Book picks similar to
Such Times by Christopher Coe
fiction
gay-fiction
lgbt
gay
Closet Case
Robert Rodi - 1994
Lionel Frank is a man as desperate to conceal his homosexuality from his ad agency colleagues as he is to indulge it at night. But poor Lionel is playing the straight man in a world where every success takes him one step closer to disaster.
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.
The Year of Ice
Brian Malloy - 2002
His mother Eileen died two years earlier when her car plunged into the icy waters of the Mississippi River, and since then Kevin's relationship with his father Patrick has become increasingly distant. As lonely women vie for his father's attention, Kevin discovers Patrick's own closely guarded secret: he had planned to abandon his family for another woman. More disturbingly, his mother's death may well have been a suicide, not an accident.Complicating the family dynamic is the constant meddling of Kevin's outspoken Aunt Nora--who will never forgive Patrick for Eileen's death--along with Patrick's inability to stay single for very long. His loyalties divided between his father and his aunt, between his internal reality and his public persona, Kevin is forced to accept his gay identity and reevaluate his notions of family and love as painful truths emerge about both.
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Carson McCullers - 1941
A powerful and passionate tale is set on a southern army post --a human hell inhabited by a sexually disturbed officer, his animalistic wife, her lover, and the driven young private who forces the drama to its climax...
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"
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.
M or F?
Lisa Papademetriou - 2005
Too bad Frannie’s terrified. She won’t type a word without Marcus’s help.In the chat room, Marcus and Jeffrey hit it off. But the more Marcus writes, the more he’s convinced that Jeffrey is falling for him, not Frannie.Whose romance is this anyway? Read this heartwarming comedy of errors to find out.
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.
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.
What Belongs to You
Garth Greenwell - 2016
There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and disease.What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.
In the Absence of Men
Philippe Besson - 2001
It also dares to introduce an asthmatic middle-aged Proust into its masterfully manipulated plot and invents a series of deeply felt letters written by him to the novel's young protagonist, Vincent de l'Etoile. In the summer of 1916, the emotionally precocious Vincent, who is the same age as the century, awakens to the possibilities of both erotic and platonic love. In the course of one week-at literary salons, at the Ritz, in cork-lined rooms-Vincent launches an intense friendship with the celebrated Proust, while at his parents' house in Paris he embarks on a sensual journey with Arthur Vales, the soldier son of a family servant, on leave from the front. Unknowingly, Vincent is also beginning a passage into a manhood that will be haunted by the secret he uncovers behind the love he bears for a doomed French infantryman and a famous middle-aged Jewish writer.
Let's Get Back to the Party
Zak Salih - 2021
A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame. So when he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, D.C., he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties; friends getting married, having babies. While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line between envy and obsession: Sebastian with one of his students and Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must come reckon not just with one another, but with themselves. Rich with sharply drawn characters and contemporary detail, provocative, and emotionally profound, Let’s Get Back to the Party is sure to appeal to readers of Garth Greenwell, Alan Hollinghurst, Claire Messud, and Rebecca Makkai.
The Vast Fields of Ordinary
Nick Burd - 2009
He has a crappy job at Food World, a "boyfriend" who won't publicly acknowledge his existence (maybe because Pablo also has a girlfriend), and parents on the verge of a divorce. College is Dade's shining beacon of possibility, a horizon to keep him from floating away. Then he meets the mysterious Alex Kincaid. Falling in real love finally lets Dade come out of the closet - and, ironically, ignites a ruthless passion in Pablo. But just when true happiness has set in, tragedy shatters the dreamy curtain of summer, and Dade will use every ounce of strength he's gained to break from his past and start fresh with the future.
What I Did Wrong
John Weir - 2006
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.
I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.
John Donovan - 1969
Between alcohol-infused lectures about her self-sacrifice and awkward visits with his distant father, Davy's only comfort is his beloved dachshund Fred. Things start to look up when he and a boy from school become friends. But when their relationship takes an unexpected turn, Davy struggles to understand what happened and what it might mean.