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Since Strayhorn’s death, a handful of writers have worked to rescue him from Duke Ellington’s shadow. David Hajdu’s 1997 biography Lush Life and Walter van de Leur’s Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn have solidified Strayhorn’s position as a major force in American jazz. To those titles we can add Lisa Barg’s new Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration, a scholarly examination of Strayhorn’s work and life as a queer Black artist working in a time of overt racism and homophobia.

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Maurice is placed by media professor David Greven in a tradition of melancholy and lyrical gay films exemplified by Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, and later Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Will & Grace’s pedigree is more I Love Lucy.

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Christopher Byrne’s biography, “A Man of Much Importance,” is welcome on several counts. First, despite the choppy way that it consigns McNally’s plays, operas, and work for television to separate chapters, the book does offer an accurate overview of McNally’s life that’s surprising in some of its details. For example, while McNally had spoken publicly about his parents’ alcoholism and his father’s beating him for his artsy behaviors and sassy comebacks as he grew up in Corpus Christi, Byrne is the first to report that McNally’s mother “interfered” (Byrne’s word) with him during his teenage years, which perhaps explains the sexually troubled relationship between mothers and sons in his plays.

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AS A WRITER and commentator for Rolling Stone and NPR, Will Hermes has zestfully illuminated the zeitgeist of various musical movements, placing them within their historical and cultural settings. His latest book is an examination of the complicated genius of Lou Reed, the drug-taking, gender-bending avatar of the leather, goth, glam, and punk music scenes. Many books have been written about the legend, but Lou Reed: The King of New York may well be the definitive biography.

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The project, “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” is now recapped in a book by the same name, which includes essays about the works on display and interviews with the living artists. Much of it wrestles with questions of inclusion: Whose pictures deserve to hang on a museum’s walls? Is there an institutional responsibility to represent different kinds of art and artists outside its established purview? What types of people are encouraged to walk through a museum’s front door?

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A  HOST of accolades marks Sean DeLear’s posthumous reputation: “the Queen Mother of alternative music,” “a punk rock fairy godmother,” “a walking work of art,” “a person who single-handedly made counterculture feel viable,” AND “a fierce, fully formed faggot.” To use an expression DeLear often applied to others, he was a “bitchin’ babe.”

            “He was so many things,” writes Michael Bullock, co-editor of DeLear’s teenage diary I Could Not Believe It, recently issued by Semiotext(e): “punk musician, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, dance-track vocalist, party host, heavy-metal groupie, marijuana farmer, and even Frances Bean Cobain’s babysitter.”

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Impressive for its careful, comprehensive portrait of memory, love, grief, and community, The Road to Dalton encourages acceptance of its flawed characters. They are doing the best they know how in a place where the only expectations are of birth and marriage and death.

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In his mid-eighties, [Ross] Terrill has published the diary he kept between 1963 and 1989, edited by Philip Gambone. Surprisingly sexually explicit for its era, this is the first in a planned two-volume set.

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In The House of Doors, Tan skillfully mirrors that competent, lucid style. There are no frilly flights of descriptive prose, no subplots, no psychological probing, no distractions from the rather simple plot: A famous writer travels to an exotic land to collect tales from the natives and writes a collection of six stories that tell those tales. Lesley’s telling of the Proudlock murder trial story unfolds like any straightforward detective story. Thus, in both content and writing style, Tan has paid homage to Maugham as one of the masters of unadorned prose.

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Books under review: Gays on Broadway by Ethan Mordden, and Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre by Kelly Kessler.

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