Hot Stew


Fiona Mozley - 2021
    The Soho that Precious and Tabitha live and work in is barely recognisable anymore. And now, the building they call their home is under threat; its billionaire-owner Agatha wants to kick the women out to build expensive restaurants and luxury flats. Men like Robert, who visit the brothel, will have to go elsewhere. The collection of vagabonds and strays in the basement will have to find somewhere else to live. But the women are not going to go quietly. They have plans to make things difficult for Agatha but she isn't taking no for an answer.Hot Stew is an insightful and ambitious novel about property, ownership, wealth and inheritance. It is about the place we occupy in society, especially women, and the importance placed on class and money. It doesn't shy away from asking difficult questions but does so with humour and intelligence.

Something Cloudy, Something Clear


Tennessee Williams - 1995
    In 1962, Williams retitled and expanded The Parade into a full-length play. Both versions of the play are set on the fishing wharves and in the sand dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and tell the story of a young playwright named August dealing with his unrequited love for another man. It was produced posthumously in Provincetown in 2006.

Mogul


Terrance Dean - 2011
    Making hip hop beats becomes his life. His love for music lands him at the estate of Larry “Pop” Singleton, a retired and respected Hip Hop music mogul who sees something special in Big A.T., and he also knows the truth about his sexuality. With Pop’s blessings and nurturing, Big A.T. is on the path to becoming the next great Hip Hop producer in New York.  With the help of Pop and “the family,” a network of secretly gay men in the Hip Hop world, Big A.T. finds success and starts his own music label. He’s signed and worked with some of the biggest Hip Hop artists in the country. One of them is Brooklyn native lyricist, “Tickman.” Together they are making sweet music together. Tickman and Big A.T.’s relationship goes beyond producer and rapper – they become secret lovers.  Nothing can stop Big A.T. All of the radio stations play his music. He has money, fame, and Jasmine, his girlfriend who doesn’t know about his secret love for men. However, at the pinnacle of his career, compromising photos of Big A.T. land on the desk of a national news program—and in the hands of his girlfriend. Big A.T., for the first time is at a crossroad in his career: come out publicly with his secret or watch his music empire crumble.

London Triptych


Jonathan Kemp - 2010
    A century later, David tells his own tale of unashamed decadence while waiting to be released from prison, addressing his story to the lover who betrayed him. Where their paths cross, in the politically sensitive 1950s, the artist Colin Read tentatively explores his sexuality as he draws in preparation for his most ambitious painting yet — ‘London Triptych’.Rent boys, aristocrats, artists and felons populate this bold début as Jonathan Kemp skilfully interweaves the lives and loves of three very different men across the decades

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.

Women


Chloe Caldwell - 2014
    The book is an urgent recall of heartbreak, a stark portrait of an identity in crisis.

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.

Lote


Shola von Reinhold - 2020
    After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions?From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda’s journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.

Teleny or the Reverse of the Medal


Oscar Wilde - 1893
    It is a work of unmasking the cynical double moral standards of the Victorian era: The love of Camille and Teleny is shattered by social reprisals. The book was published in 1893 in 200 copies by Leonard Smithers who praised it as being "the most powerful and cleverly written erotic romance which has appeared in the English language" during that era, "a book that will certainly rank as the chief of its class."

A Single Man


Christopher Isherwood - 1964
    George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, determined to persist in the routines of his daily life. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the true textures of life itself."--BOOK JACKET.

The Gay Divorcee


Paul Burston - 2009
    He has a flourishing bar in the heart of Soho and in six months he will be marrying Ashley. There's just one problem. Phil has been married before, 20 years ago. To a woman. In fact, technically Phil and Hazel are still married. And what Phil doesn't know yet is that Hazel has a son - a 19-year-old son.

Empire of the Senseless


Kathy Acker - 1988
    Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.

Glamourpuss


Christian McLaughlin - 1994
    It's big money and a major career move, but Alex just can't seem to forget a first love he's left behind in Texas. When Alex is outed by a national tabloid, chaotic complications ensue as his career in daytime drama and his relationship with an acerbic International Male pretty boy/sitcom starlet are jolted by comic aftershocks. Suddenly, all hell breaks loose and he's being bombarded by betrayed fans, stalked by a self-professed warlock, and attacked by homophobes who want him off the show. Torrid, dishy, outrageously romantic, this hilarious first novel is both a deliciously satiric skewering of the glitziest Hollywood has to offer, and a sweetly wicked boy-meets-boy tale of unrequited love.

In at the Deep End


Kate Davies - 2019
    Her roommate has a boyfriend—and their sex noises are audible through the walls, maybe even throughout the neighborhood. Not to mention, she’s treading water in a dead-end job, her know-it-all therapist gives her advice she doesn’t ask for, and the men she is surrounded by are, to be polite, subpar. Enough is enough.So when Julia gets invited to a warehouse party in a part of town where “trendy people who have lots of sex might go on a Friday night”—she readily accepts. Whom she meets there, however, is surprising: a conceptual artist, also a woman.Julia’s sexual awakening begins; her new lesbian life, as she coins it, is exhilarating. She finds her tribe at queer swing dancing classes, and guided by her new lover Sam, she soon discovers London’s gay bars and BDSM clubs, and . . . the complexities of polyamory. Soon it becomes clear that Sam needs to call the shots, and Julia’s newfound liberation comes to bear a suspicious resemblance to entrapment . . . In at the Deep End is an unforgettably frank, funny, and racy odyssey through the pitfalls and seductions we encounter on the treacherous—and more often, absurd—path to love and self.

Sins of the Cities of the Plain


Jack Saul - 1881
    The work draws on the author's own experiences with an all-male brothel in Cleveland Street (later shut down scandalously.) Originally subtitled: or, The Recollections of a Mary-Anne.