Ocean State Libraries

"Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir. Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence--into tumultuous relationships with his...

Rechy's long-awaited memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman, is the author's first open treatment of his life and a testament to the power of pride and self-acceptance. Raised Mexican-American in El Paso, Texas, at a time when Latino children were routinely segregated, Rechy was often assumed to be Anglo because of his light skin, and had his name changed" for him by a teacher, from Juan to John. As he grew older and as his fascination with the...

"In the great tradition of David Sedaris, David Rakoff, and Augusten Burroughs, memoirist Eric Poole recounts his quirky childhood years in utterly hilarious and painful detail. In 1977, Eric Poole is a talented high school trumpet player with one working ear, the height-to-weight ratio of a hat rack, a series of annoyingly handsome bullies, and a mother irrationally devoted to Lemon Pledge. But who he wants to be is a star...ANY star. With equal...

Born in Massachusetts in 1916, John Horne Burns grew up steeped in the traditions of New England and alienated from them--a defiant Irish Catholic amid staid Yankees. After Andover and Harvard he taught English at the Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut, one of the few prestigious prep schools that would hire a Catholic at the time. Burns stood out there as a precocious young man with enormous intellectual and musical gifts, a wicked sense of humor,...

James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon-Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen-he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference. A gay, African American writer who was born in Harlem, he found the freedom to express himself living in exile in Paris. When...

"The first biography of one of the most important poets in the second half of the twentieth century, whose life story is unparalleled in its narrative interest. The story of James Merrill (1926-1995) is that of a young man escaping, but inevitably reproducing, the energies and obsessions of glamorous, powerful parents (his father founded Merrill Lynch); of a gay man inventing his identity against a shifting social and sexual backdrop; and of a brilliantly...

"In 1921 Penang, when Willie, a famed writer and old friend of her husband's, arrives for an extended stay, Lesley, as her friendship with Willie grows, makes a dangerous decision to confide in him about life in the Straits, including her relationship with a charismatic Chinese revolutionary-a confession that has devastating consequences."--

A REVELATORY LOOK AT THE INTIMATE LIFE OF THE GREAT AUTHOR-AND HOW IT SHAPED HIS MOST BE LOVED WORKS With the posthumous publication of his long-suppressed novel Maurice in 1970, E. M. Forster came out as a homosexual- though that revelation made barely a ripple in his literary reputation. As Wendy Moffat persuasively argues in A Great Unrecorded History, Forster's homosexuality was the central fact of his life. Between Wilde's imprisonment and the...

Drawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet, and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid

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