Best non-fiction gay book

The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing up Gay in a Straight Man's World by Alan Downs

And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts. This has come under fire in recent years for its somewhat fictional portray of "Patient Zero," however, it's an incredibly thorough documentation of the beginning days of AIDS from someone right on the front lines of the epidemic. It has that "non-fiction that reads narratively" thing going for it.

The Best Little Boy in the World by John Reid and Andrew Tobias. The classic 1970s account of growing up gay in America.

An Unpublished Vice by Edmund White

Chronicles of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath by Andrew Holleran. The incredibly empathetic Holleran revisits his book of "Christopher Street" essays, first published in 1988 from the front lines of the AIDS ravaging warpath.

At Danceteria and Other Stories by Philip Dean Walker. Although this is classified as fiction, it features fictionalized accounts of real nights that occurred and all the characters in the book are celebrities or famous people. The series of stories focuses on the swirling nightlife of the 1980s where celebrities, "keep the party going as the AIDS plague gathers."

I loathed The Best Little Boy In The World. Something was 'off' about that guy's personality. I got the same feeling as when I read Young Man From The Provinces, and also Harold Norse's memoir.

R1, Conduct Unbecoming, Shilt's other "big" book about gays and lesbians in the military, is really good.

Becoming a Man Paul Monette's memoir of discovery and accepting his sexuality

Last Watch of the Night is also by Monette A collection of essays

Charley Shively's two books on Whitman: • Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados

• Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers

A lot of Whitman scholars won't acknowledge their debt to him, because they're unapologetically gay, and -- while Whitman had been outted by the time of their publication, they outted him in a way that fully exposed his homosexuality and pederasty. Many straight scholars still haven't come to terms with it. And sure as hell the greater public haven't.

And let's have a nod two to the Rev Boyd MacDonald, with his first peerless collected work...

States of Desire, Edmund White.

Byron and Greek Love. Great great book. And revealed the whole reason he headed east was in search of sodomy. It published two letters that had been lying in a fucking cupboard in the offices of Byron's publisher John Murray since his death, almost certainly because of their sensitive contents. Absolutely beyond belief. Scandalous!

A Class Apart.

The fact that it revealed this fantastic relationship, and the photos of the gorgeous Ralph, which all could have ended up in a dumpster, is a miracle. The fact it is long out of print is another scandal.

Looks interesting r7.

Plato’s Symposium.

Gay New York by George Chauncey

r8 I purchased a new(er) edition on Amazon last year!

A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forester was wonderful.

[quote],Becoming a Man Paul Monette's memoir of discovery and accepting his sexuality

This one

How To Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed Aids by David France.

I've read most of the books listed so far, and liked all of them except The Velvet Rage. I never felt gorgeous enough to think the writer was talking to me. It really is an A-Gay primer, and it just produced more rage.

I haven't read it r16. Thanks for your input. It goes lower on my "to do" list.

Memoirs:

Palimpsest - Gore Vidal

My Lives - Edmund White

City Boy - Edmund White

On The Move - Oliver Sacks

Social/Cultural history:

The Gay Metropolis - Charles Kaiser

[quote]The Velvet Rage ... really is an A-Gay primer

That was not my impression at all. The book may focus on a relatively narrow range of gay men, but I think the insights into insecurity, shame and self-loathing apply to all levels of our community. Of course, the author's perspective pretty much confirms my own worldview, so I'm biased.

Since people have already included Paul Monette books, I'd like to add another. Borrowed Time is the story of his boyfriend Roger who dies in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic. It's got all the righteous anger of Becoming a Man (the book of his that means the most to me), but it also has the love story. It gets a little high falutin at times - Monette can really gild the lily. Still, it's a wonderful book about gay love and yet, by the end, you'll wanna pick up your torch and burn everything to the ground. It's a great companion piece to Randy Shilt's or David France's books.

Covering - The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, by Kenji Yoshino.

Quentin Crisp. Great overviews of an out (femme) gay mans life in UK and US pre-WW2 London through the turn of the century NYC. A role model in many ways and truly one of a kind.

