Boykin, an author, television commentator, and Harvard Law School graduate, is to be commended for assembling writers with the audacity to address issues normally shrouded in silence in communities of color in this stirring collection of personal essays by gay men of color.

Jim Nawrocki reviews Michael Rumaker’s Robert Duncan in San Francisco and Hilary Holladay’s American Hipster: A Life of Herbert Huncke.

A MAN who is never named – as if he’s invisible or not worthy of a name – is the protagonist of this somber, almost depressing novel by Will Davis, author of the award-winning novel, My Side of the Story (2007). …

This book is a remarkable work of reconstruction. It begins with the “American dream” of Mereleh Luft, a teenage girl in Latvia: “She’d been sent out to be an apprentice, first to a milliner and then to a dressmaker, and with loathing she’d believed the needle would be her whole life.

ONE MAGAZINE, America’s first openly gay publication, was launched in Los Angeles in January 1953. It continued going strong for almost a decade, until an internal split in the parent organization, One Inc., weakened the magazine. Still, it continued to publish in a diminished form up to 1967, only two years before Stonewall. …

TREBOR HEALEY’S LATEST NOVEL, A Horse Named Sorrow, is a painfully beautiful book. It’s also gloriously sexy and, along with Michelle Tea’s Valencia (2000), it’s among the finest depictions of queer life in 1990s San Francisco. …

A YOUNG American artist, Jenny Kidd, has left a dull job and her overbearing parents behind to come to Venice. In New York, she feels trapped between her parents’ expectations, her need to make a living, and her desire to paint and teach or illustrate. In Venice, hoping that her paintings might provide a livelihood, she also explores her curiosity about lesbianism and her own sexuality. …

DEAHN BERRINI’S How To Earn Your Keep is a tentative novel, full of almosts. It has aspects of a legal thriller, shadings of chick lit, and something akin to a coming out story, braided into a larger narrative about finding one’s moral compass in trying times. It’s an engaging mix, if hesitant in its delivery. …

WILLIAM DRUMMOND STEWART was part of the landed aristocracy in 19th-century Scotland, albeit a second son, who ultimately became baronet of Murthly Castle late in life upon the death of his childless older brother. With limited cash and not a lot to do prior to inheriting the title, he set out for ‘pleasure trips’ to the Rocky Mountains, spending several years there as he had adventures and explored the beauty not only of the frontier landscape but also of the young, virile men who flocked to the Rockies to explore and escape as well. …