Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco
Killing Me Softly: Morir Amando
Suspect Thoughts Press
December 2004 * ISBN 0974638811 * $16.95
Description: Ibáñez-Carrasco introduces us to a vision of the urban queer never glimpsed in advertisements for tight shirts and designer jeans. If you scraped the rainbow paint off your pride rings with a dirty thumbnail, you would find Francisco’s world, skillfully rendered and beautifully imperfect.
Radclyffe
Change of Pace: Erotic Interludes
Bold Strokes Books
December 2004 * 1-933110-07-4 * $14.95
Description: Twenty-five hot-wired scenes — sharp-edged erotica guaranteed to satisfy … no matter what the pleasure.
Will Roscoe
Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love
Suspect Thoughts Press
December 2004 * ISBN 0974638838 * $16.95
Description: Whether discussing early Christianity, Plato’s Symposium, the rites of shamans, or the myths of ancient Mesopotamia, Roscoe uncovers fresh insights at every turn. He builds a persuasive argument that mysticism and gay love are powerfully connected, and that this connection forms a hidden tradition in the history of Western religion.
Bernard Amador
To Know A Fallen Angel
Authorhouse
October 2004 * ISBN 141849822X * $11.50
Description: This true coming of age story about a boy’s struggle not to become a sexual predator explains what happened to the mind of an abused child, takes its readers on an expedition through the mind of a sexual predator, and shows that triumph over sexual abuse is possible.
Beverly Burch
Sweet to Burn
Gival Press
October 2004 * ISBN 1928589235 * $15.00
Description: Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award and a Lammy finalist for best Lesbian Poetry, this book is emotionally packed with lyric intensity but its scope is novelistic.
Marshall Moore
Black Shapes in a Darkened Room
Suspect Thoughts Press
October 2004 * ISBN 097463882X * $16.95
Description: Black Shapes in a Darkened Room is a collection of witty, visceral, and darkly imaginative short fiction from the author of the novel The Concrete Sky. Revenge and eroticism, humor and despair, the supernatural and the everyday. Marshall Moore draws new contour lines and makes new connections in this nighttime map of the human soul.
Royston Tester
Summat Else
Porcupine’s Quill
October 2004 * ISBN 0889842574 * Ca $16.95
Description: Debut collection of short fiction from award-winning Canadian author. Mischievous, witty linked stories about a young Englishman, too queer and too clever to be a working-class lad from Birmingham, the polluted heart of England. “The writing is stripped and clean and so spare it almost shines.” (John Metcalf)
Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, eds.
I Do/I Don’t: Queers on Marriage
Suspect Thoughts Press
September 2004 * ISBN 0974638870 * $16.95
Description: I Do/I Don’t collects a diverse group of over 140 contributors on the subject of marriage. Stars and ordinary Janes. Saints and sinners. Anarchists and poets. Journalists and dreamers. Personal essays, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, vows, rants, love letters, and sermons. In favor and against. All valid. All from inside the community.
Jim Elledge
Masquerade: Queer Poetry in American to the End of World War II
Indiana University Press
August 2004 * ISBN 0253216346 * $24.95
Description: Beginning with a section of texts from pre-colonial Native America and Hawaii, Masquerade offers representative work by over 100 poets–male and female, known and unknown–and reveals for the first time the rich heritage of poetry that, for the most part, has been heretofore hidden.
Blair Mastbaum
Clay’s Way
Alyson Books
July 2004 * ISBN 1555838197 * $12.95
Description: Described by John Rechy as a gay Catcher in the Rye, Clay’s Way is a story of a 15-year-old skater Sam and the 17-year-old Clay. Bored with his middle-class existence, Sam becomes obsessed with the cool and mysterious surfer boy, Clay. But things are never as easy as they appear.
Dodie Bellamy
Pink Steam
Suspect Thoughts Press
June 2004 * ISBN 0-9746388-0-3 * $16.95
Description: Bounding from autobiography to Oscar Wilde to King Kong to the booze-addled body of Judy Garland, Bellamy’s anarchic imagination sends the cozy pieties of linguistic form through a blender, suturing the results into something perversely original. If anyone can drag the sleeping, stagnant beast of contemporary literature into the future, she can.
David Carter
Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution
St. Martin’s Press
June 2004 * ISBN 0-312-20025-0 * $24.95
Description: Based on hundreds of interviews and access to previously sealed files, Stonewall is the definitive account of the Stonewall Riots, now widely acknowledged as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. Dispelling long held myths and misinformation, Stonewall reveals the truth behind the times, the places and the riots themselves.
David Boyer
Kings & Queens: Queers at the Prom
Soft Skull Press
May 2004 * ISBN 1932360247 * $24.95
Description: Kings & Queens gets at the queer heart of an American rite of passage and captures what it’s like to grow up gay, bi, trans or utterly confused. Packed with more than seventy years of stories and pictures, this visual and oral history simultaneously explores the evolution of gay rights and teen culture.
Patrick Califia
Mortal Companion
Suspect Thoughts Press
May 2004 * 0-9710846-9-6 * $16.95
Description: Patrick Califia has crafted a lush and passionate tale of bloodlust, ennui, and immortality, fairly crackling with the erotic energy and gender bending that only lurk sedately beneath the surfaces of tamer vampire novels. This is Anne Rice on ecstasy, with all the stops pulled out!
