At the end of 2007, two major gay-interest publishers - Harrington Park Press and Carroll & Graf - were defunct, and smaller queer presses were reeling from the financial fallout of a major distributor’s bankruptcy. Good news follows bad: Some of the Harrington slack was picked up (along...

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...

Blind Curves
By Diane and Jacob Anderson-Marshall
Bold Strokes Books, $15.95
The catfight setting for this intricate mystery is the world of lesbian magazine publishing - and because half the writing team (Diane) is the current editor of Curve, the plot has a patina of possibility. Some action is...

Voices Rising: Celebrating 20 Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Writing
Edited by G. Winston James and Other Countries
RedBone Press, $25
Other Countries was founded 20 years ago as a collective committed to black gay male writers and writing, back when a mere handful of emerging African-American...

Butch Is a Noun
By S. Bear Bergman
Suspect Thoughts, $16.95
This sassy essay collection is savvy about the theory of being a butch—about the physicality and the psychology of moving through a world normally divided into this-is-a-boy and this-is-a-girl certainties. For that alone, it’s an impressive guide to the...

Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground
Edited by Dennis Cooper
Little House on the Bowery, $16.95

Two years ago, Dennis Cooper set up a personal blog. Within months, it had attracted an eclectic community of inspired “commenters” drawn to the sexual intensity of the writer’s eight novels (most...

Gay Art: A Historic Collection
Edited by Felix Lance Falkon, with Thomas Waugh
Arsenal Pulp Press, $24.95

A quarter-million copies of Gay Art sold out when Greenleaf, then the prime purveyor of gay porn, published it in 1972. With a production schedule of 50 books a month (straight and...

SoMa
By Kemble Scott
Kensington Books, $14

Sexy but sexually ambivalent young Raphe, precipitously downsized by San Francisco’s dot-com implosion, is a frustrated writer with a condo he can’t afford, a menial job in a South of Market mail drop, and an apparent eye for the girls. Then he...

2006 was a good year for queer readers when books by the likes of Christopher Bram, Edmund White, Norah Vincent, Leslie Feinberg, Cheryl Clarke, Stephen McCauley, and Andrew Holleran are crowded out of the Book Marks Top 10 lists. Impressive debut work from a new generation of skilled...

Writing My Love
By Claire McNab
Bella Books, $13.95
After 16 Carol Ashton mysteries and six Denise Cleever thrillers, every one briskly busy with disquieting murders and bloody mayhem, prolific Australian author McNab (she’s written two romances as well) has turned to something completely different. And satisfyingly silly. Vonny Smith—Victoria...

Paws and Reflect: Exploring the Bond Between Gay Men and Their Dogs

By Neil Plakcy and
Sharon Sakson
Alyson Books, $24.95

This is a mixed-breed collection. Some stories are as-told-to tales about the dogs in our queer lives, based on interviews conducted by the editors. Kevin Anderson reveals...

Izzy and Eve
By Neal Drinnan
Green Candy Press, $14.95
Eve and Izzy have lived together for years. She crafts exotic jewelry and works as a receptionist in a whorehouse, he’s an erotic cartoonist with a yen for rougher sex, and they love each other deeply and mostly...

Jokes and the Unconscious: A Graphic Novel
By Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa
Cleis Press, $17.95
The words in this graphic novel are by performance poet Gottlieb, and they’re fierce and funny. The art is by Hothead Paisan comic creator DiMassa, and it’s vivid and witty. The story, in which...

Gay Power: An American Revolution

By David Eisenbach

Carroll & Graf, $27

Idaho Code
By Joan Opyr
Bywater Books, $13.95
A functionally dysfunctional family. Lesbian lust. Broken hearts. An antigay initiative. Faerie boys. Daring drag. Malicious gossip. Women sharpshooters. A colony of womyn. Closeted cops. Baristas with attitude. And softball games. Lots of softball games. Opyr’s well-crafted debut novel, set in dichotomously...

The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts
By James Smalls
Temple University Press, $35
It matters to mention that Smalls is a gay African-American professor of art history. His sexuality, his race, and his training are all filters for his astute assessment of the 34 homoerotic...

A Scarecrow’s Bible
By Martin Hyatt.
Suspect Thoughts Press, $16.95
When wounded souls connect, the miracle can be explosive. So it is in this rapturous debut novel, a tragic love story set in the hardscrabble working-class Deep South. Gary is an emotional wreck of a Vietnam vet whose daily...

Grief
By Andrew Holleran
Hyperion Books, $19.95
From a lesser writer, Grief would be a bore. It’s the story of a reserved professor, in later middle age, who is mourning his elderly mother’s death, lamenting the lack of romance in his life, and whiling away lonely evenings with free concerts...

