The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief


David Plante - 2009
    Written in vivid fragments that, like the pieces of a mosaic, come together into a glimmering whole, it shows us both the wild nature of grief and the intimate conversation that is love.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Brothers Bishop


Bart Yates - 2005
    Carefree and careless, Tommy is the golden boy who takes men into his bed with a seductive smile and turns them out just as quickly. No one can resist him - and no one can control him, either. That salient point certainly isn't lost on his brother. Nathan is all about control. At thirty-one, he is as dark and complicated as Tommy is light and easy, and he is bitter beyond his years. While Tommy left for the excitement of New York City, Nathan has stayed behind, teaching high school English in their provincial hometown, surrounded by the reminders of their ruined family history and the legacy of anger that runs through him like a scar. Now, Tommy has come home to the family cottage by the sea for the summer, bringing his unstable, sexual powder keg of an entourage and the distant echoes of his family's tumultuous past with him.

The Painting of Porcupine City


Ben Monopoli - 2011
    His coworker Fletcher Bradford is looking for a heaven spot of his own, and his is even more elusive. Out since age 12, Fletcher's been around more blocks than Mateo has ever painted. He's dated all the jerks, all the creeps, all the losers in between. At 26 he's decided the only way to meet a nice guy is just never to give him a chance to prove otherwise. When he's introduced to Mateo, Fletcher expects to add another notch to his bedpost. But Mateo is different--and from him Fletcher will rediscover a long-lost feeling: surprise. What Fletcher finds in the trunk of Mateo's car will change his life in ways he never imagined--and may help him find what he's always wanted.From the author of THE CRANBERRY HUSH comes an epic story spanning years and hemispheres and miles of painted walls. At times sexy and sweet, gritty and gut-wrenching, THE PAINTING OF PORCUPINE CITY takes readers along with Mateo and Fletcher on an adventure through the subways of Boston to the towers of São Paulo. Are you in?

A Thirsty Evil


Gore Vidal - 1956
    Meanwhile, in 'Erlinda and Mr Coffin', Southern etiquette is unashamedly turned upside down in a tale of amateur theatricals reminiscent of Dickens and Victorian melodrama. Yet it is in 'Three Stratagems', 'The Zenner Trophy', 'Pages from an Abandoned Journal' and 'The Ladies in the Library' (with more than a hint of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice in the latter) that we see Vidal as we know him best: cynical and provocative in these subtle tales of what was known in those days as 'sexual inversion'.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You


Peter Cameron - 2007
    Instead, he’s surfing the real estate listings, searching for a sanctuary—a nice farmhouse in Kansas, perhaps. Although James lives in twenty-first-century Manhattan, he’s more at home in the faraway worlds of Eric Rohmer or Anthony Trollope—or his favorite writer, the obscure and tragic Denton Welch. James’s sense of dislocation is exacerbated by his willfully self-absorbed parents, a disdainful sister, his Teutonically cryptic shrink, and an increasingly vague, D-list celebrity grandmother. Compounding matters is James’s growing infatuation with a handsome male colleague at the art gallery his mother owns, where James supposedly works at his summer job but where he actually plots his escape to the prairie.

Halfway Home


Paul Monette - 1991
    Reprint. 14,000 first printing.

The Spell


Alan Hollinghurst - 1998
    Ultimately, The Spell details the restlessness of every human heart.

A Horse Named Sorrow


Trebor Healey - 2012
    But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: “Take me back the way I came.”    And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. He meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelers—each one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmy’s death. When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man whose mother has recently died, Seamus’s grief and his story become universal and redemptive.

Changing Trains: One boy's journey of discovery across 1980s Europe


Mark Johnson - 2018
     Changing Trains is a fictionalised memoire that will transport you back to the glorious 1980s - that time just before mobile devices, the internet and social media changed the world - and one working class boy's journey of discovery and sexual self awareness.

Lovers


Daniel Arsand - 2008
    Sébastien is fifteen years old and already versed in the medicinal properties of plants and herbs when he meets the young nobleman Balthazar de Créon, whose life he saves after the latter is thrown from a horse. De Créon, struck by the boy’s beauty as much by his talents as a healer, orders Sébastien to his manor some months later so he can instruct him in the ways of the court, hoping thus to install him as Louis XV’s surgeon. His motives, however, are clouded by his lust for Sébastien, and after a brief period of restraint Balthazar and Sébastien abandon themselves to their passions and imaginations. But it is 1749 and their affair scandalizes the French court, bringing the king’s wrath down upon them. Balthazar is eventually presented with an ultimatum: repudiate Sébastien and live, or do not, and die. Daniel Arsand’s slim, sublime Lovers is many things: a song of love and an ode to sensual abandon; a richly imagined, atmospheric evocation of the French court; a fable about freedom and the heart’s indifference to social and class barriers; a heartfelt cry against those who, poor of soul, refute the legitimacy of unconventional love. Above all, with its delectable prose, Lovers is itself a delight for the senses.

Brokeback Mountain


Annie Proulx - 1997
     Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.

A Simple Suburban Murder


Mark Richard Zubro - 1988
    When a gay high school teacher starts investigating a colleague's murder, he finds beneath the calm veneer of his Midwestern suburb a seamy underbelly of gambling, prostitution, and child abuse.Simple Suburban Murder is the book that started it all--the debut novel of Lambda Literary Award winner Mark Richard Zubro.

Male Model


Dave Benbow - 2004
    Reprint.

Rent Boy Bundle


J.P. Oliver - 2019
    A rent boy with a heart of gold. These two will leave you breathless in more ways than one. Get five books for the price of one in this hotter-than-you-can-handle bundle! Jacob's never really found the "right" person for him, which is why he's left a virgin nearing his 30th birthday. Finally giving in, he hires a rent boy to break him in gently. He isn't expecting it to turn into more. Evan is highly sought-after rent boy with one goal: keep his customers happy. When that turns out to mean visiting his virgin billionaire over and over again, never quite sealing the deal, he's left wondering why the man keeps seeking him out. And why Jacob seems like he's teetering on the brink of jealousy. Will Evan manage to break down Jacob's steel-plated walls? Or will Jacob keep the world from seeing who he really is forever? These five titles are intended for adults only. Grab this bundle now to swoon over friends becoming lovers, swanky billionaires, first-timers, virgins, and so much more. Remember, no matter what, there's always a happily ever after by the last page and no cheating!

100 Boyfriends


Brontez Purnell - 2021
    His characters solicit sex on their lunch breaks, expose themselves to racist neighbors, sleep with their coworker's husbands, rub Preparation H on their hungover eyes, and, in an uproarious epilogue, take a punk band on a disastrous tour of Europe. They also travel to claim inheritances, push past personal trauma, and cultivate community while living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society.Armed with a deadpan wit that finds humor in even the lowest of nadirs, Brontez Purnell--a widely acclaimed underground writer, filmmaker, musician, and performance artist--writes with the peerless zeal, insight, and horniness of a gay punk messiah. From dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama, Purnell indexes desire, desperation, race, and loneliness with a startling blend of levity and vulnerability. Together, the slice-of-life tales that writhe within 100 Boyfriends are a singular and uncompromising vision of an unexposed queer underbelly. Holding them together is the vision of an iconoclastic storyteller, as fearless as he is human.