“A FRYING-PAN of shameful loves sizzled loudly all around me,” writes a brilliant, sensitive man in his early forties, remembering the uncontrollable lusts of earlier years, “and theatrical shows seized hold of me.” The writer is not Martin Moran but St. Augustine …

… Same-sex marriage, which a decade ago seemed like a logical-and harmless-extension of civil rights to a group of disfranchised citizens, has instead become one of the key rallying points in the Christian Right’s attempt to merge religion and politics. …

“CREATIVE NON-POETRY” is how Richard McCann half-jokingly described his unassumingly moving new book, Mother of Sorrows, at a reading. In a fusion of poetic memoir and fictional prose, McCann gently skews the facts both to guard his own past and to acquire artistic liberties. …

THIS BOOK had to happen at some point. Someone had to embrace Whitman as an environmentalist, and thus we have Killingsworth’s Walt Whitman and the Earth, demonstrating yet again that Whitman is larger than himself, extending beyond 19th-century America to embrace the ages. …

THIS THOROUGH and harrowing book gives us the information we need to assess Oscar Wilde’s place in the creation of modern Western culture and in the history of gay rights. …

AT ONE TURNING POINT in this moving and romantic book, author Jeffrey McGowan, at the time a U.S. Army artillery lieutenant, hits bottom as he goes to war in Operation Desert Storm, knowing that he must hide the fact that he’s gay and in love with a fellow officer. He asks himself: “Why could I be a soldier, but not a man?” …