“A sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights. But it’s also a whodunit to rival anything by Agatha Christie. How did so many promising men in government wind up dead before their time, by such variously violent means? … A luxurious, slow-rolling Cadillac of a book, not to be mastered in one sitting. It would be best read at the violet hour with a snifter of brandy in a wood-paneled library, one of those with a rolling ladder to bring down some of the faded midcentury best-sellers resurfaced in these pages, like Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar”” – New York Times

Oscar Wilde is one of the most important figures in our history and culture — a playwright, essayist, novelist. Every time I re-read his work I am reminded of his wit and sassiness and how widely he influenced our culture. He is a model of creativity, aestheticism and sexuality.

How queer people survive erasure, self-inflicted or otherwise, is at the heart of Garrard Conley’s stunning debut memoir, Boy Erased. His father, a Baptist preacher who sought to lead at least a thousand souls to the Lord, held daily Bible study at his Ford dealership and interpreted events like earthquakes and war in the Middle East as signs of the End Times…a gut-punch of a memoir, but the miracle of this book is the generosity with which Conley writes in an effort to understand the circumstances and motivations that led his family to seek the “cure.” [at gay conversion center, Love in Action]. – L.A. Review of Books

This is like a dark lesbian genius rolling in a giant heap of damp, dead leaves. What a great, shaking, grieving party this book is — the best.

A remarkable collection of essays by a remarkable woman. Lorde’s views on race, gender, homophobia, xenophobia, class discrimination… To me this book is a manifesto of multiplicity. In an age in which we are all reduced to single identities and pushed into artificial tribes, Lorde’s intersectional and touchingly human approach is like a balm. It is a book about love, resilience and sisterhood.

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white, and further access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and queerness.

Enough has been said about this book by better writers than me. This is Baldwin’s tale of desire, and the failure of that desire, set in 1950’s Paris. The abandonment at the end is heart-breaking. Lingering in my mind is the beautiful quote, “If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”

I found this book so educational in terms of what it must have been like to grow up in America, discovering you need to harbor a secret. And the yearning in these pages is so palpable.

This book is a little rawer and more hedonistic than Hollinghurst’s later work and I love that about it. It’s really sexy. William Beckwith is a young aristocrat who spends his days cruising men at the swimming pool of a private club, and writing the biography of an elderly Lord. Beckwith is enormously privileged and totally unapologetic about his sexual promiscuity. It’s a glimpse of queer London before the scourge of Aids.

I was a student when I read Orlando for the first time, and I remember how for many days afterwards I walked around in a happy daze. Daring to transcend boundaries of gender, class, history, culture, geography… this is a story — Woolf called it a biography — like no other. Our hero wakes up and finds himself turned into a woman, and delightfully, this transition takes place in Istanbul—Constantinople. Orlando is a novel about transformations and journeys — from man into woman, from the West to the East, from one existence to the next and vice versa.

I love all of Sarah Waters’ historical fiction but this is my favorite novel, set during and after WWII. It starts slow but picks up insane momentum, using reverse narration to follow the characters backward in time to the explosive wartime scenes that shaped them.

Paul Monette’s memoir is a devastating account of his encounter with a disease that would kill him. It is so intimate and personal that I often felt I was reading someone’s diary and was ashamed to be committing such a gross invasion of another person’s privacy. Paul Monette was not a careless man. He wanted us to know and remember what AIDS did to him. He succeeded more than he could ever have realized. Books about what it means to be human have no expiration date.

In my opinion James Purdy is the most underrated writer in American literature, probably because he was gay. His books are heart wrenching, brutal and sometimes flat-out mean-spirited but they are also incredibly beautiful and endlessly poetic. I’m not all that fond of books that make me cry but in Purdy’s case, I don’t mind.

So many gay writers have influenced me – Edward Albee, James Baldwin, Stephen Sondheim, Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde yadda yadda. Edmund White is a great writer – so erudite, curious about all things, a great aesthete. And as honest as anyone can be about sex and the motivations of self. Honesty is everything!

It is September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the man he fought alongside during the Great War.But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan’s visit. He can no longer keep a secret and has finally found the courage to unburden himself of it.

I was stunned by how relevant the themes of the book are to today. I did not imagine that sci-fi would be an enjoyable genre to get into for me, but Butler writes with such a familiarity that the alien is welcome and intriguing. She really artfully exposes our human impulse to self-destruct.

Renault was one of the great historical novelists, able to do justice to the strangeness of the past, even while bringing it to life for modern readers. The Persian Boy, I think, was her masterpiece.

This examination of masculinity and violence from writer Thomas Page McBee is utterly readable. McBee…interviews sociologists, trains for a boxing match himself, and writes about his relationships to the important people in his life, especially his late mother, all in pursuit of a greater understanding of masculinity. – The Los Angeles Review of Books

Yanagihara’s novel breaks with the decorum of much of contemporary American fiction, laying claim instead to the scope and grandeur that often characterize the greatest queer art. This book elicits strong reactions; however you feel about it, it will be a landmark in your reading life.