The Pat Parker/Vito Russo Library book discussion group meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 8:00pm (except when noted). We meet at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Community Center, 208 West 13th Street (near Seventh Avenue) in NYC. Ask at the information desk for the room number.

We're a friendly group, always open to new members. If you'd like, you can just read the book and join us at the Community Center. We'd be pleased to meet you. If you have questions or want more information, you can send e-mail to Howard@HowardWill.com. (If you send an e-mail, make sure you include the words "book club" early in the subject line because if you just say "Hey" or "I've got a question" it'll just get deleted because it looks like spam.)

Upcoming books:

April 7: "In the City of Shy Hunters" by Tom Spanbauer (fiction, 512 page)

This sprawling novel, starting in the early 1980s, tells the story of Will, who comes to the "Wolf Swamp" of New York in search of his boyhood first love. After Will secures a seedy apartment, a bevy of tough, typecast but blissfully genuine New Yorkers materialize, including drug-addled Ruby; the tenacious waitress Fiona, who trains Will at his new restaurant job; and drag-queen Rose, with whom he falls in love. But while his life is being sorted out, AIDS has already begun claiming victims. Spanbauer's rapid-fire narration generates tension and gritty emotion, as does his vibrant, dead-on dialogue and keen sense of place. The high points come first when Rose drags Will to his first Gay Pride parade and then, as years pass, when he witnesses the death of friends. Unlike other "early AIDS" novels, this one acknowledges that AIDS touches all classes, races, religions, and sexual orientations.

May 5: "Call Me By Your Name" by Andre Aciman (novel, 256 pages)

Aciman's first novel probes a boy's erotic coming-of-age at his family's Italian home. Elio—who is 17, well-read, and the son of a prominent expatriate professor—finds himself troublingly attracted to this year's visiting resident scholar, Oliver, who is 24, breezy and spontaneous. The young men loll about in bathing suits, play tennis, jog, and flirt. Both also flirt with women, but Elio, who narrates, yearns for Oliver. A trip to Rome ushers Elio into first love's joy and pain, as the novel moves to a look into Elio's future. Aciman offers elegant writing in sensitively re-creating Elio's sweet and sanguine voice.

(No meetings in June, July, or August)

September 8 (the second Tuesday of Sept, rather than the day after Labor Day): "The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein" by Martin Duberman (biography, 736 pages)

Unconventional from the cradle and free to follow his passions thanks to his family's department-store fortune, Duberman details Kirstein's herculean efforts to establish choreographer George Balanchine in the U.S and tells phenomenal stories of Kirstein's role during World War II of the dramatic discovery of stolen masterpieces and intelligence gathering in pro-Nazi South America. A crucial force in the vitality of NYC, the Museum of Modern Art, and Lincoln Center, Kirstein led a complicated personal life. Although married, Kirstein enjoyed many affairs with men. Duberman offers a candid and insightful portrait of a "consequential if controversial figure in the art world," a man of dazzling gifts and convictions.

October 6: "Exiles in America" by Christopher Bram

Zack Knowles, a psychologist, and Daniel Wexler, a teacher at a college in Virginia, have been together for twenty-one years. In 2002, a few months before the Iraq War, a new artist in residence, Abbas Rohani, arrives with his Russian wife, Elena, and their two children. But Abbas is not quite what he seems, and he begins an affair with Daniel. Soon politics intrude upon two families thrown together by love, threatening the future of both in ways no one could have predicted. A novel that explores how the personal becomes political, Exiles in America offers an intimate look at the meaning of marriage, gay and straight.

November 3: "The Indian Clerk" by David Leavitt

This historical novel centers on the relationship between mathematicians G.H. Hardy (1877–1947) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920). After receiving an enticing letter, Hardy invites Ramanujan, a young clerk from India, to England. Hardy and his collaborator, J.E. Littlewood; soon decide that Ramanujan is a mathematical genius and that he should emigrate to Cambridge to work with them. The novel describes the eager but complicated attempts of a young don and his wife to expedite Ramanujan's arrival, and Hardy's scholarly endeavors at Cambridge, as well as his closeted homosexual life.

