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.
• New York native. Issue 83, February 13-26, 1984
  The ‘New York Native’ newspaper was published by Charles Ortleb (1950?-) between 1980 and 1997. This issue contains articles, reviews, personal listings, adverts, a fashion spread and a winter travel supplement. Most notable is the range of reports on AIDS, which begin with an editorial critiquing the racism and homophobia in press reports of the crisis. Other articles in this issue focus on the first European conference on AIDS and lists of numbers of cases reported in New York. The paper first reported on AIDS in 1981, after the ‘New York Times’ broke the story on 3 July that year. ‘New York Native’ had been pioneering in its coverage, although it later fell out of favour and was boycotted by some activists when it began to promote conspiracy theories regarding the cause of AIDS.
• The AIDS epidemic
  In spring 1983, a “devastating, puzzling and fatal” new illness was spreading rapidly throughout the United States. At that time, some three to four years after the first cases of HIV/AIDS had emerged and under two years since the first cases were reported in the ‘New York Times’, New York City was the hardest-hit metropolitan area with 595 cases and 228 deaths. This astonishingly prescient book edited by physician Kevin Cahill (1936-2022) comprises the published proceedings of a symposium that took place at Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City. Doctors, epidemiologists and policy-makers gathered to discuss how they might combat the disease, stating that “there is every indication that we will soon be in the midst of a worldwide epidemic”. As of 2024, HIV has claimed over 40 million lives worldwide.
• The homosexual matrix
  First published in America by McGraw-Hill in 1975, the preface to this British edition includes author C.A. Tripp’s (1919-2003) reflections on the book’s initial reception. More positively received than the author had hoped among the scientific community and in much of the media, including ‘Newsweek’, it nevertheless provoked anti-gay moralising in ‘Time’ magazine and ‘The New York Times’, while some papers cancelled their reviews altogether. Tripp, a psychotherapist, fails to mention that the book was also criticised by LGBTQ+ reviewers for its pseudo-scientific categorisation of gay men into ‘types’, its misogyny, and its refusal to engage with gay liberation as a social movement. The striking typographic cover design is by Marcy J. Katz. The edition on display is from the library of actor, author and bookseller Noel Lloyd.
• The Lord won't mind
  This is the opening book in a gay romance trilogy by Gordon Merrick (1916-1988), first published in 1970. Young, handsome and improbably well-endowed Charlie Mills is introduced to the equally attractive Peter Martin in late 1930s New Jersey. It is love – and lust – at first sight. Advertised in ‘The New York Times’ as “the first homosexual novel with a happy ending”, the book spent sixteen weeks in the ‘Times’ top ten, becoming a bestseller that secured Merrick’s fortunes. Criticised for its misogyny and as “corny, oddly dated and saccharine” by a discerning reviewer for ‘Gay NYC’, it nonetheless became a guilty pleasure for generations of gay men.
• Winter music
  Set in the Philadelphia classical music scene of the late 1970s, Karen Rile’s first and only novel concerns gay concert flautist Lawrence Chatterjee, whose performance career has been cut short following an accident, and child flute prodigy Gabriel, who also loves Kool-Aid and the Beatles. Rile herself studied flute at university level, before going on to become a writer and journalist for publications including ‘The New York Times’, ‘The San Francisco Chronicle’ and ‘The Philadelphia Enquirer’, and her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in several literary magazines. She teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania.