Amy Hoffman’s The Off Season moves along at a swift pace with short, titled chapters. P’town is brought to life with vivid descriptions of the town and its maritime surroundings.

Written in 1904, Hirschfeld presents a picture of gay and lesbian life in Berlin at the turn of the 20th century. We learn about the tea dances, hustlers, drag kings and queens, lesbian bars, cruising, campy humor and kitschy aesthetics, blackmailers, police raids, and gay ghettos.

The Diamond Setter is Moshe Sakal’s first novel to be translated into English. His language flows easily in Jessica Cohen’s translation. A quietly affecting novel, it offers an unusual perspective on a thorny part of the world.

IN HER INTRODUCTION to Sisters in the Life, editor Yvonne Welbon explains the significance of the “minority group” under discussion, namely African-American lesbian filmmakers: “Since the 1922 theatrical release of Tressie Souders’s A Woman’s Error, approximately one hundred feature films have been directed by African-American women. Almost one-third of those films were directed by black lesbians. Statistically about four percent of the adult American population is likely to identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, but over thirty percent of the feature films have been directed by this minority population.”