The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories

The diversity - and unity - of gay love and experience in the 20th century is celebrated in this collection of 39 stories. Beginning with the tender, unarticulated desires of two boys swimming in D.H. Lawrence's "A Poem of Friendship" and ending with the explicit sexual interaction of "The Whiz Kids" by A.M. Homes, these pages offer every imaginable kind of gay chronicle. "Me and the Girls", by Noël Coward is camp, pithy and moving and causes us to reevaluate our perceptions of his writing. Larry Kramer's surprising and touching "Mrs. Tefillin" is the story of and elderly widow who discovers that her husband was never the man she thought he was. And the tragedy of love is also represented in Allen Barnett's bittersweet masterpiece about Aids (The Times as It Knows Us). Not all the authors collected here are male and gay, but their work in this anthology shares a refusal to "ghettorize" gay men as shadowy inhabitants of a nocturnal subculture. The characters in these stories live very much in the world; their sexuality, though an important aspect of their lives, does not singularly define them.