The novel, Life of David Hockney, explores Hockney’s romantic relationships in detail. One longtime partner, Peter, is a student in a class Hockney teaches in L.A., “still a teenager” who came to the class by accident.

People I’ve Met from the Internet puts Van Dyck in the company of Rechy, Samuel Steward, and even Christopher Isherwood (especially his reconstructed diary, Lost Years) as experimental chroniclers of queer lives and times. The creativity of the form seems like something readers may wish they’d thought of themselves.

In the era before Stonewall, when gay men were forced to lead closeted lives, those who sought to express their sexuality, however furtively, were often victimized and even murdered for doing so. The press coverage of such attacks on gay men was distorted and sensational, and they often turned the victim into the criminal. In Indecent Advances, Polchin explores this important feature of the “bad old days” before gay liberation.

While Madden hints that she was at least a little embarrassed that her mother was her father’s mistress, she nonetheless enjoyed the perks: Her father was a man of means and showered gifts and privileges on his daughter, including lavish vacations, horses, private schools, and the latest toys.

Film buffs will want to read Sleeping with Strangers, an analytical book that somehow maintains a dreamlike quality. Given the insanely messy connections between the sexual images we consume and our actual sex lives, all of us could probably use more time on the couch (this author included).

As Zeb Tortorici’s Sins Against Nature proves, the Catholic Church has meticulously investigated, documented, and largely kept silent on priestly sexual abuses for centuries.