December 1: "Mothers and Sons" by Colm Toibin

Nine stories explore what happens when mothers and sons confront one another as adults. The sons include a middle-aged petty criminal, a young alienated pub musician, and a regular guy whose drug-fueled mourning takes him into new sexual territory. The mothers include a widow who married above her class, a woman whose son's depression hangs over her and her husband's lives, and a woman whose son is a priest being charged with abuse. The concluding, near-novella-length "A Long Winter," set in Spain, features Miguel, his younger brother Jordi, and their mother, whose drinking may not be the only secret Miguel discovers during preparations for Jordi's departure for his military service.

Here is the list of books we're considering reading.

The complete list of our discussion group appears below. The upcoming books also appear at the end of the list.

1994
"The Culture of Desire," Frank Browning
"The Well of Loneliness," Radically Hall
"Conduct Unbecoming," Randy Shilts
"A Place at the Table," Bruce Bawer
"Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold," E. Kennedy & M. Davis
"Dancing on Tisha B'av," Lev Raphael and "The Bar Stories," Nisa Donnelly
"A Smile in His Lifetime," Joseph Hansen
"Stone Butch Blues," Leslie Feinberg
"My Father and Myself," J. R. Ackerley
"Giovanni's Room," James Baldwin
"Cherry Grove, Fire Island," Esther Newton

1995
"The Motion of Light in Water," Samuel Delany
"Dancer From the Dance," Andrew Holleran
"Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," Gertrude Stein
"Swimming Pool Library," Alan Hollingshurst
"Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life, 1918-1945," Ina Russell," ed.
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," John Berendt
"Before Night Falls," Renaldo Arenas
"Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter," M. Nava and R. Dawidoff
"A Different Life," James Merrill
"Becoming a Man," Paul Monette
"Chamber Music," Doris Grumbach

1996
"Weekend," Peter Cameron
"New York Gay History: 1890-1940," George Chauncey
"Empathy," Sarah Schulman
"Maurice," E. M. Forester
"Martin and John," Dale Peck
"Closet Case," Robert Rodi
"Virtually Normal," Andrew Sullivan
"Flesh and Blood," Michael Cunningham
"The Folding Star," Alan Hollinghurst
"Virtual Equality," Urvashi Vaid
"Skinned Alive," Edmund White

1997
"Torsos," John Peyton Cooke
"Angels in America," Tony Kushner
"The Boys on the Rock," John Fox
"Stranger Among Friends," David Mixner
"User," Bruce Benderson and "City of Night," John Rechy
"Midlife Queer," Martin Duberman
"While England Sleeps," David Leavitt
"Eighty-sixed," David Feinberg
"Wonderbread and Ecstasy," Charles Isherwood and "Love Junky," Robert Plunket
"Rise and Fall of Gay Culture," Daniel Harris
"Gay Spirit," Mark Thompson," ed.
"Sea of Tranquility," Paul Russell

1998
"Stuck Rubber Baby," Howard Cruise
"Celluloid Closet," Vito Russo
"Movie Lover," Richard Friedel
"Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall," Neil Bartlett
"Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal," David Brodney
"American Studies," Mark Merlis
"Mysterious Skin," Scott Heim
"Easy Way Out," Stephen McCauley
"Sexual Ecology," Gabriel Rotello
"Funny Boy," Shyam Selvaduri
"Gossip," Christopher Bram
"Billy Budd," Herman Melville and "Frisk," Dennis Cooper

1999
"Palimpsest," Gore Vidal
"How Proust Can Change Your Life," Alain de Botton
"Querelle," Jean Genet
"Dreyfus Affair," Peter Lefcourt
"Berlin Stories," Christopher Isherwood
"Life Outside," Michaelangelo Signorelle
"To the Lighthouse," Virginia Woolf
"Don't Get Me Started," Kate Clinton
"The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up," Andrew Tobias
"Kiss of the Spider Woman," Manuel Puig
"The Other Side of Silence," John Loughery
"Confessions of a Mask," Yukio Mishima

2000
"The Hours," Michael Cunningham
"My Life with Noel Coward," Graham Payn
"Was," Geoff Ryman
"Sacred Lips of the Bronx," Douglas Sadownick
"Young Man from the Provinces," Alan Helms
"Farewell Symphony," Edmund White
"Cities of the Plain," Marcel Proust
"Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams," Lyle Leverich
"The Lost Language of Cranes," David Leavitt
"Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh

2001
"The Coming Storm," Paul Russell
"The Turn of the Screw," Henry James
"Allan Stein," Matthew Stadler
"The Spell," Alan Hollinghurst
"The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of ID," Daniel Mendelsohn
"Original Story by: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood," Arthur Laurents
"An Arrow's Flight," Mark Merlis
"The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles
"Endangered Species," Louis Bayard
"The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes," Christopher Bram
"Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems," J.D. McClatchy (ed.)

