NO STRAIGHT LINES is not a book about Tom of Finland. While the erotic art of Finnish illustrator Touko Laaksonen makes a brief appearance in this book, Justin Hall is primarily concerned with the cultural underground that GLBT comics have documented—and the political alternatives that they have imagined—from the late 1960s to the present.

The End Of San Francisco is an episodic memoir in which readers are brought nose-to-page with a narrative mélange of childhood anorexia, sexual abuse, and present-day attempts at healing. Images cascade and collide with one another in an accomplished literary cadenza of salvation.

THIS THOUGHTFUL, unusual book is an absorbing memoir of gay Japanese poet Mutsuo Takahashi’s childhood years. It originally appeared in serialized form in 1969 and was published as a book the following year. In the twelve chapters, Takahashi looks over formative moments of his youth and examines the ripples they have had in his later life.

A significant portion of the correspondence reveals that his stint in the army was positively “dreadful”—a word repurposed by Burns to mean “homosexual.” Margolick provides enough war correspondence to justify his claim that Burns was an important chronicler of gay life in the military.

IMAGINE your spouse, partner, lover goes out for a walk one evening and never comes back. The police are called, you tell them your story, and nobody is to be found. What would you do?