McLane was born in 1944 in Macon, Georgia, but grew up in Wagener, South Carolina, a small town in horsey Aiken County. He was an English major and a member of the Furman Theater Guild. In the decade after he left the college, he forged a minor but significant career for himself in the theater—no small accomplishment, as any number of former stars of the university stage can attest.

THIS IS the unspoken story of the extraordinary relationship between John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), the preeminent portrait artist of high society of his era, and his African-American muse, Thomas McKeller.

AS AN AMERICAN who came out as a teen in Italy in the early 1980s, my favorite gay novel (which I discovered years later) is The Gallery. Written…More

FEAR of her same-sex desires stalked poet Charlotte Mew’s life and haunted her work. She feared that such desire was just another symptom of the family legacy of madness, which she feared even more. On March 24, 1928, afraid that she was succumbing to this trait, she drank Lysol from a cheap brown bottle, …

Strachey’s depiction of Olivia’s sexual and erotic longings is what makes this novel remarkable. Olivia’s “thinly veiled passions” erupt into all that goes with first love: obsession, jealousy, idealization, longing, endless waiting, despair, disillusionment. Strachey takes the reader through all of these stations of the cross of first love.

OF THE HANDFUL of books that informed my adolescent understanding of what it meant to be gay, E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice was the most revelatory. The reasons are numerous, but the most important was that it held out hope to a confused young mind enduring a very dark night of the soul.

ÉRIC JOURDAN’S Les mauvais anges, or Wicked Angels, was banned in France shortly after its publication in 1955, and the ban was only lifted thirty years later. The story of a sadomasochistic amour fou between two teenage boys was translated into English by Richard Howard in 1963 and titled Two.