My Lives: An Autobiography
By Edmund White
Ecco Press, $25.95
After autobiographical fiction like  A Boy’s Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, and The Married Man, what more can renowned author White cull from his six decades of sexual and intellectual activity that’s not already familiar? Plenty, all neatly categorized into...

Now Is the Hour
By Tom Spanbauer
Houghton Mifflin, $26
It’s 1967, and eternally tumescent 17-year-old Rigby John Klusener—with a flower in his hair—is hitchhiking to San Francisco. He’s leaving behind an oppressively religious mother, a bigoted and embittered father, a hard, hard life on the family’s Idaho farm—and the...

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
By Alison Bechdel
Houghton Mifflin, $19.95
When he was 44, Bruce Bechdel probably committed suicide by stepping in front of a speeding truck. The emotionally distant father of three was a high school teacher with a penchant for buying beer for teenage boys and hiring...

Rose of No Man’s Land
By Michelle Tea
MacAdam/Cage, $22
Fourteen-year-old Trisha is an ennui-embracing loner oddly out of touch with her peers. She’s saddled with a welfare mother wallowing in hypochondria and a perky sister whose goal is a role on MTV’s The Real Life. Trisha subsists mostly on...

1,001 Beds: Performances, Essays, and Travels
By Tim Miller
Univ of Wisconsin Press, $19.95
A queer Johnny Appleseed—that’s Tim Miller, the peripatetic performance artist who has been sowing seeds of insurrectionary faggot art across America for a quarter of a century. By his own tongue-in-cheek estimation, he’ll have slept in...

The Three
By Meghan O’Brien
Quest Books, $19.95
A raging sickness has decimated North America, leaving isolated bands of survivors to fend for themselves in a mean, dog-eat-dog world—one where electricity is a memory, living off the land is a necessity, and religious fanatics are kidnapping women for forced...

The Last Time I Saw You
By Rebecca Brown
City Lights, $12.95.
Love doesn’t come easy, and memory is always suspect, for the lesbian narrators in Brown’s dark-humored collection of a dozen brilliant, edgy stories. “Trying to Say” considers what a woman intended to tell her ex-girlfriend—”maybe I am trying...

Sweet Creek
By Lee Lynch
Bold Strokes Books, $15.95.

There’s a heady sense of ‘60s back-to-the-land communal idealism and ‘70s woman-power feminism (with hints of lesbian separatism) to this spirited novel—even though it’s set in contemporary rural Oregon. Partners Donny (she’s black and blue-collar) and Chick (she’s plus-sized and motherly)...

My Lucky Star

By Joe Keenan
Little, Brown, $24.95.
Hosanna: novelist Keenan hasn’t lost his comic touch in the too-many-years since Blue Heaven (1988) and Putting on the Ritz (1991) split many a queer reader’s side. With a decade’s experience working on the TV hit Frasier to draw from,...

Brando Unzipped: A Revisionist and Very Private Look at America’s Greatest Actor
By Darwin Porter
Blood Moon Productions, $26.95
Yummy. That sums up veteran entertainment reporter and biographer (of Howard Hughes and Humphrey Bogart) Porter’s titillatingly tabloidish account of Marlon Brando’s eccentric, sex-centric years. The author barely pauses to...

Branwell: A Novel of the Bronte Brother
By Douglas A. Martin
Soft Skull Press, $13.95
Branwell, the overshadowed Bronte brother of Charlotte, Anne, and Emily, was an immensely troubled lad, dead at age 31of an addiction to alcohol and opium—and failure. This mesmerizing fictional realization of the young man’s...

Throughout 2005, I reviewed 100 books in this column, and read as many more, and there are dozens of potentially good reads I haven’t gotten to yet. This offering of 10 fiction and 10 nonfiction titles is pared down from an initial list of almost 50; those cited here are...

Heroes
By Patrick Fillion
Bruno Gmunder, $22.95.
They dangle thickly down to knees and arc jauntily up to nipples: Erotic comic artist Fillion’s super-muscled superheroes are, to a man, supremely well-endowed. There’s no real storyline in this cartoonish parade of hot, hypermasculine hunks, though every well-drawn picture is certainly...

They Change the Subject
By Douglas A. Martin
Terrace Books, $17.95

It’s less than a full-bore narrative novel, and it’s more than a collection of discrete short stories. Many of the pieces are not much more than vignettes, vivid exploratory expositions of a soulful erotic life, beginning with “License,” about...

The City of Falling Angels
By John Berendt
The Penguin Press,  $25.95

Venice’s cherished opera house burns down. Wealthy Americans trying to save the sinking city from the elements feud bitterly with each other. Two venal overseers of Peggy Guggenheim’s Venetian estate rip off Ezra Pound’s 101-year-old mistress. Those interwoven...

