Book picks similar to
Tramps Like Us: A Novel by Joe Westmoreland
lgbt
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The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse
Lonely Christopher - 2011
Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, with an unyielding imagination in the lovely/ugly architecture of his stories.Lonely Christopher is the author of several poetry chapbooks and is a contributor to the poetry volume Into (Seven Circles Press). His plays have been published, staged in New York City and internationally, and released in Mandarin translation. His fiction received Pratt Institute's 2009 Thesis Award. He is a founding member of the small press The Corresponding Society and an editor of its biannual journal Correspondence. He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
Punk and Zen
J.D. Glass - 2007
That? She saves for music, whether she's playing guitar or DJing...and everyone dances to her tune. But when the dreams Nina works so hard for start to fall into place, the past she thinks she's left behind returns. As she opens herself - to everything - Nina learns that being punk alone is not enough. She needs to love and be loved, to let go - without losing herself. Angst, sex, love, rock - 'Nuff said.
I'm Open to Anything
William E. Jones - 2019
Jones's I'm Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book's narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning. Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I'm Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor. The book recalls Olympia Press's heyday, when authors made quick money churning out dirty books, but couldn't hide the intellectual obsessions that made them writers in the first place. William E. Jones's previous book, True Homosexual Experiences (also published by We Heard You Like Books), a biography of Straight to Hell's iconoclastic editor Boyd McDonald, celebrates the frank, raunchy language of the first queer 'zine. Jones brings the same unsparing and profane attitude to I'm Open to Anything, his debut novel.
Beneath the Streets
Adam Macqueen - 2020
What if they had succeeded? It is February 1976, and the naked corpse of a shockingly underage rent boy is fished out of a pond on Hampstead Heath. Since the police don’t seem to care, 20-year-old Tommy Wildeblood—himself a former ‘Dilly boy’ prostitute—finds himself investigating. Dodging murderous Soho hoodlums and the agents of a more sinister power, Tommy uncovers another, even more shocking crime: the Liberal leader and likely next Home Secretary, Jeremy Thorpe, has had his former male lover executed on Exmoor and got clean away with it. Now the trail of guilt seems to lead higher still, and a ruthless Establishment will stop at nothing to cover its tracks. In a gripping thriller whose cast of real-life characters includes Prime Minister Harold Wilson, his senior adviser Lady Falkender, gay Labour peer Tom Driberg and the investigative journalist Paul Foot, Adam Macqueen plays "what if" with Seventies UK political history—with a sting in the tail that reminds us that the truth can be just as chilling as fiction.
10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives
Joe Kort - 2003
Joe Kort explores as he guides readers through the complex journey of becoming a gay man. Dr. Kort points out that the beginning of this journey is about taking responsibility for your own life, and reading this book shows you exactly how to do this. Readers will learn how to identify their own internalized homophobia that is preventing many of gay men from leading satisfying lives and keeping them from having healthy relationships.Gay men often say that after coming out they feel better at first, but for many it doesn't last. 10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives provides a thorough map for navigating through the difficult terrain of becoming the gay man you want to be in the context of your family, of your sexual health, and ultimately of a partnered relationship.* Discover how to find your authentic gay self* Learn the five biggest mistakes gay men make when seeking a relationship* Understand how to understand loved ones who disapprove of you being gay* Overcome damaging patterns that are holding you back from a healthy sex life
Jack the Modernist
Robert Glück - 1985
Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack. A paean to love and obsession, Glück's novel explores the everyday in a language that is both intimate and lush. "Robert Glück has found a new way of making fiction passionate. This novel is a strange, exhilarating love story rich with invention and observation." -Edmund White
Comfort and Joy
Jim Grimsley - 1995
He comes from an old Savannah family where his parents, attentive to his future, focus their energies on finding their son--their golden boy--a girl to marry. But how charmed is this life when Ford's own heart suspects that he is not meant to spend his life with a woman? His suspicions are confirmed when he meets Dan Crell. Dan is a quiet man with a great voice. Behind the tempered facade of the shy hospital administrator is a singer who can transform a room with his soaring voice, leaving his listeners in awe and reverence. Ford catches one such Christmas concert and his life is never quite the same; he is touched in a place he keeps hidden, forbidden. When Ford and Dan begin to explore the limits of their relationship, Dan's own secrets are exposed--and his mysterious and painful childhood returns to haunt him. In Comfort and Joy Jim Grimsley finds a marriage between the stark and stunning pain of his prize-winning Winter Birds and the passion of critically acclaimed Dream Boy. In this, his fourth novel, he considers pressing questions. How does a man reconcile the child he was raised to be with the man that he truly is? What happens when an adult has to choose between his parents and a lover?
