This small collection of poems explores how time influences loving another, loving yourself and loving the life you own. This quick but fulfilling read, explores these topics in three sections: the head, the heart and the lungs.

    Taking the advice (and financial support) of a wealthy aunt, he decides to "toss the tiara and get a life." Unfortunately, Daniel's only degrees are in "extensive show tune knowledge, advanced lip-synch, and how to cover up a five o'clock shadow." With his best friend beginning to die from AIDS, his ex-boyfriend prowling around, and his ex-boyfriend's new boyfriend making a pass at Daniel, what's a boy to do but throw himself into intensive weeding and planting of his new apartment garden? And if a handsome stranger should smile down at him from a nearby window, so much the better. Timothy James Beck's debut novel is detailed, realistic, and continually interesting. His main character spends so much energy exhaustively "processing" what happens to him, however, that this might as well have been a lesbian novel. With a little editing, It Had to Be You would have been a much stronger book, but patient readers will agree that Beck shows great promise along the lines of Felice Picano and Neal Drinnan. --Regina Marler

    Both are in every obvious respect what is generally termed masculine. There is no suggestion of the effeminate – nothing that could evoke the characterization of gay. Their backgrounds and personalities are thoroughly American, and they live and work in a completely normal man's social and professional world. Other men respect and admire their courage and ability and even their physical prowess. Women are very much attracted to both of them.Tim, the older the two, has already recognized and resolved the problem of his sexual deviation. Phillip has not. A product of rural American mores and attitudes, he has a fierce contempt for "queers" and at the same time a deep and secret dread that the germ of homosexuality maybe buried somewhere within himself. One or two incidences in his life have shaken him profoundly and have made him determined ruthlessly to crush any tendencies in himself as well as to avoid any close relations with other men. He is engaged to be married as soon as he is discharged from the Navy, and he intends to rear a big family, to take over the operations of his family's bank and other interests, and to become a responsible and civic-minded leader in his community.As the story opens, he has almost reached the refuge and security he has carefully planned. But then he meets Danelaw. From that moment the struggle begins – a tense and shattering emotional upheaval composed of aversion, self-contempt, admiration and – finally – love. There are other well-drawn characters in this drama – Phillip's exceptional family; his fiancée and her mother; Tim's fascinating wife; Lt. Bruner, the blackmailer; Stuff, the hard-boiled sailor who worshipped Philip. QUATREFOIL is a deeply moral novel. Two men of integrity and intellect are confronted with the knowledge that they are deviants from the normal pattern of our society – that most people in that society would abhor and persecute them if they openly avowed their difference. Both men avidly desire to live within the social conventions and to attain the ends that motivate all men – a home, a family, respecting in their community, an opportunity to do honest and satisfying work, to realize their ambitions.This is their problem and QUATREFOIL is their story. It will evoke some disturbing thoughts.

    Step back in time with two of Queer as Folk's hottest characters in the first book in this provocative new series. Every Nine Seconds On the eve of Brian Kinney's eighteenth birthday, he and his best friend, Michael Novotny, celebrate a bond that could link them forever if their future paths don't separate them for good. In a few short weeks Brian, the seductive soccer star, will leave for college, where he'll be free to explore the adult pursuits in which he's only dabbled in high school. Michael is destined for a more sedate life in community college while living at home with his eccentric mom. But before their lives diverge, a hot new club will open, they'll go to the prom "stag" together, and family strife will turn their world upside down. Brian and Michael still have some unforgettable times to share before graduation ushers in the next stages of their lives.

    His mother’s second husband is a licensed psychologist who eats like an ape, his stepsister is a stoner slut, and his father is engaged to a Southern belle. Rick’s only solace is his growing collection of original Broadway-cast LPs, bought on the sly at Wax Trax.    After he brings two girls in speech class to tears by reading a story aloud, Rick is coaxed onto the interscholastic forensics team to perform an eight-minute dramatic interpretation of The Boys in the Band, the controversial sixties play about homosexuality. Unexpectedly successful at this oddball event, Rick begins winning tournaments and making friends with his teammates.    Rick also discovers the joys of sex—with a speech coach from a rival school—just as his mother, reacting to a deteriorating home environment, makes an unnerving commitment to Christ. The newly confident Rick assumes this too shall pass—until the combined forces of family, sex, and faith threaten to undo him at the state meet in Peoria.    James Magruder’s Sugarless offers a ruefully entertaining take on the simultaneous struggles of coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming-to-Jesus.  A selection of InsightOut Book Club Finalist, Lambda Book Award for Gay Debut Fiction, Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist, TLA Gaybie Award for Best Gay Fiction Semi-finalist, James Branch Cabell First Novelist Award, Virginia Commonwealth University Semi-finalist, William Saroyan International Prize For Writing, Stanford University

