Future Selections for the Group:
(Please note: Schedule is subject to change depending on availability of selections or at the discretion of Group members)

Selection for September 2010

Role Models
by John Waters

Here, from the incomparable John Waters, is a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich—and happily horrify readers everywhere.

Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities—some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis—these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness.

Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse, and hilarious artistic minds of our time.

Selection for October 2010

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde

Celebrated novel traces the moral degeneration of a handsome young Londoner from an innocent fop into a cruel and reckless pursuer of pleasure and, ultimately, a murderer. As Dorian Gray sinks into depravity, his body retains perfect youth and vigor while his recently painted portrait reflects the ravages of crime and sensuality.

Selection for November 2010

My Queer War
by James Lord

In My Queer War, James Lord tells the story of a young man’s exposure to the terrors, dislocations, and horrors of armed conflict.

In 1942, a timid, inexperienced twenty-one-year-old Lord reports to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to enlist in the U.S. Army. His career in the armed forces takes him to Nevada and California, to Boston, to England, and eventually to France and Germany, where he witnesses firsthand the ravages of total war on Europe’s land and on its people. Along the way he comes to terms with his own sexuality, experiences the thrill of first love and the chill of disillusionment with his fellow man, and in a moment of great rashness makes the acquaintance of the world’s most renowned artist, who will show him the way to a new life.

My Queer War is a rich and moving record of one man’s maturation in the crucible of the greatest war the world has known. If his war is queer, it is because each man’s experience is strange in its own way. His is a story of universal significance and appeal, told by a wry and eloquent observer of the world and of himself.

Selection for December 2010

The Pure Lover:
A Memoir of Grief
by David Plante

A powerful and tragic memoir about the lifelong love between two men, from a well-loved and critically acclaimed author.

Our first night together, we could have been the inspiration of a poem by Cavafy. But you would not make love. You wanted to lie with me and talk. I, who only really knew promiscuity, didn't understand, but you said you must first know a person before making love. You believed lovemaking was a long and intimate conversation. That conversation with you was filled with delicacy of your sensuality, for sensuality and sensitivity were in you one, eros and agape.

David Plante first met Nikos Stangos in London in 1965. He was a young American-raw, an aspiring writer, in love with a fantasy of Greece half classical and half inspired with the eroticism of Cavafy. Nikos was Greek, a poet, an aesthete and intellectual, a leftist, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of his country: a man of great sophistication and few pretensions. Nikos was pure. They spent the next forty years together. And then Nikos died of brain cancer.

In The Pure Lover Plante tells us, in vivid fragments that like the pieces of a mosaic come together into a glimmering whole, the story of his beloved, of their life together, and of its end. And in this telling he shows us the nature of grief: its passion, its centrality, its vanity, its willfulness, the threat and the lure of its overwhelming force. And the griever's fear that when it fades, the lost lover will finally, really, be lost.

The Pure Lover is a book of unusual intimacy, a lament that will speak to all who have known deep love and deep grief.

Selection for January 2011

Great Speeches on Gay Rights
edited by John Waters

This anthology traces the rhetoric of the gay rights movement from its deeply clandestine beginnings in the late 1800s through the current fight for marriage equality. Speeches include Robert G. Ingersoll's "Address at the Funeral of Walt Whitman," Harvey Milk's "Hope Speech," and Franklin Kameny's "Civil Liberties: A Progress Report."

Selection for February 2011

Faggots
by Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer's Faggots has been in print since its original publication in 1978 and has become one of the best-selling novels about gay life ever written. The book is a fierce satire of the gay ghetto and a touching story of one man's desperate search for love there, and reading it today is a fascinating look at how much, and how little, has changed.

To make recommendations for future selections of Big Gay Book Group,
please send your suggestions and recommendations by email to
biggaybookgroup@hotmail.com
Any recommendations will be presented to and voted on by
members of the Group during our Group Gatherings.