Quatrefoil


James Barr - 1950
    Both are in every obvious respect what is generally termed masculine. There is no suggestion of the effeminate – nothing that could evoke the characterization of gay. Their backgrounds and personalities are thoroughly American, and they live and work in a completely normal man's social and professional world. Other men respect and admire their courage and ability and even their physical prowess. Women are very much attracted to both of them.Tim, the older the two, has already recognized and resolved the problem of his sexual deviation. Phillip has not. A product of rural American mores and attitudes, he has a fierce contempt for "queers" and at the same time a deep and secret dread that the germ of homosexuality maybe buried somewhere within himself. One or two incidences in his life have shaken him profoundly and have made him determined ruthlessly to crush any tendencies in himself as well as to avoid any close relations with other men. He is engaged to be married as soon as he is discharged from the Navy, and he intends to rear a big family, to take over the operations of his family's bank and other interests, and to become a responsible and civic-minded leader in his community.As the story opens, he has almost reached the refuge and security he has carefully planned. But then he meets Danelaw. From that moment the struggle begins – a tense and shattering emotional upheaval composed of aversion, self-contempt, admiration and – finally – love. There are other well-drawn characters in this drama – Phillip's exceptional family; his fiancée and her mother; Tim's fascinating wife; Lt. Bruner, the blackmailer; Stuff, the hard-boiled sailor who worshipped Philip. QUATREFOIL is a deeply moral novel. Two men of integrity and intellect are confronted with the knowledge that they are deviants from the normal pattern of our society – that most people in that society would abhor and persecute them if they openly avowed their difference. Both men avidly desire to live within the social conventions and to attain the ends that motivate all men – a home, a family, respecting in their community, an opportunity to do honest and satisfying work, to realize their ambitions.This is their problem and QUATREFOIL is their story. It will evoke some disturbing thoughts.

According To Hoyle


Abigail Roux - 2011
    The line between heroes and villains is narrow and indistinct. The concept that a man may only kill if backed into a corner is antiquated. Lives are worth less than horses. Treasures are worth killing for. And the law is written in the blood of those who came before. The only men staving off total chaos are the few who take the letter of the law at its word and risk their lives to uphold it. But in the West, the rules aren't always played according to Hoyle.U.S. Marshals Eli Flynn and William Henry Washington are escorting two prisoners to New Orleans for trial when they discover there’s more to the infamous shootist Dusty Rose and the enigmatic man known only as Cage than merely being outlaws. When forces beyond the marshals’ control converge on the paddlewheeler they have hired to take them downriver, they must choose between two dangers: playing by the rules at any cost or trusting the very men they are meant to bring to justice.

A Place Called Winter


Patrick Gale - 2015
    They settle by the sea and have a daughter and conventional marriage does not seem such a tumultuous change after all. When a chance encounter awakens scandalous desires never acknowledged until now, however, Harry is forced to forsake the land and people he loves for a harsh new life as a homesteader on the newly colonized Canadian prairies. There, in a place called Winter, he will come to find a deep love within an alternative family, a love imperiled by war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism.If you've never read a Patrick Gale, stop now and pick up this book. From the author of the bestselling NOTES FROM AN EXHIBITION comes an irresistible, searching and poignant historical novel of love, relationships, secrets and escape.

Perfect Freedom


Gordon Merrick - 1982
    Tropez -- dapper American expatriate Stuart Cosling, his ravishing French wife Helene, and their stunningly handsome son Robbie. To his parents, Robbie was still a boy, but in the spring of 1938, on a cruise of the Greek islands, Robbie discovered the pleasures of manhood. It wasn't until a certain season in St. Tropez that Robbie discovered the endless passion that comes only once with first love.

Skin Lane


Neil Bartlett - 2007
    F's working life on London's Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision and routine. So when he starts to have frightening, recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them. The images that appear in his dream are disturbing, Mr. F can't for the life of him think where they have come from. After all, he's a perfectly ordinary middle-aged man. As London's crooked backstreets begin to swelter in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F's nightmare becomes an obsession. A chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the torments of his sweat-drenched nights lead him and the reader deeper into a terrifying labyrinth of rage, desire and shame. Part fairy-tale, part compelling evocation of a now-lost London, Neil Bartlett's long-awaited third novel is his fiercest piece of writing yet: cruel, erotic, and tender.

