100 books like Jeb and Dash

I love the subversive title of this book. If there is no “heterosexuality” then there is no “homosexuality.” A challenging read, because of the subtle and complex reasoning Katz uses to untangle early erotic/procreative/love relationship concepts that were very differently structured from our own homo/hetero dichotomy. He uses history to show the slow development of the concept of heterosexuality, and that it is not “an essential, eternal, normal.” Katz draws on Michel Foucault regarding ancient Greece, on the Puritans, the Victorians, on Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and Alfred Kinsey, showing how language reveals the changing ways of conceptualizing and valuing differing modes of sexual expression. The critiques of Freud are a revelation.

This book was essential background for my trilogy. What I like most is its descriptions of the different sex practices of the different homosexual “types”—lower/working class men (“trade” or “wolves”) preferred anal intercourse with boys or young men (“punks” or “lambs”); upper class men preferred oral sex with “queens” or “fairies.” Focusing on the Pacific Northwest of the USA, Boag does great research into criminal and court records, which were some of the only records of these “aberrant” activities. A bonus is Boag’s tracing of the influence of the Oscar Wilde trial (1895) on attitudes in the Western USA.

This book taught me that the gay rights movement started long before Stonewall. Published in 1974, this little book opens by reporting on a Hungarian Dr. Benkert, who “devised” the term “homosexuality” in 1869 and argued for acceptance, making the 1969 Stonewall riots a 100th anniversary. In under 90 pages, the book gives a concise history of the movement against the 1871 German law that included Paragraph 175, which criminalized male homosexual acts. The authors go on to outline less robust movements in other European countries and the USA. Later chapters cover scientific inquiries, political connections with Nazism and Bolshevism, and short bios of significant movement figures.

While trying to learn about gay life in the 1920s, I was delighted to find this novel, “privately” published in 1919. One soon learns that Bertram Cope, who comes to teach at an undergraduate college as he works on an advanced degree, has a relationship with another young male with whom he plans to cohabit—interesting that two men could openly set up housekeeping together, even back then. Meanwhile an older matron, an aging homosexual man, and various young women hope to attract Cope’s attention. Though seen by some as a trivial social satire, Fuller’s light touch and subtle wit mask an undertone of eroticism and homosexual associations. His anonymous, authorial, third-person narrative voice is humorous and incisive, revealing his penetrating observations of social niceties and the layers of his characters’ maneuverings. Clever and understated, the book implies much that is never declared.

This novel is everything—a school story, a coming-of-age story, a fish-out-of-water story as well as being chock-full of swords and sorcery. It follows genius mechanist Kiram Kir-Zaki as he journeys far away from his home to attend the prestigious Sagrada Academy where he hopes to make the connections that will earn him a place in the king’s court. Instead, he finds himself shunned on account of his race and compelled to share a room with a man who is widely believed to have no soul. If two hot outcasts being forced to share a room and eventually falling so deeply in love that death itself cannot separate them, then this book is your cup of tea.

Forster captures the loneliness and enforced celibacy many experienced when homosexuality was criminalized, and which I also experienced.

Forster had his first sexual experience at 37. His hero Maurice, like characters in many novels of the early twentieth century, tries therapy to change himself, and remains in a celibate relationship until his partner marries a woman. Maurice was published after Forster’s death, though it was written six decades earlier.

It inspired younger writers like Isherwood and was made into a great film with the young Hugh Grant as Maurice’s partner Clive. Forster’s statement that he would not have bothered to write unless he could give his hero a happy ending, also inspired my fiction-writing.

I was a freshman in college and still closeted about my homosexuality when I found Numbers in an LGBTQ+ bookstore. The description on the dust jacket got my blood racing: in an effort to reclaim his youth, a handsome gay man strikes out to see how many sexual conquests he can rack up during a ten-day stay in L.A. I bought the book and read it in my dorm room when my roommate wasn’t around.

I got more than I bargained for. Along with descriptions of sexual encounters, the novel opened my eyes to the ramifications of internalized homophobia and explored the value of sex among an oppressed people who are persecuted for their carnal desires. This novel written in 1967 spoke to me across the decades. It still can.

The book that put British literary giant Hollinghurst on the map in 1988, this gorgeously written, fast-paced novel follows Will, a ridiculously privileged, idle, and good-looking young gay man in early 1980s London who has torrid sexual affairs with a racially diverse group of working-class men and also inadvertently saves the life of a very elderly gay aristocratic man with a homoerotic colonial past.

With its Forsterian attunement to the prejudices and vanities of the Thatcher-era British upper class, its explicit evocation of the early 20th century gay British novelist Ronald Firbank and its sometimes cringe-y look at cross-class and cross-racial desire, the novel showcases gay men driven ecstatically and obsessively by both libidinous and aesthetic yearnings—all of them oblivious to the dark clouds of AIDS gathering on London’s horizon.

I still remember when this book came out my senior year of high school, and how ridiculously excited my friends and I were to find out about it. It was probably one of my first times finding some good, wholesome gay representation in manga.

An unknown brother-in-law traveling from Canada to Japan to meet his husband’s family, with personal character growth about gay acceptance? Sign me up!

I feel like I’m always down to read more about family dynamics that aren’t your typical nuclear setup, so this is just a win-win for me.

I’m always a sucker for something sweet, wholesome, and low-to-no stakes when it comes to my gay manga.

It’s a sweet and wholesome story about a mom who realizes her eldest son is gay, but gives him the space, respect, and privacy to come out in his own time. She also makes a point to defend her son’s sexuality without outing him to others. It made me crack up because I remember being that eldest son - thinking I was slick at hiding my sexuality, when I really wasn’t.

I also love how the mom gives her son the space he needs and respects his privacy. A super mom, for sure!