Best of
Queer-Lit

1994

The Gifts of the Body


Rebecca Brown - 1994
    An emotionally wrenching work of fiction about a health-care worker who tenders compassion and love to victims of AIDS, by an author who "strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need."--New York Times Book Review

In Youth is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather's House


Denton Welch - 1994
    Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school--but as in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes." Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his "Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You," and writes: "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's "In Youth Is Pleasure." Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger." Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of "I Left My Grandfather's House." This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, "In Youth Is Pleasure."

Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution


David Carter - 1994
    Since then the event itself has become the stuff of legend, with relatively little hard information available on the riots themselves. Now, based on hundreds of interviews, an exhaustive search of public and previously sealed files, and over a decade of intensive research into the history and the topic, Stonewall brings this singular event to vivid life in this, the definitive story of one of history's most singular events.

Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943


Erica Fischer - 1994
    When Lilly "Aimee" Wust, a gentile mother of four and wife of a Nazi officer, met Felice "Jaguar" Schragenheim, a Jew living underground in Berlin, neither could have guessed that their brief initial encounter would develop into a blazing, devoted love. As the Nazi stranglehold closed in on them, Lilly and Felice found themselves fighting insurmountable odds to stay together. Extraordinarily passionate and heartrending, this is a rare and personal look at the love and strength of two women whose commitment to each other defied the brutality of their time.

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us


Kate Bornstein - 1994
    Part coming-of-age story, part mind-altering manifesto on gender and sexuality, coming directly to you from the life experiences of a transgender woman, Gender Outlaw breaks all the rules and leaves the reader forever changed.26 black-and-white illustrations.

Funny Boy


Shyam Selvadurai - 1994
    In FUNNY BOY we follow the life of the family through Arjie's eyes, as he comes to terms both with his own homosexuality and with the racism of the society in which he lives. In the north of Sri Lanka there is a war going on between the army and the Tamil Tigers, and gradually it begins to encroach on the family's comfortable life. Sporadic acts of violence flare into full scale riots and lead, ultimately, to tragedy. Written in clear, simple prose, Syam Selvadurai's first novel is masterly in its mingling of the personal and political.

Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present


Lillian FadermanSarah Orne Jewett - 1994
    This landmark work of scholarship offers an enlightening review of the shifting concept of "lesbian literature," followed by examples of six different genres: Romantic Friendship, Sexual Inversion, Exotic and Evil Lesbians, Lesbian Encoding, Lesbian Feminism, and Post-Lesbian Feminism.Faderman examines works as diverse as Willa Cather's My Antonia and Virginia Woolf's Orlando; poetry by Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell; fiction by Carson McCullers, Helen Hull, and Alice Walker. In addition, Chloe Plus Olivia contains writing by men who focused on women's relationships. These writings are included in the early section of the book and were, in various ways, important to the development of lesbian literature, since men were far more likely than women to achieve publication in other centuries.It would be impossible to identify a single "great tradition" of lesbian writing, since it is in constant metamorphosis, reflecting changing social attitudes and women's voices. Chloe Plus Olivia, with its historical scope enhanced by Faderman's own personal search for a definition of lesbian literature, makes this the first book of its kind; it is certain to become the point of reference from which all subsequent studies of lesbian literature will begin.

The Violet Quill Reader: The Emergence of Gay Writing After Stonewall


David Bergman - 1994
    Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Felice Picano, George Whitmore, and Christopher Cox--these are the writers whose novels, plays, short stories, essays, and journalism defined what it was to be gay before that first announcement of AIDS.

The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writings by Asian & Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women


Sharon Lim-Hing - 1994
    More than fifty contributions of poetry, prose, interviews, articles and artwork make this collection fascinating and important.

Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam d'Allesandro


Dodie Bellamy - 1994
    Nonfiction. Real contains letters between Dodie Bellamy (Mina Harker) and Sam D'Allesandro; the transcription of a story that was taped by D'Allesandro before he died in 1988; and a letter by Bellamy that concerns D'Allesandro's death.