George Ilsley
Random Acts of Hatred
Arsenal Pulp Press
May 2004 * ISBN 1-55152-152-0 * $16.95
Description: George K. Ilsley explores the thin line between love and hate, and the outer parameters of desire that can both heal and destroy. Random Acts of Hatred infiltrates the dark confines of young men undone by self-loathing and the powers-that-be, and asks: What happens when people know they are hated?
Aaron Krach
Half-Life
Alyson Publications
May 2004 * ISBN 1555838545 * $14.95
Description: 18-year-old Adam is lost in L.A. circa 1999. His depressed single dad is dead and now a handsome police officer is entering the scene. “Funny, romantic, surprising, and totally original.”–Edmund White.
Radclyffe
Fated Love
BookEnds Press
May 2004 * ISBN 1932667148 * $18.99
Description: Amidst the chaos and drama of a busy emergency room, Quinn Maguire, a dashing young trauma surgeon, and her new boss, Honor Blake, must contend not only with the fragile nature of life, but also with the mysteries of the heart and the irresistible forces of fate.
Lesléa Newman (illustrated by Peter Ferguson)
The Boy Who Cried Fabulous
Tricycle Press
April 2004 * ISBN: 1-58246-101-5 * $15.95
Description: (children’s book) Roger is so overwhelmed by all the fabulous things he sees, he never gets anywhere on time. In desperation, his parents ban the word “fabulous” from his vocabulary. But Roger’s spirit cannot be squelched! Soon he shows his parents the most fabulous thing of all–simply being yourself.
Tom Dolby
The Trouble Boy
Kensington Books
March 2004 * 075820616X * $23
Description: In this debut novel, 22-year-old Toby Griffin is living the Manhattan party life, but what he really desires are a boyfriend and fame as a screenwriter. He’s on the edge of stardom when he’s forced to choose between his dreams and his humanity.
Stanley Ely
In the Steps of Mister Proust
GLB Publishers, San Francisco
March 2004 * 1-879194-47-3 * $16.95
Description: This first person novel is told by an 18-year-old freshman at Columbia University who aspires to become a writer, studies and identifies with the narrator in Proust, struggles to relate to his father who left home for a male lover, and experiments in deciding if he himself is gay.
Aaron Hamburger
The View from Stalin’s Head
Random House
March 2004 * ISBN 0812970934 * $12.95
Description: This debut collection features ten lucid, haunting, and darkly comic stories about Americans and Europeans in post-Cold War Prague.
Michael Luongo
Between the Palms
Harrington Park Press (Haworth Press)
March 2004 * ISBN 1-56023-416-4 * $16.95
Description: Between the Palms is a collection of intelligently written travel erotica, whisking you away to the most exciting, sensual destinations on 6 continents. While the world is at war, the book proves the best cultural exchanges are the most intimate ones.
Randall Mann
Complaint in the Garden
Zoo Press
March 2004 * ISBN 1932023127 * $14.95
Description: Randall Mann’s curiosity endeavors to discover, often ironically, the beauty of things in the world around him. Mann’s poems invite readers into lush landscapes, sundry histories and a contemporary gay San Francisco populated by things and people loved and lost. Winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry.
Radclyffe
shadowland
BookEnds Press
March 2004 * ISBN 1932667067 * $17.99
Description: In the dark hours of the night, when passions rule and the barriers of convention are stripped away, two women are drawn together by power, passion and dark pleasures.
Radclyffe
Justice in the Shadows
BookEnds Press
March 2004 * ISBN 1932667024 * $18.99
Description: A rag-tag team of dedicated cops and civilian cybersleuths struggle to uncover a pornography ring and expose its connections to a traitor within the police department in the third of the Justice series featuring Detective Sergeant Rebecca Frye and her lover, Dr. Catherine Rawlings.
Wayne Courtois
My Name Is Rand
Suspect Thoughts Press
February 2004 * 0-9710846-7-X * $16.95
Description: Sweatily detailed in its depiction of men driven over the edge, My Name Is Rand is a bondage epic, a horror comic, and a totally original speculation on the nature of time and consciousness.
Lesléa Newman (illustrated by Ronald Himler)
The Best Cat in the World
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
February 2004 * ISBN 0-8028-5252-1 * $16.00
Description: (children’s book) Victor, his mom and their cat Charlie are a family. When Charlie dies, Victor is too sad to get a new cat but eventually a kitten named Shelley teaches him that every cat is “the best cat in the world.” A welcome addition to the growing body of literature about alternative families in everyday situations.
Trish Shields
Inferno
Baycrest Books
February 2004 * ISBN 0972845011 * $17.95
Description: Chicago firefighter Dray Khalkousa forms a deep connection with a homeless woman and they discover there is more to their bond than they could ever imagine. Both women struggle with a painful past to forge ahead and create a new future together.
Bazhe
Damages
iUniverse Star
January 2004 * ISBN 0595297145 * $19.95
Description: Damages is a saga of a young man caught in the political crossfire of a country torn apart by Communism, Christian nationalism, and Islamic fundamentalism. It is one man’s fight to find his true identity, sexuality, and freedom in an oppressive society and system.