From the Publisher: In the first anthology to survey the full range of gay men's autobiographical writing from Walt Whitman to the present, Gay American Autobiography draws excerpts from letters, journals, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies to provide examples of the best life writing over the last century and a half. Volume editor David Bergman guides the reader chronologically through selected writings that give voice to every generation...

Rigoberto González, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, takes a second piercing look at his past through a startling new lens: hunger. The need for sustenance originating in childhood poverty, the adolescent emotional need for solace and comfort, the adult desire for a larger world, another lover, a different body-all are explored by González in a series of heartbreaking and poetic vignettes....

A devout young boy in rural Ohio, Andrew Evans had his life mapped for him: baptism, mission, Brigham Young University, temple marriage, and children of his own. But as an awkward gay kid, bullied and bored, he escaped into the glossy pages of National Geographic and the wide promise of the world atlas. Eventually ejected from church and shunned by his family, Evans embarked on an ambitious overland journey halfway across the world. Riding public...

The Pox Lover is a personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by a pioneering American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. In an account that is by turns searing, hectic, and funny, Anne-christine d'Adesky remembers 'the poxed generation' of AIDS -- their lives, their battles, and their determination to find love and make art in the heartbreaking years before lifesaving protease drugs arrived....

In this candid and revelatory memoir, Erin White shares her profound hunger for both romantic and divine love. Both desires arrived unexpectedly and profoundly transformed her. In the 1990s, White spent Saturday nights with her girlfriend and Sunday mornings in Catholic confirmation classes. Gay marriage legislation was sweeping the nation and the lesbian baby boom was well underway. Could she be both Catholic and gay? White reveals her yearnings...

In the throes of a classic midlife crisis, Lori Soderlind takes a sabbatical from her community college job as a journalism professor. She sets out to travel across America's rusting heart with her fourteen-year-old dog, Colby, and a used camping trailer. Making pit stops in places like Buffalo and Rockford, she explores a deeply conflicted country going through its own crises and transformations. Even as she struggles with her own impulses, she finds...