About the Book
A refreshingly readable collection of literature devoted to same-sex attraction from the ancient Greeks through the war poets. Includes works from Homer, Solon, Sappho, the Old Testament, Anacreon, Theognis, Pindar, Plato, Xenophon, Callimachus, Meleager, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Petronius, Plutarch, Ovid, Aelian, Strato, Agathius, Rumi, Hafiz, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anna Seward, James Silk Buckingham, Lord Byron, Disraeli, Gogol, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Bayard Taylor, Ernst Haeckel, John Addington Symonds, Henry James, Stanley Lane-Poole, Wilde, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Housman, Cather, Stein, Thomas Mann, Renee Vivien, Forster, D.H. Lawrence, H.D., Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Lawrence of Arabia, and Wilfred Owen. Hale's introductions to the authors are to the point and sometimes witty, specifying why the author or work is included in the volume and sometimes providing a larger biographical scope.
About the Author :
Keith Hale is author of the novels Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada and Letters to a Shooting Star. He has edited an anthology of gay literature from antiquity through the First World War (Ode to Boy), a collection of Lord Byron's love poetry for boys (Edleston), a collection of Rupert Brooke's letters that had been sealed for eighty years due to their homosexual themes (Friends and Apostles), a collection of Georgian Poetry, and editions of poetry by Shakespeare, Housman, and Brooke. Hale wrote the first and perhaps only account of gay life in the Balkans before the walls of Communism crumbled in his travelogue In the Land of Alexander, and he explored how the military's ban on gays affected the life of one ROTC cadet in his book Torn Allegiances. Hale is a native of Mayflower, Arkansas, and also has made his home in Austin, Amsterdam, and Guam.