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.
• The boy who picked the bullets up
  Charles Nelson (1942-2003) served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and claimed that some of this novel was autobiographical. The story follows medic Kurt Strom during a year he spent stationed in Vietnam. Strom’s experiences as a gay Marine are relayed via letters he sends home to his family and friends. One reviewer described the novel as containing “endless humour and devastating realism”, while the gay perspective was praised for presenting “decidedly different” insights on war. The novel’s title is taken from the poem of the same name by Arthur Rimbaud. Published by William Morrow, the book’s dust jacket shows a soldier’s trousered backside, with a blue bandana in the left pocket, alluding to ‘flagging’, a coded means of expressing sexual preferences.