Here are accounts of revealing one's sexual identity to parents, siblings, friends, co-workers and, in one notable instance, to a stockbroker. Men tell of their first sexual encounters from their preteens to their thirties, with childhood friends who rejected or tenderly embraced them, with professors, with neighbors, with a Broadway star. These are poignant, sometimes unexpectedly funny tales of romance and heartbreak, repression and liberation, rape and first love defining moments that shaped their authors' lives. Arranged chronologically from Manhattan in the Forties to San Francisco in the Nineties, these essays ultimately form a documentary of changing social and sexual mores in the United States--a literary, biographical, sociological and historical tour de force.

    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.

    Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.“In Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar exquisitely and tenaciously braids astonishment and atonement into a singular lyric voice. The desolation of alcoholism widens into hard-won insight: ‘the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven.’ Doubt and fear spiral into grace and beauty. Akbar’s mind, like his language, is perpetually in motion. His imagery—wounded and resplendent—is masterful and his syntax ensnares and releases music that’s both delicate and muscular. Kaveh Akbar has crafted one of the best debuts in recent memory. In his hands, awe and redemption hinge into unforgettable and gorgeous poems.” —Eduardo C. Corral

    Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna WarrenThis debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary.Antique BookThe sky was crazed with swallows.We walked in the frozen grassof your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.Trees shook down their gaudy nests.The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.I was jealous of the river,how the light broke it, of the skeinof windows where we saw ourselves.Where we walked, the ice crackedlike an antique book, openingand closing. The leavesbeneath it were the marbled pages.Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

    Navigating the currents of the city are three friends: Rita Mae, a rat exterminator; Killer, a career plant-waterer; and David, an HIV-positive writer. Together, they seek new ways to be truthful and honest about their lives as others around them avert their glances. Alternately elegiac, defiant, and funny, Rat Bohemia is an expansive novel about how one can cope with loss and heal the wounds of the past by reinventing oneself in the city.Rat Bohemia won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction and was named one of the “100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of All Time” by the Publishing Triangle.

    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.

    A boy who doesn't quite understand his lot--until he realizes he's a god. . . As an only son, Kiran has obligations--to excel in his studies, to honor the deities, to find a nice Indian girl, and, above all, to make his mother and father proud--standard stuff for a boy of his background. If only Kiran had anything in common with the other Indian kids besides the color of his skin. They reject him at every turn, and his cretinous public schoolmates are no better. Cincinnati in the early 1990s isn't exactly a hotbed of cultural diversity, and Kiran's not-so-well-kept secrets don't endear him to any group. Playing with dolls, choosing ballet over basketball, taking the annual talent show way too seriously. . .the very things that make Kiran who he is also make him the star of his own personal freak show. . .Surrounded by examples of upstanding Indian Americans--in his own home, in his temple, at the weekly parties given by his parents' friends--Kiran nevertheless finds it impossible to get the knack of "normalcy." And then one fateful day, a revelation: perhaps his desires aren't too earthly, but too divine. Perhaps the solution to the mystery of his existence has been before him since birth. For Kiran Sharma, a long, strange trip is about to begin--a journey so sublime, so ridiculous, so painfully beautiful, that it can only lead to the truth. . ."The best fiction reminds us that humanity is much, much larger than our personal world, our own little reality. Blue Boy shows us a world too funny and sad and sweet to be based on anything but the truth." --Chuck PalahniukNew York Times Bestselling Author

    Includes "There's a certain slant of light," "Because I could not stop for death," "It was not death for I stood up."

    Included here is some of the most celebrated verse in modern literature-”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men,” and “Ash Wednesday”-as well as many other fine selections from Eliot’s early work.

    Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."

    Set on the Côte d'Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman. "A lean, sensuous narrative...taut, chic, and strangely contemporary," The Garden of Eden represents vintage Hemingway, the master "doing what nobody did better" (R. Z. Sheppard, Time).

    At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

    It is in her poetry, however, where she achieves the full extent of her revelation as artist and human. The poems in this first selection from her whole work were written over a period of forty years. They convey a wonderfully energetic alternation of mood, idea, and experience that are part of her unique creative process.

    But she does just that. The urban comforts of New York quickly seem light years away when her journey is hampered by cars that won’t start, locks that won’t turn and a strange dog that has decided that Libby would be the perfect owner.Quinn Barnett is in no mood for damsels in distress. Her reasons for partaking of New England’s fall colors are deeply personal and painful. She’s promised to do one thing on this trip, and falling in love isn’t it. Once her mission is accomplished she’s moving on—if only she can start some cars, unlock some doors and get that bothersome stray to leave her alone. The golden shores of a beautiful New England lake and the glory of October’s sunsets should create the perfect stage for falling in love, unless two stubborn women decide to keep the wrong promises.Bella Books proudly presents this refreshing, new voice in lesbian romance! Marianne Garver’s charming first novel features an unforgettable Cupid in a setting readers will wish they could find on a map. Editor: Katherine V. ForrestCover Designer: Linda CallaghanGenre: RomanceWinner, Golden Crown Literary Award.

    Dominic is probably dying in Los Angeles. Jasper, older by almost a generation, was for many years Timothy's lover. Among Jasper's infidelities was a brisk fling with Dominic. Timothy and Dominic are having dinner in Los Angeles after viewing Dominic's taped appearance on a nationally televised quiz show. They have maintained their ambivalent friendship for twenty years. Tonight their conversation is lively but guarded. Timothy has not told Dominic of Jasper's death; Dominic doesn't inquire into Timothy's own state, and this is a question Timothy is in no hurry to answer. Through Timothy's eyes, we see that though AIDS can be deadly, it can also be taken, as Timothy chooses to, as a challenge to live. His thoughts are filled by memories of Jasper, and he takes the reader on a vivid tour of male sex at its most untamed - as it was in the seventies and the eighties - when the explosion of AIDS forced thousands of men to take a new direction. We feel the press of bodies along the waterfront of Manhattan, in the boites, and even the streets of Paris. It is possible Timothy will even come away from this dinner with a heightened understanding of Jasper, and of their long and lost romance. It is certain that the reader will be rewarded by the deeper insights of this harrowing (and often hilarious) account of love between men in such times.