    Now, Weir follows up with another terrifically moving- and often disarmingly funny-book about loss, survival, and sexuality in the post-AIDS era. Returning to a Manhattan haunted by the memory of all the young men who died in the late 1980s and early 90s, "What I Did Wrong" has at its heart a protagonist for whom that loss is still all too palpable. Tom, a forty-two-year-old English professor, watched his best friend die years earlier and now finds himself sliding into middle age while questioning everything he thought he knew about his "gay identity." His Queens College classes are filled with borough boys displaying their own bravado along with their confused masculinity. As Tom balances their friendship with the occasional displaced erotic overtones, he finds an unexpected common ground with these proud young men and, surprisingly, claims his place in the world and in history. "What I Did Wrong" is a dazzling work juxtaposing low comedy and heartfelt tragedy with astonishing finesse, a book worthy of John Weir's return to fiction that will be warmly welcomed by critics and readers alike.

    Reprint.

    On the way home from his lab one night he runs into Tony, a fitness instructor from his gym who he harbors a crush for, on the same platform waiting for the subway. When Michael imagines Tony naked, a pleasant fantasy to spice up a dull journey home, an extraordinary thing happens: Tony strips then and there on the platform and offers himself to Michael in front of all onlookers. Horrified, Michael flees. But back at his apartment, Tony reappears, as if by magic. And disappears again, when Michael wishes him away. Being a scientist, Michael recognizes an experiment when he sees one, and sets out to test the parameters of his newfound gift. In quick succession he conjures up Billie Holliday, Johnny Weismuller, Daffy Duck, Picasso, Sophia Loren, even his younger self. The world is seemingly there for the taking. But what does Michael really desire? Mad with lust and losing all scientific objectivity, he runs the gamut of his fantasies inventing new lovers and calling up old ones, until, sated and morally bankrupt, he's forced to confront himself. What happens to the heart when it gets everything it desires?From the renowned author of Was and 253 comes a witty, disturbing and intensely erotic fable for the modern age.

    He was a boxing champion as a boy. He became a dad as a teenager. He has been a barman in a brothel and spent his first years in London working as a carer to some of the capital's most at-risk kids.In this, the first major biography of the star, Neil Simpson reveals the extraordinary highs and the terrible lows of Paul's life. He explains: how Lily Savage was born as a way to make more money - and help Paul take his mind off the horrors he saw every day as a social worker; how tough it was for the 'blonde bombsite from Birkenhead' to break into the entertainment mainstream; and, why Paul decided to risk everything by throwing off Lily's wig and carving out a new career as himself.The depression, the private grief and the near fatal heart attacks that struck as Paul re-invented himself as the funniest and most successful chat show host in the country. Frequently hilarious and sometimes heart-wrenchingly sad, Paul O'Grady has always lived his life on a rollercoaster of emotions. Today he is a proud grandfather, a multimillionaire and a man loved by millions of devoted fans. This is his incredible story.

    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.

    Everything you ever wanted to know about scales, but were afraid to ask! This book fills you in on major and minor scales; the modes; the blues scale; harmonic minor, melodic minor, chromatic, whole tone & diminished scales; other exotic and ethnic scales; and more. Includes easy-to-read fretboard diagrams, and a bio of Troy Stetina.

    He has been a prominent advocate of gay rights and feminism, which joins men and women in resistance. A gay man born into an Italian American family in New Jersey, he relates in this book his own experience on how the initiation of boys into patriarchy inflicts trauma, leading them to mindlessly accept patriarchal codes of masculinity, and how (through art, philosophy, and experience—including mutual love) he and others (straight and gay men) come to join women in resisting patriarchy through the discovery of how deeply it harms men as well as women.

    This distinct group, known as the Ñ Generation (as coined by Bill Teck), are the bilingual children of Cuban exiles nourished by two cultural currents—the fragmented traditions and transferred nostalgia of their parents' Caribbean homeland and the very real and present America where they grew up and live.

    In his Palm Sunday sermon, the Vicar explains that Christ's crucifixion and redemption are taking place every day. He little suspects that, before the week's out, he and his entire congregation will be caught up in a latter-day Passion story which will tear apart their lives.