In Too Deep
By Ronica Black
Bold Stroke Books, $15.95

This is a challenging murder mystery—a lesbian serial killer is scattering the savagely mutilated bodies of men around town. It’s also a (somewhat cliched) coming-out story—the straight policewoman sent undercover to nab the prime suspect has “feelings” for another woman...

Rode Hard, Put Away Wet: Lesbian Cowboy Erotica
Edited by Sacchi Greene and Rakelle Valencia
Suspect Thoughts Press, $16.95

Not all the lesbians are cowboys, and not even all the cowboys are lesbian—but this strong collection of erotica about gals who wear chaps, know their way around a horse, and...

Third & Heaven
By Ben Patrick Johnson
Alyson Books, $14.95.

Three gay men lust for love and fame in Hollywood, while their older, self-described “fag hag” friend will settle for love. The quartet gets together when they can for spirited Sunday brunches where they encourage, console, and occasionally upbraid each...

My One-Night Stand With Cancer
By Tania Katan
Alyson Books, $15.95
Playwright Katan’s one-night stand with cancer in fact stretched over a decade. She lost one breast in 1992, when she was 21, and the second in 2002. This would not seem an experience to laugh about—except that’s exactly...

The Next World
By Ursula Steck
Bella Books,  $12.95.
What luck that Anna Spring, the plucky protagonist of this inventive and fast-paced mystery, is a genetics researcher. Actually, she’s working as a lowly security guard for a hip ad agency, after transplanting herself from Germany to escape her crazed...

Just Add Hormones: An Insider’s Guide to the Transsexual Experience
By Matt Kailey
Beacon Press, $21.95
This assertive hybrid of informal memoir and informed how-to guide is both a serious account of one person’s transsexual experience and a genial exploration of gender transition. Kailey—a 42-year-old straight woman when he...

The Boys in the Brownstone
By Kevin Scott
Southern Tier Editions, $22.95

A bawdy Cheers-like bar for non-Chelsea queers—that’s the Brownstone, a quirky gentleman’s bar on the affluent Upper East Side of New York, where the dysfunctional characters of this serio-comic debut novel mingle and mix. A closeted pastor is...

The Tricky Part: One Boy’s Fall from Trespass into Grace
By Martin Moran
Beacon Press, $23.95

This transcendent memoir—about childhood sexual abuse, adult sexual confusion, and the consequent emotional turbulence—is, generously, both healing and cleansing. Moran, seduced at age 12 by a Catholic camp counselor 20 years his senior, and...

Fred In Love
By Felice Picano
Terrace Books, $14.95

The “Fred” of the title is a feline—but it’s memoirist Picano who cats around, in this mildly gossipy, sweetly nostalgic, and incidentally erotic slice of a writer’s life through the post-Stonewall ‘70s. A few years before the acclaim derived from early...

By William J. Mann
Kensington Books, $24

When you’re 14, what’s the boundary between sex and abuse? Where does love end and betrayal begin? And why does an all-American boy become a man adrift? It all has to do with buried family secrets and deep emotional denial, the searing themes of...

Starstruck
By MichaeJoseph Gross
Bloomsbury USA,
$23.95

Author Gross was starstruck at a tender age. A lonely teen, his unarticulated queer life still ahead of him, he spent hours every day after school soliciting signed letters from the famous, amassing a collection of more than 4,000: Madonna and Dr....

By Joshua Gamson
Henry Holt, $26

Sylvester was a pint-sized gospel singer (nickname: Dooni), a teenage drag queen, a fierce young black singer with a fabulous falsetto—signed to the same record company as Creedence Clearwater Revival—and, for a few years, a dazzling disco diva. By the time he died of AIDS...

Acqua Calda
By Keith McDermott
Carroll & Graf
200 pages, $24There was a time when the gay “AIDS novel” was all about dying. A few recent AIDS tales—Brian Bouldrey’s fine The Boom Economy comes to mind—are more about living. That’s the essence of this eloquently wry novel. It’s about...

Dinah! Three Decades of Sex, Golf, and Rock ‘n’ Roll
By Michele Kort
Out Traveler Books $18.95
There is “sex” in Dinah!: sections of Kort’s exultant consideration of the Dinah Shore Weekend party scene in Palm Springs bring to mind an intentionally lesbian installment of a Girls Gone Wild...

By Marvin K. White
RedBone Press, 76 pages, $14
There is loss in this soulful collection: “on that block/ before death come sit on our stoop/ we counted stars.” There is sorrow in this truth-telling collection: “my brother is pained/ thinking about me/ kissing men on the lips.” There...

Freedom in This Village
Ed. by E. Lynn Harris.
Carroll & Graf, $15.95Freedom in This Village, collecting a quarter century of black gay fiction, poetry, and essays, is a substantial, sorrowful, and celebratory anthology showcasing four dozen diverse writers. The “25 years” of the title allows inclusion of an...