The Beauty of Men is a 1996 novel by Andrew Holleran, about Lark, a 47-year-old single gay man, who has moved to Florida to help care for his mother, who became paralyzed after a fall.
The novel is set in the mid-1980s when AIDS was ravaging a generation of gay men back home in New York City. In Florida, Lark lives alone, has few friends, terrified of venturing out in the daylight. [1] Had he stayed in New York he would be just as alone for a different reason. Now, instead of going to clubs and bath houses, he goes to the boat ramp and the one local gay bar two towns over in Gainesville. He has become obsessed with a local man named Becker with whom he spent one long night and has followed periodically since.
It was nominated for the 1997 ALA Gay Lesbian Bisexual Books award and the Lambda Book Award for Gay Fiction. [2]
Chasing Amy is a 1997 American romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Kevin Smith and starring Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, and Jason Lee. The third film in Smith's View Askewniverse series, the film is about a male comic artist (Affleck) who falls in love with a lesbian (Adams), to the displeasure of his best friend (Lee).
A gay bathhouse, also known as a gay sauna or a gay steambath, is a public bath targeted towards gay and bisexual men. In gay slang, a bathhouse may be called just "the baths", "the sauna", or "the tubs". Historically, they have been used for sexual activity.
Laurence David Kramer was an American playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist. He began his career rewriting scripts while working for Columbia Pictures, which led him to London, where he worked with United Artists. There he wrote the screenplay for the film Women in Love (1969) and received an Academy Award nomination for his work.
LGBT themes in speculative fiction include lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBTQ) themes in science fiction, fantasy, horror fiction and related genres.[a] Such elements may include an LGBT character as the protagonist or a major character, or explorations of sexuality or gender that deviate from the heteronormative.
Gay literature is a collective term for literature produced by or for the gay community which involves characters, plot lines, and/or themes portraying male homosexual behavior.
The Price of Salt is a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith, first published under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan." Highsmith—known as a suspense writer based on her psychological thriller Strangers on a Train—used an alias as she did not want to be tagged as "a lesbian-book writer", and she also used her own life references for characters and occurrences in the story.
Andrew Holleran is the pseudonym of Eric Garber, an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer, born on the island of Aruba. Most of his adult life has been spent in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a small town in Florida. He was a member of The Violet Quill with Christopher Cox, a gay writer's group that met in 1980 and 1981 and also included Robert Ferro, Edmund White and Felice Picano. Following the critical and financial success of his first novel Dancer from the Dance in 1978, he became a prominent author of post-Stonewall gay literature. Historically protective of his privacy, the author continues to use the pseudonym Andrew Holleran as a writer and public speaker.
Big Eden is a 2000 romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Thomas Bezucha. Arye Gross stars as Henry Hart, a successful gay artist from New York City who returns to his rural hometown in Montana to care for his ailing grandfather. Henry is welcomed back by the townsfolk, all of whom are aware of his sexuality and are highly accepting and even supportive towards him. During the months he stays in the town, Henry is forced to confront his unresolved feelings for his high school friend Dean Stewart, while simultaneously being oblivious to the feelings of Pike Dexter, the shy Native American owner of the town's general store.
Dancer from the Dance is a 1978 gay novel by Andrew Holleran about gay men in New York City and Fire Island.
An Arrow's Flight is a 1998 novel by Mark Merlis.
Ann Weldy, better known by her pen name Ann Bannon, is an American author who, from 1957 to 1962, wrote six lesbian pulp fiction novels known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. The books' enduring popularity and impact on lesbian identity has earned her the title "Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction". Bannon was a young housewife trying to address her own issues of sexuality when she was inspired to write her first novel. Her subsequent books featured four characters who reappeared throughout the series, including her eponymous heroine, Beebo Brinker, who came to embody the archetype of a butch lesbian. The majority of her characters mirrored people she knew, but their stories reflected a life she did not feel she was able to live. Despite her traditional upbringing and role in married life, her novels defied conventions for romance stories and depictions of lesbians by addressing complex homosexual relationships.
Felice Picano is an American writer, publisher, and critic who has encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources.
Marijane Agnes Meaker was an American writer who, along with Tereska Torres, was credited with launching the lesbian pulp fiction genre, the only accessible novels on that theme in the 1950s.
Robert Charles "Rob" Byrnes, Jr. is a 21st-century gay American, novelist and blogger, whose fiction focuses primarily on gay men and other sexual minorities. He serves on the Steering Committee for The Publishing Triangle, and was also a member of the Executive Council of the International Association of Crime Writers/North American Branch from 2011 to 2015.
Patience and Sarah is a 1969 historical fiction novel with strong lesbian themes by Alma Routsong, using the pen name Isabel Miller. It was originally self-published under the title A Place for Us and eventually found a publisher as Patience and Sarah in 1971.
Grief is a novel by American author Andrew Holleran, published in 2006. The novel takes place in Washington D.C., following the personal journey of a middle-aged, gay man dealing with the death of his mother. The novel received the 2007 Stonewall Book Award.
Together Alone is a 1991 drama film written and directed by P. J. Castellaneta and starring Terry Curry and Todd Stites.
The Everard Baths or Everard Spa Turkish Bathhouse was a gay bathhouse at 28 West 28th Street in New York City that operated from 1888 to 1986. The venue occupied an adaptively reused church building and was the site of a deadly fire.
The Round House is a novel by the American writer Louise Erdrich first published on October 2, 2012 by HarperCollins. The Round House is Erdrich's 14th novel and is part of her "justice trilogy" of novels, which includes The Plague of Doves released in 2008 and LaRose in 2016. The Round House follows the story of Joe Coutts, a 13-year-old boy who is frustrated with the poor investigation into his mother's gruesome attack and sets out to find his mother's attacker with the help of his best friends, Cappy, Angus, and Zack. Like most of Erdrich's other works, The Round House is set on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota.
The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein is a 2007 book written and published by John Lauritsen, which defends the unorthodox hypothesis that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the real author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). The book also argues that the novel "has consistently been underrated and misinterpreted", and that its dominant theme is "male love."