The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket


John Weir - 1989
    "There's no moving away from this wrenching, beautifully told story".--Los Angeles Times.

Eighty-Sixed


David B. Feinberg - 1988
    J. Rosenthal's only mission is to find himself a boyfriend and avoid setbacks like bad haircuts, bad sex, and Jewish guilt. In post-AIDS 1986, B.J.'s world has changed dramatically -- his friends and lovers are getting sick, everyone is at risk, and B.J. is panicking. Parrying high-wire wit against unbearable human tragedy, Eighty-Sixed now stands as a testament to an era. "If Woody Allen were gay and wrote novels, he'd produce something like David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed." -- David Streitfeld, The Washington Post Book World "[Feinberg] has given us a painful story of one man coming of age in a terrifying age." -- The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) "Entertaining, harrowing, and powerfully unsensational." -- Booklist "[Eighty-Sixed] stands out for its frankness, ferocious wit, and total lack of sentimentality or self pity." -- Catherine Texier, The New York Times Book Review

Strings Attached


Nick Nolan - 2001
    Closeted teenager Jeremy is sent to live with wealthy relatives after his mother enters rehab. Struggling to fit into the posh world of Ballena Beach, Jeremy joins the high school swim team, dates a popular girl, and begins to think he may have landed in paradise - until his great aunt Katharine starts to dictate his every move and a late-night phone call insinuates that his father's accidental death was not so accidental after all.As Jeremy grows accustomed to the veneer of a fabulous life, so grows his need for answers - as well as the danger of immeasurable harm. Weaving together a murder mystery, sexual ambiguity, and characters with hidden identities and agendas, Nick Nolan offers listeners a deliciously witty novel about the "puppet" who wishes only to be a real boy. Strings Attached is also a surprisingly heartfelt story about coming-of-age and coming out - not necessarily in that order.

Like People in History


Felice Picano - 1995
    At crucial moments in their personal histories their lives intersect, and each discovers his own unique - and uniquely gay- identity. Through the lends of their complex, tumultuous, yet enduring relationship - and their involvement with the handsome model, poet and decorated Vietnam vet Matt Loguidice, whom they both love - Felice Picano chronicles and celebrates gay life and subculture over the last half of the twentieth century. From Malibu Beach in its palmist surfer days to the legendary parties at Fire Island Pines in the 1970s, from San Francisco during its gayest era to AIDS activism in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, Like People in History presents 'the heroic and funny saga of the last three decades by someone who saw everything and forgot nothing' (Edmund White).

Lawnboy


Paul Lisicky - 1998
    Estranged from his parents and his older brother, he moves in with forty-one-year-old William and begins a disastrous series of attempts to make a new home. Must he make a choice between his family and desire? First published to wide acclaim in 1999, Lawnboy by Paul Lisicky wanders the lush and tumultuous landscape of the early 1990s, its south Florida setting as fertile and troubling as Evan's inner life.

Bertram Cope's Year


Henry Blake Fuller - 1919
    Though Fuller was well known as an accomplished realist and had published twelve previous novels, this was his first to address sexual ambivalence. Bertram Cope, a young college teaching assistant, is befriended by Medora Phillips, a rich society type who tries to match him with three eligible young women. However, Bertram is emotionally attached only to his friend and housemate, Arthur Lemoyne. The portrayal of various friendships makes it an ironic and witty comedy of manners.

The Trouble Boy


Tom Dolby - 2004
    Powerfully written, keenly felt, "The Trouble Boy" heralds an exciting new voice in fiction. "This is about fame and celebrity and the lengths to which people will go to have a taste of it. . ."At twenty-two, Toby Griffin wants it all--fame, fortune, an Oscar-winning screenplay and a good-looking boyfriend by his side. For now, what he's got is a freelance writing job at a tanking online magazine, a walk-up sublet in the East Village and "the boys," a young posse of preppy Upper East Siders with a taste for high fashion, top-shelf liquor and other men.But for Toby, downing vodka cranberries and falling in and out of lust with a series of guys he knows as Subway Boy, Loft Boy and Goth Boy is getting old. That all changes when Toby gets the chance of a lifetime--working as a personal assistant to hip, ruthless film mogul, Cameron Cole. In this decadent, drug-fueled world of VIP lounges, endless networking and relentless hype, Toby discovers that nothing is what is seems and that anything and anyone can be spun into PR gold. Though he's making friends with all the right people. Toby realizes that succeeding in Manhattan isn't as easy as he thought--until the one tragic night that changes his future forever and puts him in a position of power he never could have imagined.But with Toby's name suddenly becoming Page Six material, his life is coming unglued. And as his professional contacts betray him and his friends reveal troubling secrets, his choices become that much harder--and that much more important. Now, in his first year on his own, Toby Griffin is about to learn the price of getting everything he ever wanted."What really makes Toby's world so familiar--along with the author's lively, often-hilarious eye for even the most mundane social details--is the crisp prose and the snappy story."-- "The San Francisco Chronicle"

