Items

• A brother's touch
  Angus Rivers, a young Vietnam veteran from upstate New York, ventures to the city to discover the truth about his teenage brother’s death. Earl, a gay sex worker, has been found dead of a heroin overdose on the West Side piers (a notorious cruising ground), his body “stuffed into a rusty oil drum”. This mass-market crime paperback depicts the New York gay scene as a sleazy underworld of addicts, hustlers, self-serving politicians and corrupt priests. But it also introduces gay politics and campaigning, through the activities of the ‘GLP’ or Gay Liberation Party. Positively reviewed in the ‘New York Times’ on publication, Owen Levy’s debut went on to sell very well. His second novel, ‘Goodbye Heiko, Goodbye Berlin’, was published in 2015.
• Bodies and souls : a novel
  Born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican parents, John Rechy’s (1931-) first novel, ‘City of Night’, was published in 1963 and became a bestseller. Twenty years later, ‘Bodies and Souls’ was published by Carroll & Graf. Written in the style of a classic Hollywood film, the novel is set in Los Angeles and follows a range of characters including porn stars, punks, strippers, television reporters and an evangelist. In addition to his own literary career, Rechy taught creative writing and was also a sex worker. Many of Rechy’s experiences informed his fiction.
• Saint Genet : actor and martyr
  First published in French in 1952, this biography of Jean Genet (1910-1986) is shown here in English translation. Written by one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers and writers Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), this work is the first volume of and introduction to ‘The Complete Works of Genet’. Considering him a man out of his time, Sartre outlines Genet’s life from his birth and abandonment as a foundling child, through his times as a thief, prisoner, vagrant, sex worker and later, playwright and novelist. Genet was also an out gay man who both wrote about and was imprisoned for this part of his life. Two works by Genet, ‘Querelle of Brest’ and ‘Treasures of the Night – The Collected Poems of Jean Genet’, were also seized during the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids.
• Street theater : the twenty-seventh of June, 1969, in two acts
  Part of the ‘JH Press Gay Play Script’ series, the play is set on Christopher Street on the eve of the police raids on the Stonewall Inn bar which led to the Stonewall Uprising, in which Doric Wilson (1939-2011) was a participant. The “street theater” of the title is created by the characters including a “flower child”, “street queens”, a “vice cop”, a “student radical” and a “politically incorrect lesbian”. First performed in 1982 in San Francisco, the play later moved to New York. Wilson also worked as a barman, the tips from which helped support his theatrical endeavours, including TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence) an Off Off-Broadway theatre space.
• The journey
  This knowingly ahistorical lesbian feminist Western, set in Canada and the US in the nineteenth century, is dedicated to “all the little girls who always wanted to [...] grow up to be cowboys”. Teenager Anne leaves home and teams up with sex worker Sarah. Travelling together across the Pacific Northwest, they become lovers, have a child and receive support from a matrilineal group of Indigenous people. Despite reversing gender roles, the novel is in other ways a romp through the stereotypes of the Western genre – wagons, guns, vigilante justice. Anne Cameron (1938-2022) was a prolific writer of fiction for adults and children, as well as poetry and drama for stage and screen. Born Barbara Cameron, she later wrote under the name Cam Hubert. ‘The Journey’, her third novel, was reissued in 1986 by feminist press Spinsters/Aunt Lute.