Gossip


Christopher Bram - 1997
    The manager of a Greenwich Village bookstore and politically to the left, Ralph agrees to an F2F (face-to-face) meeting with Thersites in Washington, D.C., where his friend Nancy writes speeches for a popular woman senator. With his penchant for Shakespearean drama, Ralph should have seen the elements gathering for tragedy...or farce. Thersites proves to be a young, attractive, and enthusiastic lover. He is also Republican, in the closet, right-wing, and the author of a tell-all book that spreads gossip about several Washington women, including a footnote about a lesbian affair between a speechwriter and a "happily married" senator. In a town where rumors can kill a career, such words may be fatal. And despite his passion, Ralph is disturbed by his new lover's politics...and then stunned at being charged with his murder. Christopher Bram joins dark satire with chilling suspense as Ralph is arrested for first-degree homicide and becomes a "cause" in the gay community.

Giovanni's Room


James Baldwin - 1956
    In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two. Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.

The White Book (Le Livre Blanc)


Jean Cocteau - 1927
    Cocteau never formally acknowledged the book, except in so far as he allowed it to appear in the 'authorized' bibliography drawn up in connection with his

Stone Butch Blues


Leslie Feinberg - 1993
    Stone Butch Blues traces a propulsive journey, powerfully evoking history and politics while portraying an extraordinary protagonist full of longing, vulnerability, and working-class grit. This once-underground classic takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride of gender transformation and exploration and ultimately speaks to the heart of anyone who has ever suffered or gloried in being different.

Delayed Rays of a Star


Amanda Lee Koe - 2019
    From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a seaside resort in East Germany to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysées, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, muse, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours. Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of ego, persona, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and raw, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its calculations, and its eventual betrayals--and announces a bold new literary voice.

The Snow Garden


Christopher Rice - 2002
    When the wife of respected professor Eric Eberman is killed in a tragic accident, his secret student lover, Randall Stone, fears the professor tried to avert career suicide by committing homicide. Or do the dead woman’s haunting last words point to an even more damning crime?Fearing the truth, Randall digs into his lover’s hidden history. But what he finds draws him and everyone he cares for into a dark dance of sexual manipulation, twisted retribution, and murderous rage where nothing is as it seems. And no one will escape from it unscathed…if they escape at all.In this emotionally gripping tale from New York Times bestselling author Christopher Rice, the past may seem buried, but it can come back with a deadly vengeance.Revised edition: This edition of The Snow Garden includes editorial revisions.

The Prettiest Star


Carter Sickels - 2020
    But within six short years, AIDS would claim his lover, his friends, and his future. With nothing left in New York but memories of death, Brian decides to write his mother a letter asking to come back to the place, and family, he was once so desperate to escape.Set in 1986, a year after Rock Hudson’s death shifted the public consciousness of the epidemic and brought the news of AIDS into living rooms and kitchens across America, it is a novel that speaks to the question of what home and family means when we try to forge a life for ourselves in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable. It is written at the far reaches of love and understanding, and zeroes in on the moments where those two forces reach for each other, and sometimes touch.

Halfway Home


Paul Monette - 1991
    Reprint. 14,000 first printing.

We Think the World of You


J.R. Ackerley - 1960
    Ackerley as “a fairy tale for adults.” Frank, the narrator, is a middle-aged civil servant, intelligent, acerbic, self-righteous, angry. He is in love with Johnny, a young, married, working-class man with a sweetly easygoing nature. When Johnny is sent to prison for committing a petty theft, Frank gets caught up in a struggle with Johnny’s wife and parents for access to him. Their struggle finds a strange focus in Johnny’s dog—a beautiful but neglected German shepherd named Evie. And it is she, in the end, who becomes the improbable and undeniable guardian of Frank’s inner world.

Flesh and Blood


Michael Cunningham - 1995
     In 1950, Constantine Stassos, a Greek immigrant laborer, marries Mary Cuccio, an Italian-American girl, and together they produce three children: Susan, an ambitious beauty, Billy, a brilliant homosexual, and Zoe, a wild child. Over the years, a web of tangled longings, love, inadequacies and unfulfilled dreams unfolds as Mary and Constantine's marriage fails and Susan, Billy, and Zoe leave to make families of their own. Zoe raises a child with the help of a transvestite, Billy makes a life with another man, and Susan raises a son conceived in secret, each extending the meaning of family and love. With the power of a Greek tragedy, the story builds to a heartbreaking crescendo, allowing a glimpse into contemporary life which will echo in one's heart for years to come.