Hornito: My Lie Life


Mike Albo - 2000
    From a typical suburban childhood to his perpetual search for true love, Albo evokes a poignant, nostalgic past and a vibrant, energetic present. By turns vulnerable and jaded, flamboyant and obsessive, Hornito is full of subversive humor and outrageous irony.

Take Nothing With You


Patrick Gale - 2018
    For all readers of Ian McEwan's Atonement or L P Hartley's The Go-Between.1970s Weston-Super-Mare and ten-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music-making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother.When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection, and humility are added to daily practice.Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives.

Leave Myself Behind


Bart Yates - 2003
    After his father dies, Noah's mother, a temperamental poet, takes a teaching job in a small New Hampshire town, far from Chicago and the only world Noah has known. While Noah gets along reasonably with his mother, the crumbling house they try to renovate quickly reveals dark secrets, via dusty Mason jars they discover interred between walls. The jars contain scraps of letters, poems, and journal entries, and eventually reconstructs a history of pain and violence that drives a sudden wedge between Noah and his mother. Fortunately, Noah finds an unexpected ally in J.D., a teenager down the street who has family troubles of his own.

History of a Pleasure Seeker


Richard Mason - 2011
    Unlike Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale (to which this book owes no meagre debt), Piet is magnificently gifted, not only "extremely attractive to most women and to many men," but also a fine pianist, draughtsman and lover. We first meet him interviewing for the role of tutor to the son of the wealthy hotelier, Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts. All is not well in his gilded household. Egbert, the son, is agoraphobic. The matriarch, Jacobina, hasn't been touched by her husband in almost a decade. Into this highly strung atmosphere comes Piet, charged with the task of freeing Egbert from his paralysing fear of the outside world. We soon realise, however, that Egbert isn't the only one in need of help. Piet sets about liberating the libidos of the repressed family through music – championing bawdy Bizet over abstract Bach – and oral sex. While the setting is Dutch, the influences are French – think Bel-Ami, Les Liaisons dangereuses and Gide's L'Immoraliste.

The Hour Between


Sebastian Stuart - 2009
    There, in the woods of Connecticut, Arthur meets Katrina Felt, the charming, troubled daughter of a Hollywood movie star. As Arthur struggles with his sexuality and Katrina’s beauty and talent land her in a Broadway musical, the two forge a tender friendship. But while Arthur’s confidence grows, Katrina is pulled down by the heartbreaking secrets and sorrows of her past. By year’s end, their lives will be changed forever, and their friendship will be over. Set in the late 1960s, The Hour Between is a compelling portrait of a time and place, replete with drugs, sex, Andy Warhol, a cast of truly memorable secondary characters, and some of the sharpest and funniest dialogue in recent memory.Sebastian Stuart has written novels, plays, and screenplays. His last novel was ghostwritten (with acknowledgment): Charm! by Kendall Hart, a character on the soap opera All My Children. Charm! spent five weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. A native New Yorker, Stuart now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with novelist Stephen McCauley.

Twentysix


Jonathan Kemp - 2011
    In each chapter, titled after a letter of the alphabet, an anonymous narrator details his experiences, travelling to cruising grounds and sex clubs, exploring the boundaries of sex, desire, pleasure, and the body, while reflecting on the limits of language and the act of writing.In the tradition of Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker and Jean Genet, these pieces take us to places language doesn't often go. Kemp powerfully stages a series of anonymous encounters, describing the relentless pursuit of sexual pleasure with luminous intensity, while at the same time facing the impossibility of capturing the moments he describes. This is a bold and challenging work, unashamedly sensual and searching. Kemp beautifully counterpoises explicit description with a searing interrogation of the extreme measures taken in the quest for sexual fulfillment.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh


Michael Chabon - 1988
    An unforgettable story of coming of age in America, it is also an essential milestone in the movement of American fiction, from a novelist who has become one of the most important and enduring voices of this generation.

