Gene Berry and Jeffrey Campbell Collection (Library of Congress)

A Boy's Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrator's coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations (“I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.”) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional...

This book, an overview of gay life in the U.S., puts to rest the stereotype that homosexual communities thrive only in large cities. In coast-to-coast travels, the author, former editor of Boston's Gay Community News, met vast numbers of gays and lesbians in a variety of geographic, ethnic, social and cultural settings. The author unexpectedly found that aside from some intolerant communities, small towns accept gays and lesbians--gay farmer couples,...

A lesbian therapist in Chicago whose live-in lover disappears tracks her down in Morocco, only to find a different woman, a shock that puts her power of perception in question. If she could misread a lover for so long--a therapist's worst fear--perhaps she hardly knows her own mind.

The town of Barrowcester-pronounced "Brewster"-is English as can be. From its cozy little pubs to its immaculate cathedral close, the quiet city seems straight out of the pages of Thomas Hardy. For American academic Evan Kirby, it's paradise, a welcome escape from the United States, where he was haunted by the grim memories of his brutal divorce. A historian of angels and demons, he has come to Barrowcester to explore the cathedral library. But he...

Patrick Gale's first novel is suffused with heady wish-fulfilment as two contrasting love stories entwine in the space of one simmering summer week. WPC Mo Faithe is overcome with lust while investigating a series of violent attacks on newspaper astrologers. Meanwhile in Cornwall, the Peakes are conducting their annual music festival, the cue for their two 'children' - Seth, a young violin prodigy, and Venetia, a highly-strung scholar - to embark...

"Eddie Socket left a small town in deepest New Jersey, suffocating and eccentric parents, a name (Wally Jeffers), the gay-baiting years of high school, and the secluded unreality of college and headed for the city of Big Dreams: Manhattan. In his Lambda Literary Award-winning debut novel, John Weir reveals how the heady promise of one decade was challenged by the unimaginable grief of the next, and how that earlier promise was preserved by bravery,...

A homosexual triangle in Chicago between a 25-year-old male prostitute, a teenage youth in love with him, and a 70-year-old man with whom the male prostitute falls in love.

The latest in the Little Sister's Classics series resurrecting gay and lesbian literary gems: a viciously funny, shocking yet ultimately moving 1975 novel, an allegory of Franco's Spain, about a young gay man (the self-described 'carnivorous lamb') coming of age with a mother who despises him, a father who ignores him, and a brother who loves him. Author Agustin Gomez-Arcos left his native Spain for France in the 1960s to escape its censorship policies....

Born in Iowa to the sounds of Bob and Bing Crosby and the Dorsey brothers, Mickey grows up to the comforting images of his living room TV and the reassuring ruts of his parents' life. During the restless summer of his senior year in high school, drifting away from the girlfriend he could never quite love, Mickey spends a night with another boy, and his world will never be the same. On a barge floating down the Mississippi, he falls in love with James,...