Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan Alfred A. Knopf. 200 pages, $16.99 IT HAS been just over ten years since David Levithan tossed a hot pink monkey wrench…More

A LONGTIME CORRESPONDENT for National Public Radio, Frank Browning is the author of two widely discussed books in the field of gay studies: The Culture of Desire (1993) and A Queer Geography (1996). His explorations of gay history and gay identity have been praised as expansive and provocative, engaging and readable. His latest work, The Monk and the Skeptic: Dialogues on Sex, Faith, and Religion, is all of those things.

THIS SEDUCTIVE NOVEL follows two couples in 1940 Lisbon as they await an ocean liner for America that will enable them to escape Nazi-occupied Europe with war closing in.

Becoming a Londoner deals with the physical world, social life, and David Plante’s relationship with Nikos.

It was in 1909 that [Amy] Lowell met Ada Russell through mutual friends. Russell, an actress, was in Boston appearing in a play, and the women were drawn to each other right away. It appears that after meeting again in 1912, they started the relationship that lasted until Lowell’s death in 1925 at age 51.

HISTORIAN Saul Friedländer ventures into Franz Kafka scholarship with panache. Sex, he declares, is the hitherto missing key to interpreting “the poet of shame and guilt.

Stravinsky was married and Craft is heterosexual, so it may seem that this book lacks interest for GLBT readers unless they happen to be fans of 20th-century concert music. However, at least one of its chapters ( “Amorous Augmentations”) touches on the question of Stravinsky’s sexual orientation.