People I’ve Met from the Internet puts Van Dyck in the company of Rechy, Samuel Steward, and even Christopher Isherwood (especially his reconstructed diary, Lost Years) as experimental chroniclers of queer lives and times. The creativity of the form seems like something readers may wish they’d thought of themselves.

In the era before Stonewall, when gay men were forced to lead closeted lives, those who sought to express their sexuality, however furtively, were often victimized and even murdered for doing so. The press coverage of such attacks on gay men was distorted and sensational, and they often turned the victim into the criminal. In Indecent Advances, Polchin explores this important feature of the “bad old days” before gay liberation.

While Madden hints that she was at least a little embarrassed that her mother was her father’s mistress, she nonetheless enjoyed the perks: Her father was a man of means and showered gifts and privileges on his daughter, including lavish vacations, horses, private schools, and the latest toys.

Film buffs will want to read Sleeping with Strangers, an analytical book that somehow maintains a dreamlike quality. Given the insanely messy connections between the sexual images we consume and our actual sex lives, all of us could probably use more time on the couch (this author included).

As Zeb Tortorici’s Sins Against Nature proves, the Catholic Church has meticulously investigated, documented, and largely kept silent on priestly sexual abuses for centuries.

Little did I grasp that I had stumbled upon one of the last remaining sites from a century-long history of queer life in Brooklyn. But that is one of the many things I learned in reading Hugh Ryan’s immensely absorbing .When Brooklyn Was Queer.

THIS NOVEL tells the story of the relationship between Tennessee Williams and his lover Frank Merlo. Set mainly during their time in Italy in 1953, Christopher Castellani’s Leading Men also offers glimpses of Frank’s future, suffering and dying from lung cancer.