I've left too many weeks blank. This will be the LAST time I mention last semester (19 units, six classes, two new preps) but for some reason it has affected this semester too. Enough excuses, however. From an ENTIRELY new source, from June 2013, 21 books Every Gay Man Needs To Read Right Now. By two guys in their 20s.
A little breathless, but whatever. And which books are these?
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar/Myra Breckenridge
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
John Knowles, A Separate Peace (for its homoeroticism)
Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (sexually ambiguous protagonist, like Breakfast at Tiffany's [really?])
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Leroy Aarons, Prayers for Bobby
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (because)
Augusten Burrows, Running with Scissors
Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On (or all the books in the Tales of the City series)
Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies
Patti Smith, Just Kids
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (queer theory, and probably more readable than Judith Butler)
David Sedaris, Barrel Fever
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
You supply the 21st.
Not really a bad list. I've read Giovanni's Room and I'm planning to write about A Single Man as soon as I reread it. I started it in January and I LOVED LOVED LOVED it and then I put it down, came back to it and wondered what I had liked about it, so that tells me I need to start over. Maybe in June. I don't know some of these, so I'd like to know which books on this list you'd recommend and which you'd leave on the shelf. I like that they included Proust as well, because I don't think I can avoid him any more. Some good new translations.
In two weeks, commonmass will have at Auden in Love.