Suggested Titles for BGBGs Consideration

The Brothers Bishop
by Bart Yates

Now, Tommy has come home to the family cottage by the sea for the summer, bringing his unstable, sexual powder keg of an entourage—and the distant echoes of his family’s tumultuous past—with him. Tommy and his lover Philip are teetering on the brink of disaster, while their married friends, Camille and Kyle, perfect their steps in a dance of denial, each partner pulling Nathan deeper into the fray. And when one of Nathan’s troubled students, Simon, begins visiting the house, the slow fuse is lit on a highly combustible mix.

During a heady two-week party filled with drunken revelations, bitter jealousies, caustic jabs, and tender reconciliations, Tommy and Nathan will confront the legacy of their twisted family history—their angry, abusive father and the tragic death of their mother—and finally, the one secret that has shaped their entire lives. It is a summer that will challenge everything Nathan remembers and unravel Tommy’s carefully constructed facade, drawing them both unwittingly into a drama with echoes of the past…one with unforeseen and very dangerous consequences.

His dead father is fading into a snapshot memory. His mother, the famous psycho-poet, has relocated them from Chicago to a rural New England town that looks like an advertisement for small-town America—a bad advertisement. He can’t seem to start a sentence without using the “f” word. And now, the very house he lives in is coming apart at the seams—literally—torn down bit by bit as he and his mother renovate the old Victorian. But deep within the walls lie secrets from a previous life—mason jars stuffed with bits of clothing, scraps of writing, old photographs—disturbing clues to the mysterious existence of a woman who disappeared decades before. While his mother grows more obsessed and unsettled by the discovery of these homemade reliquaries, Noah fights his own troubling obsession with the boy next door, the enigmatic J.D. It is J.D. who begins to quietly anchor Noah to his new life. J.D., who is hiding terrible, haunting pain behind an easy smile and a carefree attitude.

Part Portnoy, part Holden Caufield, never less than truthful, and always fully human, Noah York is a touching and unforgettable character. His story is one of hope and heartbreak, love and redemption, of holding on to old wounds when new skin is what’s needed, and of the power of growing up whole once every secret has been set free.

Twenty years have passed since Joseph left behind his entire life—his wife Rebecca, his five sons, his father, and the religious Israeli farming community where he grew up—when he fell in love with a man, the genius rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig. Their affair is long over, but its echoes continue to reverberate through the lives of Joseph, Rebecca, and their sons in ways that none of them could have predicted.

Now, for his fiftieth birthday, Joseph is preparing to have his five sons and the daughter-in-law he has never met spend the Sabbath with him in the Tel Aviv penthouse that he shares with a man—who is conveniently out of town that weekend. This will be the first time Joseph and all his sons will be together in nearly two decades.

The boys’ lives have taken widely varying paths. While some have become extremely religious, another is completely cosmopolitan and secular, and their feelings toward their father range from acceptance to bitter resentment. As they prepare for this reunion, Joseph, his sons, and even Rebecca, must confront what was, what is and what could have been

Sex by the Book
edited by Kevin Bentley

A Perfect Waiter
by Alain Claude Sulzer

Erneste is the perfect waiter—and his private life seems to embody the qualities he brings to his profession. But inwardly this polite and dignified man is in the grip of a violent passion, aroused thirty years before, when he fell in love with a young waiter-in-training named Jakob. Jakob broke his heart when he fled Nazi-dominated Europe for a new life in America with his lover, Julius Klinger, a celebrated German intellectual. Nursing his wounds, Erneste slinks even deeper into his well-ordered world, hardening into what had only previously been a role. And then, after decades of silence, he receives a letter from a distraught and penniless Jakob asking for help. And Ernest must decide if he will finally take action. Set against the backdrop of a genteel Swiss hotel, and moving skillfully between two time periods, this exquisitely written story of a lifelong passion is rich in tension and emotion, exploring the nature of love and betrayal, memory, and regret.

We Disappear
by Scott Heim

But what he finds is a boy named Otis handcuffed in a secret basement room, and the questions that arise seem too disturbing even to contemplate. With his mother's health rapidly deteriorating, he must surrender to his own obsession, and unravel Otis's unsettling connections to other missing teens . . . and, ultimately, to Scott himself.

An insider's account of the rise of contemporary gay literature—and culture—a revealing portrait of New York in the 1970s and 80s

Almost a decade after the Stonewall rebellion lit the political fuse of Gay Liberation in 1969, its impact on the arts remained minimal. While a handful of gay plays, films and a small number of gay themed books were available, few of these reflected the new, out-of-the-closet realities of the post-Stonewall scene. That landscape began to change in 1977, when Felice Picano launched a small press devoted to gay books, SeaHorse, and author Larry Mitchell set up his own gay press, Calamus Books. Dramaturge Terry Helbing followed with a line of plays at his JH Press. By 1981 the three men joined forces to create Gay Presses of New York (GPNy), the most visible and influential publisher of gay books of its time. Together they brought out work by then unknown but soon to be established authors such as Harvey Fierstein, Dennis Cooper, Brad Gooch, Joan Larkin, Martin Duberman, Robert Gluck, Jane Chambers, Karla Jay, Gavin Dillard, as well as many more up and coming poets, novelists, and playwrights.

GPNY set the tone for Gay and Lesbian publishing for decades to come and played an integral role in the development and growth of gay popular culture, consisting today of bookstores, magazines, newspapers, theater companies, and art galleries. GPNy was also in the forefront of the gay visual arts, often using first time photographers such as Arthur Tress and Robert Mapplethorpe, and artists like George Stravinos, Ron Fowler and David Martin. Picano writes about his sometimes endearing, sometimes erotic, and sometimes bizarre encounters with them, with already established authors like Charles Henri Ford, Gore Vidal and James Purdy, and with members of his own group, the pathbreaking Violet Quill Club Through luck, and sheer propinquity, for a decade or more, Felice Picano found himself at the center of whatever gay culture there was in the world and Art and Sex in Greenwich Village is Picano’s first-hand account of that historic confluence.

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