A revealing portrait of a major poet of the SF Renaissance and a gripping account of late '50s gay life.

Michael Rumaker was a writing student at Black Mountain College during the final traumatic years of the college. From a blue-collar background, his personal poverty paralleled that of the school. Teachers like Charles Olson and Robert Creeley helped him to a good start in gritty published stories and longer fiction, and he later produced important chronicles of the American gay experience.

In the first anthology to survey the full range of gay men's autobiographical writing from Walt Whitman to the present, Gay American Autobiography draws excerpts from letters, journals, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies to provide examples of the best life writing over the last century and a half. Volume editor David Bergman guides the reader chronologically through selected writings that give voice to every generation of gay writers since the nineteenth century, including a diverse array of American men of African, European, Jewish, Asian, and Latino heritage. Documenting a range of life experiences that encompass tattoo artists and academics, composers and drag queens, hustlers and clerks, it contains accounts of turn-of-the-century transvestites, gay rights activists, men battling AIDS, and soldiers attempting to come out in the army. Each selection provides important insight on the wide spectrum of ways gay men have defined and lived their lives, highlighting how self-awareness changes an author's experience. The volume includes an introduction by Bergman and headnotes for each of the nearly forty entries. Bringing many out-of-print and hard-to-find works to new readers, this challenging and comprehensive anthology chronicles American gay history and life struggles over the course of the past 150 years. Finalist, Lambda Book Award for LGBT Anthology, Lambda Literary Foundation

Account of male gay literature across cultures and languages and from ancient times to the present. It traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion. It includes writers of wide-ranging literary status (from high cultural icons like Virgil, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Proust to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett) and of various locations (from Mishima s Tokyo and Abu Nuwas s Baghdad to David Leavitt s New York). It also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men.

Fiction. "Mickey seems to see and hear everything, revealing as he does, Michael Rumaker's amazing abilities as a novelist. Rumaker has a wonderful eye for realistic detail and an exceptional ear for dialogue. His ability to create realistic American characters living in 20th century America rivals any American novelist I have ever read. PAGAN DAYS is one of the best novels I've read in a lifetime of reading. Michael Rumaker is a working-class Marcel Proust, a great novelist, inspired by memory to write this truly memorable novel."--Anne Geismar "Mickey's days as a 'pagan' open his eyes to an almost mystical, but certainly aesthetic, view of the world where each experience, no matter how difficult or painful, offers him a vision that will carry him through life. PAGAN DAYS enriches our literature, and reinforces that the avant-garde need not be unintelligible to communicate the complexity of being human. Rumaker's characters breathe like Rodin's figures--they are alive, real, sinewy, torn, ecstatic, and transformative."--Jeffery Beam