Items

• Black men/white men : a gay anthology
  A collection of forty poems, short fiction and non-fiction pieces which explore the intersections of race and sexuality “from the most scholarly to the most explicit”, by authors such as Langston Hughes, Eric Garber and Bruce Nugent. Contributions on sexual stereotyping, discrimination and anti-Black racism within the white gay community are interspersed with several high-quality monochrome photographs and drawings of gay men, both Black and white, pictured separately and in couples. Editor Michael J. Smith founded the advocacy organisation Black and White Men Together in 1980. Chapters sprung up in cities across the United States – there was even, briefly, a Dalston-Hackney branch in London – and the organisation continues today. Smith died of AIDS in 1989 aged 45.
• Now the volcano : an anthology of Latin American gay literature
  Edited by Winston Leyland (1940-) and published by his Gay Sunshine Press imprint, this book is an anthology of short stories, poems, novel excerpts and a memoir, interspersed with illustrations. The collection presents a snapshot of gay male writing from Latin America, with an emphasis on Brazilian literature, which Leyland notes is the richest, including ‘Bom-Crioulo’ which was first published in 1895 (and which was also seized during ‘Operation Tiger’ as a separate title). The book’s title refers to Malcolm Lowry’s Mexican-set novel ‘Under the Volcano’. Translator Erskine Lane’s own novel, ‘Game-Texts – a Guatemalan Journal’, was also published by Gay Sunshine Press and seized during the raids.
• Surpassing the love of men : romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present
  Academic Lillian Faderman (1940-) uses literary and documentary sources to present a history of romantic love between women, one of the first comprehensive studies of its kind. Following initial research on poet Emily Dickinson’s love letters to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Faderman expanded her scope to consider a period of five hundred years and the lives of many women (including those featured in the ‘Scotch Verdict’ case explored in another Faderman work seized during the raids). The book describes how societal attitudes to love between women moved from tolerance (albeit not to women who dressed as men), to prejudice and eventually, to liberatory lesbian feminism. The book, dedicated to Faderman’s partner Phyllis Irwin, is shown here in the UK edition, although it is likely to have been the US William Morrow edition that was seized from Gay’s the Word.