Allusions: LGBTQ Writing

S. Gagliano & Son has been a barber shop fixture in South Philly for decades. Frankie and Michael Gagliano’s Italian immigrant father—Luigi to his customers, Papa to his sons—presides over the store, enlisting his children as soon as they’re big enough to wield a broom. On their mother’s deathbed, eight-year-old Frankie swears that he and his little brother will always take care of each other,...

When an unexpected letter arrives in the mail, Aero assumes it’s bad news about the grandmother he hasn’t seen in years. A trip to Southern California to reconnect with her and pick up a family heirloom, however, produces an introduction to a hotter-than-hell surf god who asks him out to dinner. A chance encounter at the beach piques Charlie’s interest and gets him thinking about things beyond the...

Justin can’t live with being a werewolf anymore. The innocent blood on his hands haunts him every moment despite hunting others of his kind. When a ruthless hunter picks up his scent and is determined to put a silver bullet through his heart, Justin makes a bargain that’ll either end in a cure or his death. A human-werewolf hybrid, Vincent despises full bloods, wanting nothing more than to eradica...

To lose a pet means to lose a child. The love we share with our pets never dies, and the author proves our pets do communicate with us from the other side. Rob Gutro is a medium and an author of several Amazon-best selling books about the afterlife. He explains how pets can communicate from the other side, and how energy is the basis of that communication. Learn how dogs, cats, horses and some bir...

Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled seventeen-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noir...

Joshua Howard arrived in Arizona for his uncle’s funeral, not expecting to become the heir to a large orange grove. But the inheritance came with conditions. He had to live on the grove and work it for a full year. The conditions weren't the worst part, things went from bad to worse when he discovered the grumpy, but incredibly sexy caretaker, Clay. Clay Masters had lost everything, his engineerin...

Trevor comes out as bisexual, meets the man of his dreams, and learns he's a new dad. Will he be able to survive his conservative parent's wrath? Two years after Peter lost his fiancée, he’s convinced love isn’t in his future. At least until sexy new father Trevor and his very opinionated infant son step into his life. As their relationship begins to blossom and grow, the baby’s disapproving grand...

The Last Goodbye shows a complex relationship between twenty-five-year-old Sonny Noir, a gay man feeling beaten by the system, and forty-two-year-old Jacqueline Svenson Skylar, a newly transplanted wealthy New York socialite who recently moved to Chicago carrying a lifetime of unhappiness on her shoulders. Sonny Noir’s Story opens with a riveting quadruple homicide at the Miami International Airpo...

Bring a guy to the fraternity formal? Pfft. Easy. Won’t be him kicked out of the house. So what if his luck with guys on campus has been Horrendous? Ed Knowles is Jack’s winning ticket. Tall, handsome, hardworking—and he doesn’t go to Harrison. With every stolen look, every secret kiss, every clandestine touch Ed becomes more than just an answer to a bet. These cloak-and-dagger meetings that set J...

As bombs rain down over London during the Blitz, Major Tommy Haupner negotiates the rubble-filled streets of Bloomsbury on his way to perform at a socialite party. The explosive event of the evening is not his virtuosic violin playing, but the 'almost-blond' American who not only insults him, but then steals his heart. The Seventh of December follows a few months in the lives of two Intelligence a...

Halloran pulled the sheet down to the man's waist. What I saw made me take a deep breath: the man's throat was cut so deeply his head looked like it had almost been severed. "If you tell me this man was found in the public toilet behind the grandstand of Coogee Oval opposite where I live, I might just need a chair," I said. Clyde Smith's quiet, happy life, in love for the first time, working as a...

“There’s no deal unless you tell me who killed Lucretia, Thomas! For the love of God, I have to know—” “She was shot by an assassin.” “But who was this assassin? Who shot her?” he demanded again angrily, leaning forward over the table. “I did,” I said, after a suitably dramatic pause. He threw his head back and laughed loudly, his arms crossed on his chest. “You?” he said once he’d regained his br...

A decades-old body is found in the decaying San Diego landmark, The Aztec Hotel. Horatio "Rush" Storms, struggling bar owner, is dragged into finding out who it was and why they wound up in the closet, literally. Duplicitous drag royalty, childhood heroines gone wrong and unreliable police keep getting in Rush's way while a series of gay-bashings keeps everyone on edge. San Diego in the early 1990...

