The Clothesline Swing is the story of two gay Syrians, lovers and refugees, who flee their war-ravaged country for a new life in Canada. Set in the future, some forty years after they first arrive in Vancouver, the story focuses on the now old couple’s final months together. The narrator’s partner is dying. His only relief comes from the stories that his lover, whom he calls Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic), tells him. “I’m your Scheherazade,” Hakawati tells his sleepless partner. “I offer you souvenirs: my stories, the pieces of my soul, to help you sleep.”

Jake Shears (real name, Jason Sellards) was born in Mesa, Arizona, in 1978, and was shuttled back and forth between there and Seattle during his school years. A showy, bossy gay kid who watched, unimpressed, as baseballs “plunked on the ground yards away from me, like a dead shooting star,” he found himself instead obsessed with David Bowie …

Only at the last page does the reader fully understand that there are no heroes or villains in this fictional world, no sick puppies or paragons of mental health and political correctness. While it captures a contemporary zeitgeist, this book seems likely to last.

The plot of Less is well constructed, with lots of amusing incidents. The fun begins in New York City, with Less almost missing his interview with Mandern due to a broken clock in the hotel lobby and a mistaken assumption by his escort.

The response to Don Leon’s request for a new way of thinking about sexual variety was social shock. Early printings of this work were destroyed in one way or another, and the text became a rare and nearly mythical presence in gay history.