Examining the development of gay American fiction and providing an essential reading list, this literary survey covers 257 works--novels, novellas, a graphic story cycle and a narrative poem--in which gay and bisexual male characters play a major role. Iconic works, such as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, are included, along with titles not given attention by earlier surveys, such as Wallace Thurman's Infants of the Spring, Dashiel Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Julian Green's Each in His Darkness, Ursula Zilinsky's Middle Ground and David Plante's The Ghost of Henry James. Chronological entries discuss each work's plot, significance for gay identity, and publication history, along with a brief biography of the author.

The first biography of Canada's most enigmatic literary figure, a self-described "great practitioner of deceit."

From homicidal homos to locked-up lesbians, and almost every sexually dangerous combination in between, Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback is the first complete expose of queer sexuality in mid-twentieth century paperbacks. Compellingly written by historian Susan Stryker, Queer Pulp gives a complete overview of the cultural, political, and economic factors involved in the boom of queer paperbacks. With chapters covering gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexually oriented books, a lively overview of the genres, and loads of scorching paperback covers, Queer Pulp reveals the complicated and fascinating history of alternative sexual literature and book publishing. Featuring the work of well-known authors such as W. Somerset Maugham and Truman Capote to the low-brow and no-brow scribes who worked under several names, Queer Pulp is the entertaining and informative introduction to these lost, salacious literary genres.

Reuben Cox is on the cusp of adolescence and living an idyllic life on his family's horse farm in Kentucky, receiving a classical education from his tutor and learning about the horse-raising business, martial skills expected of a man, and the responsibilities of duty and honor from his stern but loving father. Through her example, his mother provides for the growth of his heart and conscience. Suddenly, the outbreak of the Civil War bursts this idyll to pieces, and as a young teen, Reuben finds himself riding with Quantrill's raiders. Despite his youth, Reuben becomes skilled and efficient at the violent duties of war, but at the war's end, he is unable to return to his former life. Among many of the young male diaspora from the South, he seeks his fortune in the post-war Texas cattle industry. In Texas, he finds himself caught up in another battle, a range war between two wealthy cattle barons. Even more so than the Civil War, this range war will not only force the limits of Reuben's martial abilities but also put his sense of duty, honor, pride, justice, and love to the ultimate test. The story weaves in and out of the lives of three families who, having built edifices of power and wealth, must face the fragility of those walls. This is a story about building strength out of courage and is also a story about the dangers of pride.

The first comprehensive treatment of the history of homophobia - from ancient Athens to the halls of Congress.

The Anglo-Russian author William Gerhardie was hailed by writers including Graham Greene, Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh and others as a “genius,” and this, his long-out-of-print second novel, is generally acclaimed as his comic masterpiece—not to mention “the most influential English novel of the twentieth century,” according to William Boyd. It tells the unforgettable tale of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East during the turbulent years just after the First World War, which displaced them, and the Russian Revolution, which impoverished them. Recounted by a conceited young English cousin who visits during a military mission, the story is filled with a host of fascinatingly idiosyncratic characters—depressives, obsessives, sex maniacs, and hypochondriacs—often forced to choose between absurdity and tragedy. Yet Gerhardie depicts them as both charming and poignant, as they each struggle for love and safety in tumultuous times . . . and the protagonist finds his conceit shredded as he falls head over heels in love with one of them. Gerhardie’s portraits of Europeans in exile, attempting to escape from the era’s upheavals, draws on his own experiences as an officer in the British Mission. He has summoned up a world adrift, where war and revolution have broken up the old order, but nothing has come to replace it. And he does it with unforgettable humor and a sharp eye for the absurd. Hilarious, poignant, panoramic in scope, The Polyglots redeems, from the Babel of the interwar period, a stirring vision of love and human sympathy.