The Glass Closet:  Why Coming Out Is Good Business by John Browne Harper Business.  240 pages, $27.99 JOHN BROWNE was the CEO of BP from 1995 to 2007.…More

IT WAS only one sentence in a lengthy obituary of America’s first female astronaut, but it momentarily overshadowed Sally Ride’s inspirational life. “Dr. Ride is remembered by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy,” it read, and you could practically hear readers gasp in surprise. Almost no one outside of her immediate family realized that Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space , was in a long-term relationship with another woman.

In Letter to Jimmy, Alain Mabanckou also considers Baldwin’s life as an expatriate. While in France he generally escaped the racism that dogged him in the U.S. To be sure, at first he was isolated from French society due to the language barrier, spending time instead with white Americans also visiting and living in France. Even abroad he was not exempt from prejudice.

Croteau’s courageous disclosure of his arduous journey toward self-acceptance is especially relevant for many gay men who have been disenfranchised from their families of origin. The book also illuminates the realities of male eating disorders, adding considerably to the literature on anorexia, still wrongly perceived as solely a female disease.

Rebecca Rotert’s novel, Last Night at the Blue Angel, takes place in what feels like a much different Chicago. Like most mature American cities in the mid-1960s, Chicago was literally tearing itself apart.

Frida Kahlo acknowledges that the artist’s death, officially described as the logical result of a long decline, might have been an assisted suicide. Like Sylvia Plath, a contemporary writer who also acquired cult status after her early death by suicide, Kahlo emerged as a martyr to heterosexual love as well as to art.