GLBTQ: What Should I Read?

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) Tom Robbins

Sissy Hankshaw is a woman born with a mutation of enormously large thumbs, though she considers it a gift. Sissy makes the most of her thumbs by becoming a hitchhiker and she travels to New York. She becomes a model for the Countess, a male homosexual tycoon of feminine hygiene products. He introduces her to a staid Mohawk named  Julian Gitche; whom she later marries. In her later travels she encounters, among many others, a sexually open cowgirl named Bonanza Jellybean and an itinerant escapee from a Japanese internment camp happily mislabeled the Chink.

The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2003) Emma Donoghue

A series of short stories, including the tale of an English soldier tricked into marrying a dowdy spinster, a Victorian surgeon’s attempts to “improve” women, a seventeenth-century Irish countess who ran away to Italy disguised as a man, or an “undead” murderess returning for the maid she left behind to be executed in her place.

The Vinland Sheep (2004) Helen Shaklady

An adventure story, set between Autumn 1470 and Spring 1471, that centres around two families, one English, one Welsh. The attraction between Agnes and Gwyneth simmers next to the Wars of the Roses and the myriad excitements that voyages across the Atlantic generated.

Mistress Moderately Fair (1988) Katherine Sturtevant

In 17th century London’s theater district, muddy streets and stimulating coffee houses, a sensitive romance develops between two women Margaret Featherstone, a playwright, and Amy Dudley, a mysterious and talented actress. Beyond the challenge of maintaining their illicit relationship, the women grapple with the choice of fulfilling love or ambition.

Despite their intimacy, Amy does not reveal her troubled past to Margaretand her abrupt disappearance wounds her lover deeply. To assuage the pain, Margaret returns to “the strange, lonely world of invention” to write her finest play. The new work demands an exceptional actress, and both Cary and Margaret determine it must be Amy. The search for her moves rapidly toward the stunning and well-crafted denouement.

My Dearest Holmes (2007) Rohase Piercy

‘… The accounts of these cases are too bound up with events in my personal life which, although they may provide a plausible commentary to much of my dealings with Mr Sherlock Holmes, can never be made public while he or I remain alive …’

Although Dr Watson is known for recording some sixty of his adventures with the celebrated Sherlock Holmes, he also wrote other reminiscences of their long friendship which were never intended for publication during their lifetimes.

Rescued from oblivion by Rohase Piercy, here are two previously unknown stories about the great detective and his companion, throwing a fresh light upon the nature of their famous partnership, and helping to explain much which has puzzled their devotees. Together Holmes and Watson face disturbing revelations as they investigate the case of the Queen Bee; and we finally learn what actually happened at the Reichenback Falls, and the real reasons which lay behind Holmes’ faked death and his subsequent return.

Moll Cutpurse, Her True History: A Novel (1985) Ellen Galford

A novel based on the life of the “feminist Robin Hood” in Elizabethan England and tells the story of Mary Frith, the real life Moll Cutpurse. She was the heroine of a comedic play, The Roaring Girl and well known as a pickpocket, thief and sometimes fortune teller. Cross-dressing and gender bending abounds.

An Arrow’s Flight (1999) Mark Merlis

An Arrow’s Flight tells the story of the Trojan War and Pyrrhus, the son of the fallen Achilles, now working as a go-go boy and hustler in the big city. Magically blending ancient headlines and modern myth, Merlis creates a fabulous new world where legendary heroes declare their endowments in personal ads and any panhandler may be a divinity in disguise. 

While England Sleeps (1995) David Leavitt

Set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, While England Sleeps tells the story of a love affair between the aristocratic young British writer Brian Botsford, who thinks homosexuality is something he will outgrow, and Edward Phelan, a sensitive and idealistic working-class employee of the London Underground and a Communist party member. When the strains of class difference, sexual taboo, and Brian’s ambivalence impel Edward to volunteer to fight against Franco in Spain, Brian pursues him across Europe and into the violent chaos of war.

Mr. Clive and Mr. Page (1998) Neil Bartlett

In 1886, an architect called Richardson built a house on the South side of Chicago. In 1985, the “Daily Mirror” reported the death of Rock Hudson. Halfway through the century that falls between these dates a man who claims his name is Mr Page sits down by his gas-fire on a snowbound Christmas Eve and sets himself the task of explaining a story that connects these apparently unconnected events.

Neil Bartlett’s new novel spins a dark and erotic web of conjecture in the gaps of history. It takes its reader from the brittle glamour of the twenties into the violent repression of the fifties; from Mayfair dining rooms to the steam room of a gentlemen’s Turkish Bath; from the ordinary world of Mr Page into the strange and unsettling world of the black-haired, well-dressed and immensely wealthy Mr Clive.

The Spectacle Salesman’s Family (2007) by Viola Roggenkamp

Paul Schiefer is a travelling spectacles salesman. Every Monday morning he leaves Hamburg on a week-long sales trip. His wife, his mother-in-law and his two teenage daughters Fania and Vera see him off with abundant hugs and kisses, and they welcome him back with equal exuberance on Friday evening - just in time for Sabbath eve. While her husband is away, Alma Schiefer defends the wellbeing of her family with an explosive mixture of ferocious love and extreme determination. Thirteen-year-old Fania is torn between the comfort of home and the fearful thrills of the unknown outside world, a sixties world that contains student protest, beehive hairdos, Israel and the Six Day War, politics, religion, revolution and …the promise of love. Sensual, funny and acerbic, The Spectacle Salesman’s Family is a brilliant, vivid portrait of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany that continues the Jewish tradition of memorialising, recounting the details in order to hold onto the past and its lessons.