Is ancient Torah relevant to the social issues of today? In  The Genealogy of Understanding , Matt Klein, a contemporary Jewish Scheherazade, questions whether Torah can illuminate and guide responses to religious conflict and prejudice, to such issues as intermarriage, infidelity, and prejudice that threaten to splinter families in the suburban New Jersey community of his upbringing. He firs...

A powerful true story about how a boy survived and then overcame his family’s multigenerational cycle of violence, neglect, and sexual abuse: Despite the odds against him, Cody Renegar grew up and became a loving father and husband, successful hairstylist, and respected artist. Raised by a substance-abusing single mother, at six Cody and his four siblings were placed into the foster care system in...

Emery Hazard is trying to plan his wedding, even though his fiancé, John-Henry Somerset, isn’t exactly making things easy for him. To be fair, Somers has been distracted lately; his father is running for mayor in a hotly contested election, and their hometown is splintering under the weight of divisive politics. In a matter of hours, those poisonous politics invade Hazard’s life in a way he couldn...

Rufus O’Callaghan has eked out a living on the streets of New York City by helping the police put away criminals as a confidential informant. But when Rufus shows up for an arranged meeting and finds his handler dead, his already-uncertain life is thrown into a tailspin. Now someone is trying to kill Rufus too, and he’s determined to find out why. After leaving the Army under less than desirable c...

Join traveling translator Cassandra Reilly as she solves a new mystery in Lambda Literary Award winner Barbara Wilson’s series about the London-based, Irish-American sleuth. In Not the Real Jupiter Cassandra is translating two manuscripts from Spanish. One of them is a collection of stories of speculative fiction by her old friend, the Uruguayan writer Luisa Montiflores. When editorial complicatio...

Tim Barela’s  Leonard & Larry are back!  The Complete Leonard & Larry Collection  contains every Leonard & Larry strip, from their first appearance in Gay Comix, to The Advocate and Frontiers magazine. Strip creator  Tim Barela  gave voice to a generation of LGBTQ people. Whether we were gay, straight, into music, or into leather, we could see our lives mirrore...

“It was 1984. Prince ruled the airwaves. The Los Angeles Olympics had come and gone, taking with it a spotlight that had shone harshly on the city’s night crawlers and left them thankful for the shadows. AIDS was spreading its dark, black, wings over us all, and I was a happy guy. At least I thought I was, until things took a sudden turn for the deadly.” - Marshall James It’s been over a year sinc...

Joey works as a janitor at Dick and Rock’s gym. He’s been there since his parents kicked him out for being gay. He’s happy at his job and loyal to the men who were there for him when he needed them most. Erik is a master’s student and competitive swimmer who started going to the gym after a hand-gliding accident. He’s trying to recover and get his mojo back. Joey’s been mooning over the handsome E...

It's Easter 1993, and the gang is going to Las Vegas for Angie's surprise wedding. Noah is attempting to recover from a bad bout of the flu--and his disastrous Valentine's Day, and is not all that excited to meet his new relatives: Cotton Preston and his three grown daughters. They're staying at Lucky Days casino, a hotel with notorious mob connections... and family connections. It's only then tha...

When Noah Blain opens his front door, his mind is still on the aging mother he has just helped move into assisted care. But on the threshold, a horror scene awaits.  Blood and body parts are strewn through Noah’s hallway and there is no one else in sight. At least, until Oliver Thaddeus shows up. Having escaped California after losing his job as a private investigator, Oliver has returned to...

Former CIA operative, Damon Thorne, is a fixer. He cleans up messes other people make of their lives to forget the wreckage his own has become. Whether it means retrieving a drug addict whose family is being blackmailed or rescuing a furball who’s the subject of a custody dispute, Damon just gets things done. When the job means kidnapping the wild son of a prominent Senator in an election year, it...

The name of the book clearly defines the story of one boy’s sexual awakening. It gives the account of the crisis that leads him onto the streets following his parents’ realization he is gay. Growing up gay had been hard on Georgie. The multitude of beatings, the battle wounds and bruises, the forced religion to exorcise the un-pure, unholy demons from his purely homosexual soul, culminating in his...