The best books on the lives of gay men

My favorite gay autobiography. Humorous, explicit, and thought-provoking. Like my story, his is far from a neatly packaged “coming out” story of self-acceptance. He describes some way-out-of-bounds-for-most-people sexual adventures in detail but with no intention to shock or titillate. He is just telling stories he finds interesting, and he is a great storyteller. Not surprising, since he is a celebrated science fiction author.

Always surprising in a quirky way. Example: in the 1950s, he is at an outdoor gay cruising area at night when there is a police raid. It is only as the men flee that he grasps how many were there: hundreds. It is his first sense of being in a large gay male community, and it is empowering.

I became obsessed with the writing in this book when it was first published in 1991, and I was far from the only one. News of his death, one year after the publication of this book, triggered a spontaneous march of angry mourners through his NYC neighborhood.

He wrote with the urgency of an artist running out of time. David captured the anger of the first generation of gay men to confront AIDS like no one else. Other writers expressed the grief, the despair, and the moral dilemmas. David had fire breathing out of his pen. I am proud to have one of my favorite of his paintings on the cover of my new book.

A thinly fictionalized account of a young male prostitute based on the life of the writer. This was written years before Stonewall, yet presents an unflinching portrayal of the range of male sexual desire that would be cutting edge even today. No excuse is given for sexual activity that most would see as peculiar because the author makes clear that, in his estimation, none is required. He never says as much, but it can be inferred from every line on every page.

I especially love how he can describe men who are utterly insensitive and emotionally shut down, and what you take away from it is how sensitive and emotionally boiling they are.

If you are picking up on the fact that I am pretty much over the 2-just-married-white-guys-in-a-convertible gay love story, you will not be surprised that I loved this book. The true story of a 17-year-old Irish kid working at a brothel in Victorian London.

An underworld of teenage prostitutes is vividly portrayed: runaways, post office boys, shoeblacks, newspaper sellers, grooms, servants, and most of all, telegraph boys. As the star witness in the trial that was THE sexual scandal of Victorian London, Jack defiantly testified against a wealthy gay British man, at least in part out of his sympathy for the cause of his Irish homeland. Jack goes on to die penniless at age 46 of tuberculosis. Take that!

I love this book because it is a nearly unbelievable tale of human resilience and a timely reminder that not so long ago, queers had bigger problems than micro-aggressions and pronouns. Jim Foshee had the gay life you don’t want. By age fourteen, he had been abused by his mother, his step-father, a reform school, a mental hospital, police, older kids at a juvenile jail, and a judge.

The only love he had received was from a drag queen who had taken him off the street and her partner, and for this, they were tried and nearly imprisoned. Jim was then sentenced to five years in a Texas prison, where the abuse reached an entirely new level. Incredibly, he managed to put together a stable life, co-found Denver’s first LGBT community center, and spend his later years researching gay history.