A Naked Civil Servant How to Become a Virgin The Last Word: An Autobiography

A few others that are non-fiction as well.

Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked The Gay Revolution by David Carter. Read it for the 50th anniversary and as a corrective to the lies of the Transtapo.

Huzzah, huzzah r23.

More non-fiction from David France. I may be biased because I knew the guy and survived.

Oooh - that was such a good, dark book R25. Loved it! Also a nice description of pre-AIDS NYC and Philly.

Turns out that crazy Andrew Crispo lives (lived?) 4 blocks away. He had recently (early 200s) been charged with threatening to murder a prosecutors young son because she was prosecuting a case a neighbor brought against him. A true sociopath - who scarily continued to live free into old age.

I will add Paul Monette's Halfway Home to the list, dealing with aids and family and aids and dating - a nice time capsule about what it was like.... And Paul, we miss you very much...

Faggots, by Larry Kramer.

Imagine what a powerhouse Randy Shilts would be had he lived. Tremendous loss.

A true icon R29. At least he created works that will live on and will always be remembered as a critical voice in the darkest period of gay history. Critical reading for every gay man.

R29 Except And the Band Played On opportunistically reinforced what we now know is a false Patient Zero narrative and Shields never came out in his own writing about his own AIDS. Other than that, sure, great guy.

I enjoyed The Scarlet Professor by Barry Werth.

The Lavender Screen

The sequel to At Danceteria will apparently have a Gaëtan Dugas (Patient Zero) story that tries to reconcile with the problematic Shilts portrayal.

I want to recommend the very recent non-fiction book, When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan. It just came out, but I was lucky enough to read an advance copy a couple months ago. It's really good and very well-researched.

One hopes, r34, that the word "problematic" will not be contained therein.

It's funny, R35, because I actually almost put that word in quotes in my own post.

R36, why did you use it at all? You could simply have said "negative" or "controversial." Or nothing at all (just "with Shilts' portrayal").

I probably just shouldn't have, R37. It was a last-minute addition meant to comment on the characterization Shilts' portrayal has received in recent years.

Can you ever forgive me?

Lindsey Graham: My life presenting hole across the world

The making of gay New York

As long as you promise not to use it again, r38, no problem.

This book, r40? It's one of the best.

What does "keep it real" mean?

The Day I Stopped Being Pretty... by Rodney Lofton.

True Confessions of the Wrigleyville Cumdump

All the Derek Jarman memoirs. It’s kind of sad most Americans aren’t aware of them.

Gothic by Richard Davenport-Hines. Did you know that, like the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, the entire Gothic revival was practically invented by queens? You didn’t? Well now you do. They even stuck a dead tree in Kensington Palace Gardens — because THAT, my dears, is what living with bravura is all about!!

Others have mentioned Edmund White's memoirs. I'd like to put a plug in for his "Inside a Pearl," which chronicles his time in Paris. It had me laughing out loud at times. At one point he describes how his Parisian good friend noticed how bored her husband was. She thought that all he needed was an affair. White arranged for the husband to meet his American friend, a rather plain American academic. Well, they have an affair, but then the husband left his Parisian wife for the younger American woman to the chagrin of the wife. White is terrific at describing the different attitudes of the French and Americans toward affairs.

I really liked "Between the Acts" by Kevin Porter and Jeffrey Weeks which is a book of interviews with English gay men living from the late 19th century up until the repeal of the Sexual Offenses Act in 1967. There is a range of men from all classes and walks of life. I think the thing that really sticks with me about it is the witness that gay people have always existed and have found each other, even in less contemporary and more isolated and oppressive times and eras. But besides the gay aspect, the act of an older person looking over and examining their own life was quite interesting.

The Andy Warhol Diaries!

Princes Under The Volcano.

