Items

• 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.
• 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.
• The terminal bar : a novel
  Self-published by Larry Mitchell (1939-2012) of Calamus Books, one third of the Gay Presses of New York collective, this novel is set in a real Times Square bar which was popularly known as the “roughest” in New York but which was a sanctuary for its clientele. Based on Mitchell’s experiences and those of his friends, the novel follows a group of lesbians and gay men against a backdrop of a decaying America, symbolised by the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979. The novel has also been considered the first work of fiction to reference AIDS. The copy of the book on display is inscribed to Gay’s the Word by the author “In defence of the freedom to read”.