Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been writing stories and poems with erotic themes since I first entered the spoken word scene in 1980s San Francisco. As a young queer boy, raised in the highly eroticized Catholic Church, I was actually comfortable talking about and writing about sex and eros as I’d been stigmatized by it, and it got me fascinated with what the big deal was and why writers were afraid to approach it or why they did so in a corny/predictable/idealized and/or often dishonest and clumsy way. Soon I was teaching erotic writing and have been integrating it into my writing in honest, fresh, and enlivening ways—and helping others do soever since.


I wrote

A Horse Named Sorrow

By Trebor Healey,

Book cover of A Horse Named Sorrow

What is my book about?

Part road novel, part elegy for a San Francisco long gone, A Horse Named Sorrow introduces us to the quirky…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories

Trebor Healey Why did I love this book?

Not only does Carter put a brilliantly insightful feminist spin on well-known fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” but she brings the erotic aspects of these stories to the surface in a natural and insightful way, integrating them into the stories and characters seamlessly. Discovering Carter can be truly revelatory and opened my mind and encouraged me to re-look at the entire canon, and not only find my own story within those universally praised stories, but invited me to lay claim to our collective heritage and attempt my own take on it fearlessly in service to the whole truth.

By Angela Carter,

Why should I read it?

15 authors picked The Bloody Chamber as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

With an introduction by Helen Simpson. From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.


Book cover of My Tender Matador

Trebor Healey Why did I love this book?

Lemebel was a courageous and flamboyant activist during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Having lived in Chile myself, I think this book captures the erotic Chilean soul in all its humor, grief, and idealism at an important historical moment. The hopelessly romantic and delightfully ironic seamstress/protagonist Queen of the Corner lives on a rooftop in one of Santiago’s poorest barrios and hosts discussion groups by local leftist students who keep leaving behind really heavy boxes, ostensibly full of books, as they prepare a vague plan that will have enormous implications. The group’s ringleader Carlos is a charmer ala Che Guevara, and the Queen is soon head over heels in love as a friendship and a tender unrequited love affair begins. A story of remarkable humanism that mixes the erotic with revolution.

By Pedro Lemebel, Katherine Silver (translator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked My Tender Matador as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Centered around the 1986 attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet, an event that changed Chile forever, My Tender Matador is one of the most explosive, controversial, and popular novels to have been published in that country in decades. It is spring 1986 in the city of Santiago, and Augusto Pinochet is losing his grip on power. In one of the city's many poor neighborhoods works the Queen of the Corner, a hopeless and lonely romantic who embroiders linens for the wealthy and listens to boleros to drown out the gunshots and rioting in the streets. Along comes Carlos, a…


Book cover of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

Trebor Healey Why did I love this book?

This book is probably the single most praised underground gay novel of my generation, and deservedly so. It’s so many things—beautiful writing, an old west setting in all its ugliness and adventure and hope, and a highly original narrative voice in the bisexual native orphan, Shed, who is being raised in a bordello. All the characters are well-drawn and as odd as the narrator, and the erotic journey, if I can call it that, is one of the most original, thought-provoking, and beautiful expressions of the possibilities of queer I’ve ever encountered. Spanbauer has helped me to write more skillfully about class and race and sexuality and how they are everywhere and how they can warpand sometimes, oftentimesset people free. 

By Tom Spanbauer,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The cult gay classic of the early 1990s, reissued to mark the year of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots

Between nights, earning his keep at Excellent, Idaho's outrageously pink whorehouse, Shed or, Duivichi-un-Dua - lives a life of drinking, talking and smoking opium stardust with his eccentric family. But soon, he will leave this tiny turn-of-the-century town in search of the true meaning of his Shoshone name - and in search of himself.

Along the way Shed will fall in love with the philosophical, green-eyed, half-crazy cowboy Dellwood Barker, a man who talks to the moon, on a…


Book cover of The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

Trebor Healey Why did I love this book?

The Wild Boys is at once dystopian and utopian, featuring a band of boys who’ve gone rogue and have perfected strange and poetically beautiful sex rites which allow them to ritually and meditatively conjure or reproduce more wild boy offspring. At once science fiction and fantastical in its imaginative scope, it is also, like all Burroughs’s work, a profound exploration of social control, the excesses and assumptions inherent in state and religious terror, and the sexual and erotic oppression and misunderstanding that is the real enemy of freedom. Fearless and experimental, Burroughs inspires me to be bold, blunt, and not afraid to disturb or offend in exploring the poetic and erotic relationships between all manner of ideas.

By William S. Burroughs,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Wild Boys as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as pranksterish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army. The Wild Boys shows why Burroughs is a writer unlike any other, able to make captivating the explicit and horrific.


Book cover of The Passion

Trebor Healey Why did I love this book?

In my opinion, one of the finest living writers in the English language, Winterson masterfully spins a tale of historical, poetic, eccentric, dreamy and highly sensual, and gender-bending eroticism involving an androgynous hero during the Napoleonic era, and taking place in the kitchens of the emperor, on the battlefield and along the freezing march into Russia, as well as amid the canals of Venice. Always thought-provoking and rife with magical realism and plain heart-stopping imagery, tension, and poetry, Winterson tells her story in a manner that willif not change your ideas about everythingcertainly challenge them. I always feel inspired to stretch my understanding widerand I actually fall deeply in love with the world all over againeach time I finish a novel by Winterson.

By Jeanette Winterson,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Passion as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the frozen Russia of Napoleon's campaign, to the canals of Venice, this novel journeys through curious waterways of war and chance, where destiny and the heart cannot be forgotten - nor passion which is to be found somewhere between fear and sex passion, somewhere between God and the Devil. Jeanette Winterson is author of "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" which was winner of the 1985 Whitbread First Novel Award.


Explore my book 😀

A Horse Named Sorrow

By Trebor Healey,

Book cover of A Horse Named Sorrow

What is my book about?

Part road novel, part elegy for a San Francisco long gone, A Horse Named Sorrow introduces us to the quirky callow youth, Seamus Blake, tending to his dying lover, Jimmy, at the close of the 20th Century. An orphan in the sense of the land of misfit toys that was San Francisco, Seamus, confounded by grief and the riddle of life, sets out on a journey cross-country by bicycle to return Jimmy’s ashes to Buffalo, NY, honoring his lost boyfriend’s final request to take me back the way I came.’ Along the way, the story becomes a journey into the underworld, an American book of the dead, and a meditation on grief, love, sexuality and eroticism, family and genocide as Seamus befriends two native men.

Book cover of The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories
Book cover of My Tender Matador
Book cover of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

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What is my book about?

The 19th century women's rights movement and the rise of public education intertwine with one woman's story of struggle, perseverance, and love.

Alice Harris is pressed to marry a Civil War veteran twice her age when her family’s inn fails in 1882 in western North Carolina. She remakes herself by learning to farm tobacco, campaigning for the city’s first public schools, and immersing herself in the large and divisive Carter family. But marriage offers a tenuous promise of security. When tragedy strikes, Alice turns to the courts to fight for her independence and discovers an unexpected love.

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What is this book about?

The 19th century women's rights movement and the rise of public education intertwine with one woman's story of struggle, perseverance, and love.

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However, Alice uncovers pending trouble with the family's land holdings, which threatens their livelihood on the farm. The growth…


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Interested in Chile, bisexuality, and dark comedy?

Chile 38 books
Bisexuality 44 books
Dark Comedy 304 books