Written by the very upper class and gay Raleigh Trevelyn, it came out in the 70s, and is a huge opus of a book. The main character is Tina Whitaker, who was THE fag hag (for want of a better word) to the international set in the 1890s. Every English gay who was any gay headed to her mansion in Sicily, but also of course, for the boys. So all those characters you’ve come across in books, such as Lord Ronald Gower. and Percy ffrench etc., rock up. It also has great footnotes. I think it must havd nonplused a lot of people when it first came out, because it details an entire gay social universe.

London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914 is very good. And I love the cover.

Bump for intellect

Jeb and Dash

Another here who loves Paul Monette. Borrowed Time is the most moving book I've ever read.

Not a book but The Normal Heart play by Larry Kramer is very poignant and is based on true events around the first few years of the AIDS crisis.

Faggots, by Larry Kramer

[QUOTe]Faggots, by Larry Kramer

This is a novel. And not a particularly good one.

Maybe it needed to be turned into a Ross Hunter musical, R58.

It's funny how Dancer from the Dance and Faggots both came out the same year and cover much the same milieu, but could not be more different novels.

Faggots, by Larry Kramer.

i find Edmund White's books shallow and devoid of any wit or charm.

Marc Doty "Heaven's Coast"

R60 A significant difference being that Holleran writes with grace and power and Kramer can barely put a whole sentence into grammatical English and is a scolding self-serving Jeremiah to boot?

The Noel Coward Diaries - when he get bitchy, there's no stopping him.

Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums

R64, true. I love the letters at the start of DFTD. The whole book is like an elegy to a pre AIDS idyll. The deaths of the two main characters and the fire at St Marks bathhouse eerily foreshadows the deaths of so many, beginning the year after the book was published.

It begins 'everyone is dying of cancer'. Holleran could not have known how prescient his novel would prove to be.

r64 = Dinky Adams

r66 = Marie de Maintenon

"Except And the Band Played On opportunistically reinforced what we now know is a false Patient Zero narrative."

It wasn't exactly "false." Gaetan Dugas, the "Patient Zero", was a whore who even after being told he had a deadly disease that could be spread through sexual contact continued to go to bathhouses and bareback with unsuspecting anonymous sex partners. He did a lot to spread AIDs.

"After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90's" by Marshall Kirk is a good one. I read a long time ago and thought it made a lot of sense.

"Smashcut" by Brad Gooch. 70's-80's gritty New York. Lots of references to Andy Warhol, Derek Jarman, Keith Haring and other artists of the era. Memoir of losing his lover.

"City Poet", also by Brad Gooch, great biography of Frank O'Hara.

Love all the Paul Monette love on here.

Faggots, by Larry Kramer

R68 = Andrew Sutherland

Another gay autobio I just read and enjoyed a lot is Dry by Augusten Burroughs. It's about being an advertising executive and an alcoholic in the early 90s in NYC, and takes in the death of his ex lover from AIDS.

Faggots, by Larry Kramer.

A lot of people here are really struggling with the concept of ‘non-fiction’!

R76, Faggots and Dancer are strictly fiction I guess but the others aren't.

Faggots, by Larry Kramer.

Donald Vining's GAY DIARY, in several volumes. Not written to be published, they contain remarkable vignettes of the daily lives of gay men in NYC from 1946-1982.

Sorry. ^^. Volumes start in 1933.

The James Lees-Milne diaries. Gay but self-loathing, and married to a lesbian, as one did. They illuminate decades of upper class English life. Endless great anecdotes. eg the tank commander who took a salute from the Queen while being sucked off from below.

[quote] And let's have a nod two to the Rev Boyd MacDonald, with his first peerless collected work...

Nothing comes close. The interviews are masterpieces of editing oral history. Boyd was a Harvard guy as I recall. He deserves to be put on a pedestal alongside the great Studs Terkel.

A caution: apparently reissues of some of the Rev McDonald’s collected volumes have been bowdlerised of some of their, a-hem, ‘intergenerational’ encounters. So if you want the unconforming truth, ensure you purchase the first editions.

Another recommendation for Paul Monette’s beautiful “Borrowed Time,” an AIDS memoir.

For poetry, Mark Doty is wonderful.

