This is an anthology of stories that, in the words of its co-editor David Leavitt, 'illuminate the experience of love between men, explore the nature of homosexual identity or investigate the kinds of relationships gay men have with each other, with their friends and with their families'. It is not a collection of stories written exclusively by gay authors; indeed, readers will discover that many women writers and straight male writers have also explored the territory. What the stories do share is a refusal to 'ghettoize' gay men as denizens of a nocturnal subculture. The men in these stories live very much in the world; their sexuality, though an important aspect of their lives, doesn't singularly define them.
The thirty-nine stories brought together here suggest how gay experience has - and hasn't - changed over the course of this century, starting with the tender, unarticulated longings of two boys swimming in D.H. Lawrence's 'A Poem of Friendship' and ending with the explicit sexual interaction in a bathtub in A.M. Homes's 'The Wiz Kids'. In between there is every imaginable kind of gay story, as offerd both by well-known authors and those less familiar. There is wry humour in Barbara Pym's clever manipulation of romantic convention; painful discovery - the realization of two women that their husbands had been lovers - in Larry Kramer's 'Mrs Tefilin'; the consolation of age in Edmund White's 'Reprise'; and, in Randall Kenan's "Run, Mourner, Run', the breaking of both racial and sexual taboos. The anthology also contains several stories inspired by AIDS, from such writers as Alan Barnett, Michael Cunningham, Stephen Greco, Dennis McFarland and Peter Wells: stories that explore not only the tragedy but also the triumphs, even the erotic possibilities of the epidemic.
These stories illuminate the common ground of gay male experience - and also its astonishing diversity.