A Secret Between Gentlemen is a carefully researched book that not only delves into an episode in early 20th-century British history but also provides an in-depth look at gay history in this era. The main story is one of great intrigue, filled with sex and crime and political scandal, outlandish lives, and an extraordinary cover-up. Unlike Oscar Wilde, Lord Battersea opted to use his connections and influence to escape prosecution and prison, a story that lay dormant for over a century.

            The impact of the writer’s early years is echoed throughout the last two parts of Black Folk Could Fly. The lens is broadened to include perspectives from the writer’s stint working in a publishing firm in New York and his travels around the U.S. in search of what it means to be Black.

The Digital Closet looks at how the “unlikely bedfellows” of anti-porn feminists, conservative groups such as Morality in Media (now renamed ncose, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation), and alt-right groups like the Proud Boys have influenced the development of the Internet.

In Len & Cub, authors Meredith J. Batt and Dusty Green have assembled a large number of photographs that tell the unfolding story of Leonard Olive Keith (1891–1950) and Joseph Austin Coates (1899–1965)—the “Len” and “Cub” of the book’s title.

MARPHEEN CHANN’S name may not be well-known outside of Maine, where Chann is a community organizer, a public speaker, and recently became Portland’s first Cambodian American elected official, as a member of that city’s charter commission. In his new memoir Moon in Full, he comes across as a tremendously likable, openly gay man who overcame all the odds.

            At first glance, Making Love with the Land looks like a departure from the author’s poetry and fiction, but anyone who has read his earlier work will recognize Whitehead’s characteristic honesty, humor, and deeply traditional worldview in which humans, animals, and plants are interconnected and all equally important.

Grimsley’s tenth novel, The Dove in the Belly, is a worthy but somewhat problematical work that ostensibly shares the theme of Dream Boy and Boulevard, that of a timid, newly out gay man who becomes obsessed with an apparently straight man, with the possibility of violence ever present.