I gotta say: Robert Scobles two recent Baron Corvo volumes are gorgeously produced books. Appropriately they sold out very quickly and have now become increasing high priced collectors items.

I read After The Ball when it came out and mainly remember the authors saying that gay men needed to hide the drag queens and butch it up if we wanted acceptance in the straight world. Fuck that!

The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo. First published in 1981.

Important then and now.

Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone by David Feinberg

Openly Bob by Bob Smith

Way to Go, Smith! by Bob Smith

Another vote for STATES OF DESIRE.

R88 I still find it startling to realize Smith has died, even though it's been a few years. I loved his stand-up, especially with Funny Gay Males. And his writing captured that wry voice. Feinberg's writing was very important to me in the early 90s, when I needed to hear the rage of men in the epicenter of the epidemic (I was geographically removed from gay community at the time). John Weir's second novel is a lightly fictionalized version of his friendship with Feinberg. Weir himself is a fine writer.

Running with Scissors and Dry by Augusten Burroughs. Lust and Wonder is also good, about how he met his current HIV positive husband after a spell in rehab.

The Secret Life Of Oscar Wilde is a remarkable piece of work. Anyone read the new Matthew Sturgis bio of Oscar?

The Quest For Corvo would have to be up there, particularly as it has inspired so many other books in the literary quest genre.

Love In Earnest is another important book, but would struggle to find a mainstream publisher today, which is kind of shocking in itself.

Although he only wrote bits of it, being an alcoholic mess (the rest being ghosted), I'm fond of Robin Maugham's Search For Nirvana as a curio and for its ambition. It's got such a pretty cover.

To [R66]: The bathhouse fire occurred not at the New St. Marks, but at the Everard, on West 28th St.

Thanks, R93. I remember in the book they called it The Everhard.

John Fraser's memoir, CLOSE UP. Not the best perhaps, but delicious.

Faggots, by Larry Kramer.

Is Faggots non fiction though? Larry isn't the protagonist, is he?

[quote]Larry isn't the protagonist, is he?

Larry is always the protagonist!

R96 keeps posting that in this thread. She knows it's fiction.

[QUOTE]Larry is always the protagonist!

Yet, this is also true. See also: "The Normal Heart"

I loved The Normal Heart so much.

When my situation became clear to him, Dad went out and bought me Best Little Boy in the World. It warned me about house masters who liked to wrestle with undergrads, and "Golden Boys," so when I went to college, I wasn't completely clueless. The Harvard Square he enjoyed was almost a decade past by the time I arrived, but not the little knots of people who sometimes gave hope.

Andrew Tobais put of "The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up" in the late 90s, and it was interesting to learn what happened not only to him, but all of his friends in the first book.

R101 Wasn't that house master Barney Frank?

I know When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan was already mentioned above, but it’s a stellar read. For another recent book, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement by David K. Johnson is great.

r102 -- I think Tobais did his undergrad at Yale and then went to HBS, but Barney was a Senior Tutor at Winthrop House while working on his PhD, but probably didn't wrestle the undergrads because he always had a big stogey in his mouth.

I thought Tobias went to Harvard, but it has been decades since I read the book. I thought I read elsewhere that Frank was the tutor described but not named.

R105 here. Just checked--Tobias did graduate from Harvard, with a BA in Slavic languages and literature.

Thanks, r106 -- I too read the book decades ago.

Still, I can't picture the roly-poly Barney with his cigar wrestling anyone.

"A Bone in my Flute" by Holly Johnson. Not as hard to find as one might imagine. Love that book including its Pierre et Gilles cover art.

R90, I think I love you.

I'm not sure there's ever been a non-fiction gay book.

Graham Robb - Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century

Peter Ackroyd - Queer City

BETTYVILLE by George Hodgman - "flyover country" is sneered at often, but there are well-told gay stories from there.

INSOMNIAC CITY by Bill Hayes, widower of Oliver Sacks. Not at all cashing in on his relationship, but telling his own story, as well as getting to know the private Oliver from Bill's point-of-view.

Faggots, by Larry Kramer.