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THIS NOVEL tells the story of the relationship between Tennessee Williams and his lover Frank Merlo. Set mainly during their time in Italy in 1953, Christopher Castellani’s Leading Men also offers glimpses of Frank’s future, suffering and dying from lung cancer.

THIS SUSPENSEFUL NOVEL by John Boyne tells a tale about a literary thief. Maurice Swift is an aspiring writer who befriends Eric Ackermann, an older, established author. Over the course of several months, Maurice charms Ackermann into revealing a disturbing secret story from his childhood …

What Killian does to New Narrative is to add charm and hilarity. This is how he describes himself at twenty: “In looks I resembled a slightly beefed up version of the Disney actress Hayley Mills—very androgynous in the spirit of the times.”

The Dark Eclipse’s structure as a series of essays and Barnes’ unencumbered language make this shortish book a breezy read. The subject matter, however—the exploration of death, family history, and the discovery of self—are not so easy; but they are necessary.

Chalk is also a sensitive and thought-provoking look into the mind of an extremely important figure and even confronts the question of whether an artist’s sexuality is important to his or her work.

Book reviews of Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era’s Dark Angel, The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, The Parting Gift, and Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody.

Who Killed My Father is a small book, but it packs a big punch. Early on, Louis declares that what he is writing “does not answer to the standards of literature, but to those of necessity and desperation, to standards of fire.”

In The Mourning After, John Ibson shows how the ghosts of these buddies haunted the postwar year  and even today influence the ways in which American men relate to one another.

In the White House, [Robert] Cutler brought order to national security decision-making with a “passion for anonymity.” Time magazine noted that “He probably carries more top secrets in his head than any other man in Washington.” His biggest secret was his homosexuality, which …

The Man in the Glass House, Mark Lamster’s fine new biography of Philip Johnson, attempts to sort it all out. Heir to a portion of the Alcoa fortune, Johnson squeaked out a degree at Harvard while setting himself up at New York’s new Museum of Modern Art under director Alfred H. Barr. Johnson joined aMore

Takes on news of the day.

IN THE 1960s, David Castillo’s parents, like many other Cubans, were faced with remaining in Cuba during Fidel Castro’s turbulent revolution and losing everything or starting over elsewhere. They headed for Spain, where David was later born, in 1973. Four months after that, they moved to Hialeah, Florida.

The events culminate in the appearance of a group of men, most of them shepherds, each wearing dozens of bells in copper and iron of every size—the sort you’d normally find around the necks of sheep and goats.

The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond, by Russ Lopez, … includes biographies of leading LGBT figures, and chronicles events like the secret Harvard tribunals of 1920 and the push for the anti-discrimination law that passed in 1989.

FIFTY YEARS AGO a meeting changed my life. It was in early July 1969, shortly after Stonewall. … Since I’d been involved in the movement against the Vietnam war since 1965, I jumped in on the side of the radicals, and we prevailed. The new group would be named the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), …

Readers’ thoughts.

MARY OLIVER, one of the most beloved and best-selling American poets—who happened to be a lesbian—died of lymphoma in Hobe Sound, Florida on January 17, 2019 at the age of 83.

The G&LR talks with a veteran of the Stonewall Era

In The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History, which will be published by NYU Press in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Riots, I present 200 documents from 1965 to 1973 that illuminate developments before, during, and after the LGBT movement’s most important turning point.

Over time, the marches have turned into parades. Radical political critiques have been rendered invisible through an æsthetic of celebration.

The Golden Anniversary approaches, forging ahead like a juggernaut smashing every other puny bit of queer history along the way.

“ALL WE DID was take the BR–116.” So begins Carol Bensimon’s We All Loved Cowboys, a beguiling road trip novel that lures readers in with promises of adventures in Brazil, then keeps them turning the pages with its sharp observations about gender, sex, and desire.

To commemorate acclaimed dancer and choreographer Jerome Robbins’s the centennial, two separate tributes warrant our attention: Wendy Lesser’s biography Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance and the retrospective exhibition Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York.

AS the FIFTHETH ANNIVERSARY of Stonewall approaches, there are numerous visual arts projects illuminating the legacy of early queer liberationists, particularly subsequent generations of out artists who took up the mantle of social and political change.

THERE ARE several strands running through Kembrew McLeod’s tumultuous history of the art scene in lower Manhattan from the 1960s to the late ’70s—a scene that McLeod believes has had an outsize influence on American and global culture.