A Home at the End of the World


Michael Cunningham - 1990
    In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and, with an odd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.

American Studies


Mark Merlis - 1994
    An amazing first novel, a beautifully written work of historical fiction ( Lambda Book Review), American Studies tells the story of 62-year-old Reeve who, as he recovers from a brutal beating, recalls the troubled and closeted world of his former mentor, a once-famous professor who was driven to suicide during the McCarthy era.

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.

Hemlock and After


Angus Wilson - 1952
    But Sands has influential enemies, and life is further complicated by his wife Ella's mysterious illness and his own affair with his young lover, Eric. Dazzling with his originality and insight, Wilson ensures that Sands's liberal ideals, both public and private, are put to the test.

The Music of Your Life: Stories


John Rowell - 2003
    Compulsively readable and always accessible, each story takes the reader into the mind and heart of its central character, whether a young boy suffering from Lawrence Welk damage and teetering precariously on the edge of puberty ("The Music of Your Life") or a not-so-young-anymore man for whom fantasy and reality have become a terrifying blur and who finds himself slipping over the edge toward total meltdown ("Wildlife of Coastal Carolina"). Nostalgia plays a part in these stories as a somewhat jaded New York film critic looks back on his life and the movies that shaped him ("Spectators in Love"), and an aging flower-shop owner ruefully assesses the love he found and lost when, as an eighteen-year-old, he embarked on a Hollywood career that never soared but did include one particularly memorable appearance on the I Love Lucy television show ("Who Loves You?") These stories all create entire worlds within which the characters live and struggle to find their way. Funny, touching, serious, and tender, the tales within The Music of Your Life are sure to appeal to anyone who has ever known the awkwardness of being "different," and while life is often harsh for the stories' characters, the bold determination with which they persevere offers inspiration to all.

The Mad Man


Samuel R. Delany - 1994
    Marr encounters numerous obstacles, as other researchers turn up evidence of Hassler's personal life that is deemed simply too unpleasant and disillusioning for the rarified air of academe. On another front, Marr finds himself increasingly drawn toward more shocking, depraved sexual entanglements with the homeless men of his neighborhood, until it begins to seem that Hassler's death might hold some key to his own life as a gay man in the age of AIDS. As John Marr learns more about the enigma that was Timothy Hassler, his own increasing sexual debasement leads him to a point where his and the philosopher's lives collide violently.…Surely Samuel R. Delany's most graphic and unsettling novel, The Mad Man is a provocative look at contemporary social and sexual outsiders.

Male Model


Dave Benbow - 2004
    Reprint.

Looking For It


Michael Thomas Ford - 2004
    As Mike pours beer, wipes glasses and hears everything, he's also witness to the men who come here looking for what they need - sex, direction, friendship, spiritual fulfillment, and love. People like: Stephen Darby - As an accountant, he knows many secrets. But Stephen has his own secret, one he's never been able to share with anyone close to him. Being the perfect son costs him dearly, and now it may take from him the one man he longs for. Pete Thayer - Playing it straight, Pete takes out his frustrations on transmissions and engines during the day, then spends his nights trying to quench his needs through anonymous sex. John and Russell - The golden couple in town has the ideal relationship everyone wants. But behind the scenes, their storybook marriage is on the verge of facing some explosive trials. Father Thomas Dunn - More and more the gentle priest is feeling a need to express the secret desires that conflict with his devotion to the church, sending his faith into a tailspin and making him question what he really wants from life. Simon Bird - He's a fixture in town, an old queen everyone finds amusing and entertaining. Still mourning the loss of his longtime lover, Simon yearns to find love and a place in a culture that worships youth and beauty.With unflinching honesty, keen insight, and his trademark humor, Michael Thomas Ford weaves together the unforgettable stories of these seven men, chronicling their dreams, hurts, heartbreaks, joys, and hopes, while taking readers on an emotional journey to find what it is we're all looking for.