Items

• A brother's touch
  Angus Rivers, a young Vietnam veteran from upstate New York, ventures to the city to discover the truth about his teenage brother’s death. Earl, a gay sex worker, has been found dead of a heroin overdose on the West Side piers (a notorious cruising ground), his body “stuffed into a rusty oil drum”. This mass-market crime paperback depicts the New York gay scene as a sleazy underworld of addicts, hustlers, self-serving politicians and corrupt priests. But it also introduces gay politics and campaigning, through the activities of the ‘GLP’ or Gay Liberation Party. Positively reviewed in the ‘New York Times’ on publication, Owen Levy’s debut went on to sell very well. His second novel, ‘Goodbye Heiko, Goodbye Berlin’, was published in 2015.
• Cruise to win
  “This book is about making contact” is the opening declaration of this self-help guide to successful and confident cruising for gay men. Written by Lenny Giteck, assistant editor and columnist at ‘The Advocate’, the book is based on interviews with fifty pseudonymous gay men and seventeen mental health professionals. In chapters on the principles of cruising, ‘dealing with rejection’ (and ‘rejecting others’), ‘sex and intimacy’ and older men and cruising, among others, the book aims to bolster self-worth and reduce anxiety around meeting other men, especially in bars. The inside back cover includes a statement that the book now comes with an ‘AIDS Supplement’. This suggests that this is a later edition of the book – an exact date of publication is not given – as this kind of material would not have been available on first publication in 1982. The supplement is unfortunately not included with this copy.
• Flaunting it! : a decade of gay journalism from The Body Politic : an anthology
  ‘The Body Politic’ (TBP) was a collectively run gay liberation journal founded in Toronto in 1971. Initially sold locally, it developed national distribution, and this anthology collects writing and illustrations from thirty-six contributors covering the publication’s first decade. Even at the time of publication, the anthology was considered a historical record of a key decade in gay liberation, which is expressed across sections including those entitled ‘Risks’, ‘Living Our Lives’, ‘Cruising and Censorship’, and ‘Into the Eighties’. The book is published by Pink Triangle Press (which still exists), the publishing organisation behind ‘TBP’, with financial support from New Star Books. This copy is inscribed to Gay’s the Word from six members of the collective, who note that “the seizure of your stock is a tribute to your success”.
• The sunny side of Castro Street : a diary of sorts
  A detailed, first-person account of bars, cruising and bathhouses in 1970s San Francisco by Dan Vojir (1947-). It also includes an extended memoir of growing up gay in a second-generation Czech immigrant family in Berwyn, Illinois, before Vojir moved to San Francisco’s Castro neighbourhood in 1974. “It’s a charmer”, proclaimed one contemporary reviewer. Vojir was a writer for the ‘Castro Times’ newspaper and worked in publishing as well as hosting a radio talk show, ‘Strictly Books’. ‘The Sunny Side of Castro Street’ is illustrated by Ku Fu-Sheng in a distinctive style which combines pencil and pen-and-ink sketches with photographic collage.