JEFFREY ESCOFFIER [who is interviewed in this issue] is one of the founders of LGBT studies and an early promoter of lesbian and gay writers. His career has spanned diverse fields, from his graduate work in economics in the 1970s when he also became active in gay academics and politics.

A   LOVE TRIANGLE involving a policeman, his male lover, and the lover’s wife is the subject of Bethan Roberts’ new novel My Policeman. Set in 1950s England, the story was inspired by novelist E. M. Forster’s long-term relationship with policeman Bob Buckingham and his wife May. The novel is currently being made into a major motion picture for release in 2022 starring actor and singer Harry Styles (Dunkirk), actress Emma Corrin (The Crown), and British actor David Dawson.

            This story is told from the point of view of Fitzgerald’s original supporting character, Jordan Baker, who is reinvented as a queer Vietnamese-American protagonist taking on the American Dream and all its glittering quirks and failures.

            Wilkinson’s book is about his search for his father and, by extension, his roots and his identity. There was a great-grandfather who hailed from the Canary Islands and stowed away on a ship bound for Uruguay. But even this flimsy fact is cause for disappointment: “No one in my family now knows or cares what he did or why.”

BRANDON TAYLOR’S second book, Filthy Animals, is a collection of short stories alternating between connected and stand-alone tales. The linked ones tell the story of Lionel, a Black graduate student in mathematics, and his evolving relationship with a white couple, Charles and Sophie, both dancers.

            In its most basic form, sexual racism is rejecting sex with another person based on race or race-based fetishizing and objectification. According to C. Winter Han, associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College and author of Racial Erotics, the problem is larger than just who desires whom as a sex partner.