2002
"Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris," Edmund White
"Intimate Companions: George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, and Lincoln Kirstein," David Leddick
"The Night Listener," Armistead Maupin
"Autobiography of Red," Anne Carson
"The Golden Age," Gore Vidal
"The World of Normal Boys," K. M. Soehnlein
"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," Michael Chabon
"Lies: A Diary (1986-1999)," Ned Rorem
"Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement," Clendinen and Nagourney
"Ravelstein," Saul Bellow
"Death in Venice," Thomas Mann

2003
"Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969," William Mann
"The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression," Andrew Solomon
"True Enough," Stephen McCauley
"Other Voices, Other Rooms," Truman Capote
"Edinburgh," Alexander Chee
"Price of Salt," Patricia Highsmith
"Fingersmith," Sarah Waters
"Running with Scissors," Augusten Burroughs
"The City of Your Final Destination," Peter Cameron
"The Long Firm," Jake Arnott

2004
"The Soul beneath the Skin: The Unseen Hearts and Habits of Gay Men," David Nimmons
"The Picture of Dorian Gray," Oscar Wilde
"The Danish Girl," David Ebershoff
"Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi," Salam Pax
"Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman
"City of Night," John Rechy
"Middlesex," Jeffrey Eugenides
"Women in Love", D. H. Lawrence
"The Married Man," Edmund White
"The Book of Salt," Monique Truong

2005
"Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," Azar Nafisi
"The Invention of Love," Tom Stoppard and "A Shropshire Lad," A. E. Housman
"Dorian: An Imitation," Will Self
"War Against the Animals," Paul Russell
"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "A Streetcar Named Desire," Tennessee Williams
"Lives of the Circus Animals," Christopher Bram
"The Master," Colm Toibin
"The Immoralist" and "Corydon," Andre Gide
"Three Junes," Julia Glass
"A Single Man" and "Prater Violet," Christopher Isherwood

2006
"The Line of Beauty," Alan Hollinghurst
"Less Than Zero," Bret Easton Ellis
"The Bostonians," Henry James
"Myra Breckinridge " by Gore Vidal
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain and the essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" by Leslie Fiedler
"Eustace Chisholm and the Works" by James Purdy
"Our Lady of the Flowers" by Jean Genet
"The Beauty of Men" by Andrew Holleran
"The Blackwater Lightship " by Colm Toibin
"Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" by Allison Bechdel

2007
"Speciman Days" by Michael Cunningham
"Pilgrim Hawk" and "A Visit to Priapus" by Glenway Wescott
"Acqua Calda" by Keith McDermott
"The Confusions of Young Torless" (or "Young Torless") by Robert Musil
"The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" by C. A. Tripp
"Late and Soon" by Robert J. Hughes
"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville
"My Lives: A Memoir" by Edmund White
Poetry by C. P Cavafy
"The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" by Carson McCullers

2008
"Christopher and His Kind" by Christopher Isherwood
"Stretching My Mind: Collected Essays of Edward Albee" by Edward Albee
"Nightwood" by Djuna Barnes
"Falconer" by John Cheever
"The Exquisite Corpse" by Alfred Chester
"Night Watch" by Sarah Waters
"Grief" by Andrew Holleran
"Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches" by Audre Lorde
"Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice" by Janet Malcolm

2009
"Hotel de Dream" by Edmund White
"Fellow Travelers" by Thomas Mallon
"Selected Poems" by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson
April 7: "In the City of Shy Hunters" by Tom Spanbauer
May 5: "Call Me By Your Name" by Andre Aciman
(No meetings in June, July, or August)
September 8: "The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein" by Martin Duberman
October 6: "Exiles in America" by Christopher Bram
November 3: "The Indian Clerk" by David Leavitt
December 1: "Mothers and Sons" by Colm Toibin