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Christopher Byrne’s biography, “A Man of Much Importance,” is welcome on several counts. First, despite the choppy way that it consigns McNally’s plays, operas, and work for television to separate chapters, the book does offer an accurate overview of McNally’s life that’s surprising in some of its details. For example, while McNally had spoken publicly about his parents’ alcoholism and his father’s beating him for his artsy behaviors and sassy comebacks as he grew up in Corpus Christi, Byrne is the first to report that McNally’s mother “interfered” (Byrne’s word) with him during his teenage years, which perhaps explains the sexually troubled relationship between mothers and sons in his plays.

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AS A WRITER and commentator for Rolling Stone and NPR, Will Hermes has zestfully illuminated the zeitgeist of various musical movements, placing them within their historical and cultural settings. His latest book is an examination of the complicated genius of Lou Reed, the drug-taking, gender-bending avatar of the leather, goth, glam, and punk music scenes. Many books have been written about the legend, but Lou Reed: The King of New York may well be the definitive biography.

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The project, “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” is now recapped in a book by the same name, which includes essays about the works on display and interviews with the living artists. Much of it wrestles with questions of inclusion: Whose pictures deserve to hang on a museum’s walls? Is there an institutional responsibility to represent different kinds of art and artists outside its established purview? What types of people are encouraged to walk through a museum’s front door?

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A  HOST of accolades marks Sean DeLear’s posthumous reputation: “the Queen Mother of alternative music,” “a punk rock fairy godmother,” “a walking work of art,” “a person who single-handedly made counterculture feel viable,” AND “a fierce, fully formed faggot.” To use an expression DeLear often applied to others, he was a “bitchin’ babe.”

            “He was so many things,” writes Michael Bullock, co-editor of DeLear’s teenage diary I Could Not Believe It, recently issued by Semiotext(e): “punk musician, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, dance-track vocalist, party host, heavy-metal groupie, marijuana farmer, and even Frances Bean Cobain’s babysitter.”

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Impressive for its careful, comprehensive portrait of memory, love, grief, and community, The Road to Dalton encourages acceptance of its flawed characters. They are doing the best they know how in a place where the only expectations are of birth and marriage and death.

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In his mid-eighties, [Ross] Terrill has published the diary he kept between 1963 and 1989, edited by Philip Gambone. Surprisingly sexually explicit for its era, this is the first in a planned two-volume set.

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Rustin does an excellent job of confronting directly the homophobia that Rustin faced from other African-American leaders while also capturing his charisma as a political organizer and strategist.

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