Bitch Goddess
Robert Rodi - 2002
Told entirely through interviews, e-mails, fan magazine puff pieces, film reviews, shooting scripts, greeting cards, extortion notes, and court depositions, this is a hilarious account of the on-again, off-again career of Viola Chute, the B-grade sex symbol who slept her way to the middle-and slid downward from there. After making a big comeback on a nighttime soap, Viola decides it's time to pen her memoirs. But when E. Manfred Harry, her ghostwriter, turns up some serious dirt, the bitch goddess fires him. The ever-resourceful Harry turns the book into an unauthorized tell-all biography, and Viola's star once again begins its descent... Will she be asked back for a second season? Will she make Celebrity Magazine's "Best-Dressed" list again this year? Will her agent ever return her calls? Praise for Robert Rodi: "Rodi whips action around faster than Julia Child working up a souffle." (The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel) "Irrestibly funny!" (Quentin Crisp)
Send Me
Patrick Ryan - 2006
But her ex-husbands linger in the background while her four children spin away to their own separate futures, each carrying the baggage of a complex family history. Matt serves as caretaker to the ailing father who abandoned him as a child, while his wild teenage sister, Karen, hides herself in marriage to a born-again salesman. Joe, a perpetual outsider, struggles with a private sibling rivalry that nearly derails him. And then there’s the youngest, Frankie, an endearing, eccentric sci-fi freak who’s been searching since childhood for intelligent life in the universe–and finds it.Written with wry affection, and with compassion for every character in its pages, Send Me is a wholly original, haunting evocation of family love, loss, and, ultimately, forgiveness.From the Hardcover edition.
The Charioteer
Mary Renault - 1953
There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance. Then one day, Ralph Lanyon, a mentor from Laurie’s schoolboy days, suddenly reappears in Laurie’s life, and draws him into a tight-knit social circle of world-weary gay men. Laurie is forced to choose between the sweet ideals of innocence and the distinct pleasures of experience. Originally published in the United States in 1959, The Charioteer is a bold, unapologetic portrayal of male homosexuality during World War II that stands with Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories as a monumental work in gay literature.
Flashpoint
Katherine V. Forrest - 1994
A political decision to be announced this weekend in California will signal far-reaching ramifications for America's lesbian and gay community.At a cabin in a Southern California mountain resort, three lesbians and a gay man wait in mutual antagonism for Donnelly, the woman who has summoned them here, the woman with whom they have all shared a part of their lives.Publisher Bradley Jones was once married to her. Cabin owner Pat Decker, a teacher nearing retirement, took her away from Bradley.Averill Calder Harmon, in the topmost rank of professional golfers on the LPGA tour, lured Donnelly away from Pat. Querida Quemada, a successful young Chicana professional, is Donnelly's current partner.Donnelly, an activist connected at the highest levels of the national scene, knows about the forthcoming political decision. In the certainty of her connection to these four people, she is convinced that the time is now for each of them to take vital and profoundly personal action.But even Donnelly cannot dream of the extent to which this weekend will be a watershed, with consequences reaching far beyond any of them.Published on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Inn uprising and the birth of the modern gay rights movement, FLASHPOINT is the novel for our times.
The Family of Max Desir
Robert Ferro - 1983
From the back cover copy:Max Desir loved his Italian-American family--even after his iron-willed father exiled him from its intimate innner circle.Max Desir loved his lover, Nick, with whom he openly took up life first amid the enchantment of Rome, then amid the realities of New York.Two loves so deeply felt--in a man so painfully divided...
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Andrea Lawlor - 2017
He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women’s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco—a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.
Blood Relatives
Stevan Alcock - 2015
On Prince Philip Playing Fields. He crossed the dew-soaked grass toward what he took to be a bundle of clothes, but then he came across a discarded shoe, and then t’ mutilated body. her name wor Wilma McCann.’Leeds, late 1975 and a body has been found on Prince Philip Playing Fields. Ricky, teenage delivery van boy for Corona pop, will be late for The Matterhorn Man. In the years that follow until his capture, the Yorkshire Ripper and Rick’s own life draw ever closer with unforeseen consequences. Set in a time in England's history of upheaval and change – both personal and social – this is a story told in an unforgettable voice.'An incredible debut novel: a coming of age tale set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, ‘full of daring, authenticity and wit’ (Rachel Cusk).
Wide Awake
David Levithan - 2006
They were shocked, barely comprehending. Me? I sat there and beamed. Everything seems to be going right in Duncan's life: The candidate he's been supporting for president has just won the election. Duncan's boyfriend, Jimmy, is with him to celebrate. Love and kindness appear to have won the day.But all too quickly, things start to go wrong. The election is called into question... and Duncan and Jimmy's relationship is called into question, too. Suddenly Duncan has to decide what he's willing to risk for something he believes in... and how far he's willing to go to hold on to the people we hold dear.