Wicked Angels


Éric Jourdan - 1955
    It is the story of Pierre and Gerard, two teenagers who share a love that no one else around them can condone. The two young men discover their destiny in each other's arms, their passion coupled with violence-and ultimately pay the price. The novel is a profoundly lyrical ode to adolescent love and sexuality, as well as a bold and elegant rejection of society's values while on the road to self-destruction.Told in two parts, the poetic love story of Wicked Angels is first told by Pierre, then by Gerard. This erotic classic follows their passionate relationship as it builds in intensity, with affection between them punctuated with rough sex and tender romance. Pierre is handsome, introverted, jealous, and sadistic. Gerard is charming, roguish, intelligent, and vain. Together they form an imperfect union of all-encompassing love that is destined to fail.Translator Thomas Armbrecht, PhD, helpfully includes an informative introduction that puts the novel into the proper context of the times and reviews the book's problems with censorship.Excerpts from Wicked Angels:Gerard took a slingshot out of his pocket, calmly picked up a pebble from the walk, aimed, and destroyed the first glass bell. The air filled with the sound of shattering crystal. I didn't protest; I was overcome. One after the other, each glass cover was broken. More than one, struck exactly in the middle, exploded like alandmine. I asked Gerard to leave the last one for me. He handed me his slingshot. I watched my stone hit the glass and reduce it to shards. Gerard grabbed me around the waist, trembling, his mouth humid with saliva, his fingers filled with earth.Before us, the neat furrows were gone; it looked like a bomb had been dropped. Gerard wanted some sort of an apotheosis. He unscrewed a watering pipe, splashed about, and then opened the valves of the cistern. Rainwater spewed out in torrents, drowning the seedlings, carrying the glass debris across the garden. A miniature tulip planted between the red currant bushes and the tool shed started to drown. Gerard's shirt, covered with spray and wet to the shoulder, stuck to his flesh. Its transparency revealed his skin. Getting up, he burst out laughing: "And that's not all, citizen!" he said to me, "On to the Bastille!" The Bastille was what we called the Decazes' pigeon house. We had to cross two vegetable gardens to get to their yard and to the slate-covered tower where they raised hunting birds.And:My heart beating, I dashed out into the hall. My cousin's voice surged forward from the depths of me, climbing into my chest and putting all of his words of love into my mouth. Their violence intoxicated me. I knocked on his door. Everything was still, and yet I could tell he was close, on the other side of the door, his head pressed against the wood. I could have drawn the outline of his body, so strongly did I sense it pressed against the door that I vainly wanted him to open. He revealed himself with every exhalation. His breath was so close that his lips had to be on the door. I kissed the wall passionately, and threw myself against it. We were like two lovers separated by a prison wall, more visible to each other now than in the suffocation of their kisses, showing more love here than through their gestures of love.Wicked Angels lives on as a passionate and ultimately tragic story of extreme and ill-fated love that transcends conceptions of gender, youth, and class in society.

The Back Passage


James Lear - 2006
    But wait — Edward “Mitch” Mitchell is no Hercule Poirot, and The Back Passage is no Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Mitch is a handsome, insatiable 22-year-old hunk who never lets a clue stand in the way of a steamy encounter, whether it’s with the local constabulary, the house secretary, or his school chum and fellow athlete Boy Morgan, who becomes his Watson when they’re not busy boffing each other. When Reg Walworth is found dead in a cabinet, Sir James Eagle has his servant Weeks immediately arrested as the killer. But Mitch’s observant eye pegs more plausible possibilities: polysexual chauffeur Hibbert, queenly pervert Leonard Eagle, missing scion Rex, sadistic copper Kennington, even Sir James Eagle himself. Blackmail, police corruption, a dizzying network of spyholes and secret passages, watersports, and a nonstop queer orgy backstairs and everyplace else mark this hilariously hard-core mystery by a major new talent.

Man's World


Rupert Smith - 2010
    In modern-day London, Robert searches for fulfillment in a world of sex, drugs, designer clothes, and hip gay clubs, during which he records his experience on his blog. Half a century earlier, Michael kept a secret diary in which he chronicled the dangers of negotiating the closet and the laws that could land himself and his friends and lovers in prison. Past and present collide when Robert moves into a new block of flats and discovers that history is alive and kicking on his doorstep. Funny, sexy, and moving, this tale demonstrates how much the world has changed, and remarkably, how much it can remain the same.

Swimming in the Dark


Tomasz Jedrowski - 2020
    But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. After their camp duties are fulfilled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks camping in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Inhabiting a beautiful natural world removed from society and its constraints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. But in their repressive communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable.Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly-coveted position in the ministry. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse.Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart, Swimming in the Dark is a potent blend of romance, post-war politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski has crafted an indelible and thought-provoking literary debut that explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.

Dream Boy


Jim Grimsley - 1995
     In his electrifying novel, adolescent gay love, violence, and the spirituality of old-time religion are combined through the alchemy of Grimsley's vision into a powerfully suspenseful story of escape and redemption.

Dash and Dingo: In Search of the Tasmanian Tiger


Catt Ford - 2009
    It has been hunted to the edge of extinction, and Henry would love nothing more than to help the rare creature survive.Then a human whirlwind spins through his door. Jack "Dingo" Chambers is also on the hunt for the so-called "Tasmanian Tiger," although his reasons are far more altruistic. Banding together, Dingo and the newly nicknamed Dash travel halfway around the globe in their quest to save the thylacine from becoming a footnote in the pages of biological history.While they search high and low, traverse the wilds, and fight the deadliest of all creatures—man—Dash and Dingo will face danger and discover another fierce passion within themselves: a desire for each other.

The Boy Who Picked The Bullets Up


Charles Nelson - 1981
    He was Kurt Strom, a big, good-looking southern boy who left the Detroit Tigers farm team to serve as a medic. In the blood-and-guts insanity of jungle warfare, he tended their wounds. In the comaraderie of of combat, he seduced them.

The Coming Storm


Paul Russell - 1999
    Russell's award-winning novel is the story of four interlocking lives - Louis Tremper, the headmaster at the Forge School; his wife Claire; Tracey Parker, a 25-year old gay man and recently hired teacher at the Forge School; and Noah Lathrop III, a troubled student; all of whom struggle with their own inner demons, desires, and conflicted loyalties. When Tracey and Noah become involved in an illicit relationship, dark incidents from the school's past begin colliding with the current growing confusion that all of them must face. Compelling and poignant, this is the finest work yet from one of the best contemporary American novelists.