edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca

City Lights Books

320 pages, $17.95 paper

The personal is riotously political and history is tangibly personal in this anthology of diverse, down-to-earth reflections on the early days of gay liberation, from both queers who were there, and from others looking back 40 years later. Section one in particular, “Out of the Bars and Into the Streets,” reclaims and recalls the heady era of Stonewall, getting stoned and lobbing metaphorical (and actual) stones at our oppressors. Other sections touch on the feminist movement, drag queens and transgender queers. In a closing essay demonstrating that activism shouldn’t ever die, Merle Woo declares: “Stonewall was a riot – now we need a revolution.” Avicolli Mecca, himself a longtime activist who marched sthe streets of Philadelphia not long after the 1969 bar riot in Greenwich Village, has compiled a vivid, colorful history, blending original essays, poems and songs with reprints of several historical manifestos and brief biographical vignettes of activists no longer alive to craft a co-gendered collection that is by turns emotional, joyous, poignant, even sometimes contradictory – and always defiant.

by Michael Thomas Ford

Kensington Books

342 pages, $24 hardcover

As this flashback-powered mystery opens, small-town sheriff Daniel McCloud has been missing for eight years, leaving behind stoic wife Ada, determined at any emotional cost to hold her family together, and three numbed children, including gay teenager Billy, destined to grow up gay and confused. When his body surfaces, Billy’s older brother, James – now a big city district attorney – returns home to handle the fallout, only to become the prime suspect in his father’s murder. James’ accuser? His surly brother-in-law Nate Derry, now married to his sister, who has borne a grudge ever since James, years back, dated Nate’s beloved – and suddenly pregnant – stepsister. With a chronology that hops nimbly between 1982 and 1991, and with overlapping points of view that spotlight the fallibility of memory and the treachery of lies, Ford’s intricate jigsaw puzzle of a novel zeros in on the sort of depravity – in this case, heterosexual depravity – that often rots the core of families which, on the surface, appear to be normalcy incarnate.

edited by Amber Dawn

Arsenal Pulp Press

192 pages, $17.95 paper

There’s a thin line between fear and desire, and the contributors to this woman-centric manipulation of the horror genre delight in erasing it. A few of the 16 contributions deal with traditional shivers: For example, Fionna Zedde writes, erotically, about lesbian vampires, a clichéd theme here handled fiercely. A couple are more campy: Michelle Tea is afeared of…pubic lice. But a majority of the stories are deeper, darker and psychologically intense. Among them: Megan Milks’ creepy fantasy, “Slug,” about a woman having sex with that most slimy of creatures; Mette Bach’s “All You Can Be,” about the violation of trust between two women; Aurelia T. Evans’ “In Circles,” an unsettling story about an intersex woman’s equation of genital corrective surgery and mutilation at the hands of a mystical Bloody Mary; and Suki Lee’s gripping “Sido,” about the emotional violence and physical sexuality of a predatory Parisian landlady. What most tales have in common is their inversion of the stereotypical damsel-in-distress motif of horror fiction. There are no fair ladies fainting away in this subversive anthology.

by Darwin Porter

Blood Moon Productions

598 pages, $26.95 hardcover

Darwin Porter tears the door off Merv Griffin’s queer closet with gusto in this resoundingly researched biography. (With a personal connection: As a college senior, Porter hired Griffin to sing at a graduation dance, and the two developed a friendship.) Though often overused, “page-turner” more than applies. Most every paragraph bristles with he-slept-with revelations about Merv, who schmoozed, seduced and made a play for every Tom, Dick and Harry in showbiz – emphasis on the dicks. Seduced as a teenager by Errol Flynn, he cavorted early on with such stars as Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando (with brief detours to the beds of Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe) and, later in life, with hired hustlers and porn stars, all the while pretending to be the paramour of glamorous Eva Gabor. Sexual escapades aside, Porter’s insightful assessment of the man’s career arc – from brash boy who staged backyard entertainment, to struggling big band crooner, to king (or queen) of daytime talk shows, to made-by-TV mogul – brims with insider gossip writ large, smart and with great style.

My own coming out had all the drama of an Italian opera. How appropriate, considering I come from a working-class, immigrant, southern Italian family in South Philly. Despite a conservative Catholic upbringing, I became radicalized by the time I was 16 or 17, sneaking off to civil rights and antiwar marches. In the fall of 1969, I started college at Temple University, mainly to avoid the draft. Within no time at all I joined the campus SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), an antiwar group. Then I discovered that the Gay Liberation Front held weekly coffee hours. It was a perfect fit. Filled with revolutionary fervor, I made the queer movement my life.

– from Smash the Church, Smash the State!

edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca

An anonymous donor has given the University of British Columbia $1.7 million to establish The Jane Rule Endowment for the Study of Human Relationships, named after the lesbian author and activist who died in 2007. Rule wrote the pioneering lesbian romance Desert of the Heart in 1964, followed by a dozen more novels and nonfiction titles, including her final book, the Lambda Literary Award-winning essay collection Loving the Difficult, published last year by Hedgerow Press. The endowment will fund queer conferences, support GLBT groups and foster programs on sexual orientation and gender studies.

A&M Books has published a 35th anniversary edition of Sarah Aldridge’s 1974 novel The Latecomers, the first book published by Naiad Press – of which Anyda Marchant (Aldridge’s real name) and life partner Muriel Inez Crawford were cofounders. Both women died in 2006, within months of each other, after a relationship that spanned six decades. The new edition features heartfelt accolades from a bevy of writers, musicians and activists, among them Ann Bannon, Kate Clinton, Katherine V. Forrest, Jewelle Gomez, Ellen Hart, Lee Lynch, Holly Near, Leslea Newman, Radclyffe, Carol Seajay, Ann Allen Shockley and Cris Williamson

Gay Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas won the $15,000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his novel The Slap, an eight-character story about the consequences of an adult slapping a young boy; one of the characters is a questioning queer boy.