Books like Queer Ducks (and Other Animals) — picked by fans

Here again I mean not only the sexuality of deviance or the deviance of sexuality such as crossdressers, transvestites, homosexuals, and lesbians but also historical phenomena such as the gay rights movement or the suppression of gays in Nazi Germany.

The book that most influenced me in the 1970s was Laud Humphrey’s “Tea-Room Trade”. His book was so radical, so astounding in its utter chutzpah that it could never be replicated today at research universities. It was a time when gay consciousness was erupting. The problem was that those gay activists were out in the open, but what about the closeted man? (His study dealt only with men.)

These men may not even label themselves as homosexual or bisexual or Trans. I am speaking of men who go to “hidden” bathrooms in parks or buildings and wait for anonymous sex; then go home to their wives and children and live… show more.

I loved the setting of a remote near-future research facility where the fascinating personalities of our primate brethren are being explored.

The focus is on lusty bonobos and their mating choices, but when there's an abrupt societal collapse and human researchers, and simian subjects are cut off from the world, it becomes a dystopian survival story like no other. I was deeply moved and left feeling oddly hopeful about the human ape.

Gay American History was an epiphany for me and thousands of other gay men and women who were eager to learn about our history because books about it were few. I can’t describe the wonder I felt as I opened the book to thousands of rare documents (letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, book excerpts, medical and legal reports, etc.) that connected me to LGBT individuals who lived centuries earlier. Puritans, indigenous people, cross-dressing (“passing”) women, military personnel, artists of every ilk, government officials—their struggles, their defeats, and their victories, I learned, were no different in essence from those of the LGBT individual of the 21st Century. Gay American History is, in short, a treasure trove of information.

Written by one of the great experts in the field this wonderful book takes a look at animal sexual behavior broadly. It introduces the amazing complexity of adaptations to sex and how they evolved. What is plain fascinating to the biologist may be a little odd to humans from time to time, but we have to learn not to view everything from a human perspective. This book is written for a broad audience and is very easy to read.

While trying to learn about gay life in the 1920s, I was delighted to find this novel, “privately” published in 1919. One soon learns that Bertram Cope, who comes to teach at an undergraduate college as he works on an advanced degree, has a relationship with another young male with whom he plans to cohabit—interesting that two men could openly set up housekeeping together, even back then. Meanwhile an older matron, an aging homosexual man, and various young women hope to attract Cope’s attention. Though seen by some as a trivial social satire, Fuller’s light touch and subtle wit mask an undertone of eroticism and homosexual associations. His anonymous, authorial, third-person narrative voice is humorous and incisive, revealing his penetrating observations of social niceties and the layers of his characters’ maneuverings. Clever and understated, the book implies much that is never declared.

Sexual desire, acted on or repressed, is either the text or subtext of every gay man's life.

Edmund White treats sex explicitly and with bracing honesty. His frankness—for example, in describing his fumbling, agonized, danger-courting attempts as a kid to find love—recalled my own youthful risks and failures, but freed those memories of shame.

I've read few of White's many books. (Guess I was jealous of his output and acclaim; better I should have emulated his driving curiosity and intelligence.) His recent death, at 85, prompted me to read this narrative of his long, unruly, ceaselessly questing life.

A sharp observer of trends and sub-cultures, White moved among the famous—writers, artists, intellectuals—and descriptions of and dish about them are an extra, but only slightly guilty, pleasure.

I love bugs, and there just aren’t enough books out there about them. Harry the Poisonous Centipede is one my kids asked for over and over when they were little, and that I happily read them again and again. 

When Harry and his best friend George go up the Up Pipe, they find themselves in the dangerous world of the hoo-mans. My kids loved seeing the world through a centipede’s eyes, not to mention their unique centipedish way of speaking, and the scrapes Harry and George get themselves into (and out of) are incredibly entertaining. 

Tony Parker was a British writer dedicated to telling the stories of marginalized members of society. Many of his books took the form of transcripts of interviews with murders, career criminals, lighthouse keepers, and occupants of social housing. This book was his most controversial: interviews with institutionalized sex offenders, who tell their stories in their own words. Parker was skilled at getting people to broach shameful topics and talk candidly about their lives, and this book is no exception. His transcripts capture each speaker’s unique parlance, as well as the offenders’ varying levels of self-reflection. Published in 1969, there is even the sad story of a man who was imprisoned for homosexuality.

As befitting the cheeky title, this book – about what it means to be, and to become, a gay man – is incisive, erudite, and a lot of fun to read. A pioneer of queer theory (and with this intervention, I suspect, a renegade from it), David Halperin is an unapologetic camp. He challenges received wisdom about how gay sensibility supposedly is misogynist, passé, irrelevant or dead, and his reflections on everything from Joan Crawford’s pizazz, to the current state of gay marriage, vacillate between being capacious and withering. “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people” he sniffs at one point, dispensing a delightful, and typically barbed, aperçu.

In all honesty, I wasn’t going to read this at first.

This book is a spin-off of her A Beginners Guide to Necromancy series, and I didn’t really like Amelie. But I really enjoyed this series, almost more than the main one. Hadley is as flawed as they come, but she’s compassionate, hardworking, and really wants to change.

This has become a series that I never wanted to end, and I can go back to read each one over and over.