Broadway Nights: A Romp of Life, Love, and Musical Theatre
By Seth Rudetsky
Alyson Books, $15.95
For whatever genetic reason, many queer boys have an affinity for show tunes - and some, of course, are obsessively starstruck about Broadway musicals. Curtain up on good times: Broadway pianist (and more recently performer) Rudetsky’s deeply dishy debut novel is just the thing for their inner show queen. Central character Stephen - a Broadway pianist, as it happens - has been toiling in the orchestra pits for years, his Great White Way career established but stalled. And his love life isn’t going anywhere either - his main squeeze is reluctant to leave a rich boyfriend. All that changes, endearingly, when a friend asks Stephen to become musical director of a new show. Pretty chorus boys flirt with the world, backstage liaisons complicate rehearsals, and old friends finally become happy lovers - this is a gay romance, after all. But the real fun of the fictional romp is the wealth of factual showbiz lore - much of it bitchy and most of it hilarious - that theater insider Rudetsky packs into his charmingly giddy plot.

Jack Nichols, Gay Pioneer: “Have You Heard My Message�
By J. Louis Campbell III
Harrington Park Press, $29.95
Nichols, who died in 2005, was a second-generation queer pioneer, a child-of-the-’60s activist who followed in the wake of ‘50s forebears like Harry Hay and Hal Call, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. By the time he was barely 20, he was working with legendary D.C. activist Frank Kameny to found a Washington branch of the Mattachine Society. Before he was 30, he was writing a popular gay column for Screw, the notorious heterosexual underground sex newspaper, and then editing - along with his lover, Lige Clarke - the first (albeit briefly) weekly queer newspaper, Gay. And he kept up with the times: until shortly before his death, he was editor of an online journal, GayToday. Campbell’s welcome biography compiles the facts and chronicles the years of Nichols’ life with affable competence. But the often pedestrian prose doesn’t invest Nichols’ accomplishments as an activist, a visionary, a lover, and an author - he wrote four books, and co-authored two more with Lige - with a truly vivid sense of the personality he brought to queer politics.
Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books
Edited by Steven G. Fullwood and Lisa C. Moore
Redbone Press/Vintage Entity Press, $16.95
This compilation of almost 700 black queer titles - fiction and poetry, essays and anthologies, gay studies texts and lesbian biographies - has value enough as a useful library resource. The entries aren’t annotated, though each comes with complete bibliographic information, so tracking down titles is easy enough. And there’s a value-added component: more than two dozen interviews (and a few reviews) that add personality to the book’s bare-bones booklist. SF author and gay novelist Samuel Delany, Audre Lorde biographer Alexis de Veaux, and poets Marvin K. White, Cheryl Boyce Taylor, and Reginald Harris are among the better-known writers profiled; Delany tells what it’s like to be a black, gay, genre writer - and how those three elements don’t overlap much in his life, and de Veaux tells about the 10 years it took her to write about Lorde’s life. But the richest interviews come from lesser-known authors, among them Rashid Darden, R. Erica Doyle, and Travis Montez, who, like their peers, are passionate about the power of black words to chronicle black lives.

Biting the Apple
By Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Carroll & Graf, $14.99
One-time track phenomenon Eve Glass, an Olympic contender in her teens, has lived an inauthentic life filled with false starts and private fears. To an adoring public, she’s a former golden-girl athlete turned charismatic motivational speaker, on the cusp of bestseller stardom with her second book, an exploration of grace. But she has private demons: a hellish childhood with an absent itinerant preacher father; a high school tryst with a baby dyke in the ‘70s that comes back to haunt her; a drug-addled past and an ongoing propensity to flirt with self-destruction by shoplifting; emotional overdependence on her ex-husband and former running coach; and a bad case of low literary self-esteem sparked by an affair with a reclusive poet suggestive of May Sarton in her middle years. Bledsoe’s fourth novel, packed with a cast of complex female characters, is an intelligent, introspective - and sometimes smartly sarcastic - story about the shackles of the past, the pressures of a present built on falsehoods, and the promise of reinvention and renewal in the future.

Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story
By Kim Powers
Perseus Books, $23.99
As this fantasia rooted in reality opens, Truman Capote is weeks away from dying, despondent that his friends have deserted him, drowning in drink and drugs (fact), and haunted by nightmare visits from the Clutters (fiction) - the Kansas family whose massacre inspired Capote’s true-crime triumph, In Cold Blood. In his delirium, he reaches out (fiction) to Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who accompanied Capote to Kansas as he researched the Clutter family’s slaying and the lives of their killers (fact). The childhood friends have been estranged for years (fact), Lee long embittered by rumors that Capote really wrote the book that brought her fame - a pivotal bit of fiction in this terrifically intense meshing of imagination and truth. Powers folds his fiction seamlessly into facts; the result is a riveting, offbeat what-if novel. His heartfelt depiction of a Capote in tragic decline - but with flashes of crafty self-awareness - is haunting; his portrayal of Lee as a lesbian manque – though she’s still alive, and as reclusive as ever - is heartrending.

Nureyev: A Life
By Julie Kavanagh
Pantheon, $37.50
British ballet critic Kavanagh doesn’t stint on the outsized personalities, critical high and low points, or choreographic genius of the dance world in this sophisticated warts-and-all biography of Rudolf Nureyev. There’s more than enough of a savvy insider’s astute assessment of the Russian-born dancer’s flamboyant career and charismatic talent to satisfy the most earnest of ballet buffs. And there’s no shortage of queer deep dish, either. Kavanagh chronicles the ballet superstar’s hedonistic sex life with a wealth of detail that is surprisingly nonjudgmental - the parade of lovely young men he picked up and discarded, some rough trade and some well-bred; the passion of his tempestuous romance with Danish dancer Erik Bruhn; how he prowled gay bathhouses with unabashed abandon throughout his legendary onstage partnership with Margot Fonteyn; and his AIDS-related decline and death in 1993, after becoming infected in the earliest years of the epidemic, and living for years after in denial. This detailed portrait of an iconoclastic dancer’s rebellious life adds up to a mesmerizing mosaic.

Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling, and writing about queer literature since the mid-’70s.