Tragically, Slater's own efforts at "comradeship" fail: his advocacy of socialist ideals rings hollow while he continues to live off inherited family wealth, and he has difficulty acting upon his erotic attraction to men.

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At first glance, conversely, Joel Lingeman of Man about Town is just another cog in the boring grind of government. When a newly elected, conservative senator draws upon Joel's expertise in drafting health care legislation in order to deny Medicare benefits to gay men who contracted HIV through "irresponsible" (i.e., unprotected) sex, however, Joel recognizes that "we're all in this together," and argues that government is a "covenant" guaranteeing that the fortunate will care for those who are less able to care for themselves.

Even An Arrow's Flight's Pyrrhus, the runaway prince cum gay stripper and hustler who seems so self-involved as to be incapable of thinking about the polis, comes to understand how a person can function as "a country of your own" (just as, Reeve notes, Tom Slater managed in his American studies seminars to "make a little country of his own").

For Merlis, what keeps "the invincible city" of comrades from being realized is the retributive anger that straight men direct at gay men for refusing to wear the impenetrable armor of masculinity, and the consequent shame that gay men feel regarding their sexual orientation.

Pyrrhus's inheritance and eventual rejection of the armor belonging to his father, Achilles, is a powerful metaphor that informs all three of Merlis's novels in which gay men are repeatedly despised by straight men for having made love the center of their lives, rather than arming themselves in "the seemly reticence that makes men talk only of sports and cars and bosoms."

Taken together, Merlis's novels offer an extended meditation upon the ways by which homophobia creates feelings of inadequacy, and even self-loathing, in gay men. Each novel contains multiple scenes in which a gay man is made to feel small by a hearty.

Reeve, who was repeatedly "browned" by male classmates as a boy, is both intimidated by Tom Slater's openly disdainful brother into relinquishing his claim upon Tom's estate and humiliated to be evicted from his apartment building for daring to disrupt the peaceful night's sleep of other residents with his screams on the night of his beating.

The conservative senator whose homophobic legislation Joel's non-partisan status requires him to support is as presumptuous of his privilege as Joel's low-ranking status as a government functionary and gay man renders him deferential and eager to serve. The United States Senate is one more group of privileged straight boys, like the ones that excluded Joel in high school.

And Odysseus understands only too well how to play upon Pyrrhus's sense of inadequacy after growing up in the shadow of his super-macho father, Achilles, in order to get Pyrrhus to manipulate the errant prince into doing the Greek general's bidding.

Merlis displays a profound psychological insight in his representation of the ways in which gay men render themselves all the more vulnerable by their attraction to the emotionally impenetrable straight men who are most likely to disdain them.

Pyrrhus, for example, acknowledges the erotic fascination that his father's body held for him--the same stupidly over-masculinized body that causes Pyrrhus to test the attractiveness of his own far more elegant form.

Tom Slater's afternoon sherry hours with his Harvard students "always looked like a casting call for an Arrow Shirt ad." Reeve describes the men to whom Tom was attracted as "Wheaties eaters." Reeve, his vision damaged by the beating that he suffered at the hands of a hustler, nevertheless casts sideways glances at the working-class heterosexual boy who is in the hospital bed next to his.

And Joel, obsessed with finding the model in a thirty-year-old swimming suit advertisement, must unexpectedly confront the effects that unsolicited gay desire has had on the boy, who proves to have been heterosexual.

But, while "the invincible city" of comrades may not be immediately available, and while gay men are most likely to feel that we are living in a "war zone where no covenants held," Merlis holds up for examination an alternate form of heroism: the reaching of two hands across a seemingly unbridgeable distance.

In breaking his bow, Philoctetes displays to Pyrrhus that gay men can simply refuse to give straight men power over us by turning away from straight warfare and joining hands to create "a country of your own."

At the end of Man about Town, Joel quells his suspicions concerning a new boyfriend's petty thefts and enters into a biracial relationship.

And whereas Tom Slater proved unable to cross "the abyss between the two beds" when he lay awake as a boy at boarding school with the object of his desire sleeping in a nearby bed, Reeve can "cross between the beds" in his hospital room. Falling while returning to his own bed after pulling up the covers on his sleeping roommate, he is startled to have a helping hand extended to him by the straight boy he initially feared was going to strike him.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

The contemporary literary awards given specifically to honor glbtq books may be seen as an outgrowth of the modern American gay rights movement, so intertwined are they with the movement for equality.

Glbtq historical fictions creatively interweave fiction with facts in ways that have not only won them a large readership but also have offered that readership insightful illuminations of glbtq histories.

The pseudonymous Andrew Holleran has placed his homosexuality at the center of his commercially and critically successful novels.

Noted for his elegant prose style and subtle representations of moral ambiguities, Alan Hollinghurst has in recent years emerged as Great Britain's most significant contemporary gay novelist.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

Critic F. O. Matthiessen was instrumental in the inclusion of gay writers in American literary history, and the exchange of letters between him and his lover Russell Cheney are among the most revealing gay male documents of the 1920s.

The most important American novelist of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville reflects his homosexuality throughout his texts.

One of the most prominent and highly acclaimed figures of contemporary gay literature, Edmund White works in many distinct categories of fiction and nonfiction.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.