In 1995, Nava collaborated with history professor Robert Dawidoff on the nonfiction book Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America. Basing their arguments on sound legal and historical analyses, the authors persuasively make the point that the denial of equal rights to glbtq people threatens the future of basic constitutional principles of individual freedom and liberty for the nation as a whole. They contend that the struggle for equality for glbtq citizens matters to everyone because it is a test case for equal treatment of all citizens.

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Revealingly, however, as part of their argument, Dawidoff and Nava present sexual orientation as an essentially trivial marker of difference. If people are treated differently simply because of something so insignificant as their sexual orientation, their argument goes, then the rights of all Americans are tenuous. This regard of sexual orientation as essentially trivial may explain Nava's uneasy relationship with the concept of a glbtq community, despite the fact that his books have won their greatest success in that community.

In a 2001 interview with lesbian mystery writer Katherine V. Forrest, Nava disturbed many of his glbtq admirers by limiting the markers of community to "a common race or ethnicity, a common language, a common religion or a common history" and denying "the idea of a gay community." He proposed instead the term "subculture" only to damn it: "I find the gay male subculture to be, for the most part, puerile and spiritually empty; so I steer clear of it." Finally, he shortsightedly discounted most gay fiction as parochial and sought to set himself apart from the work of his fellows by concluding, "I hope my books are not ultimately so much about difference as about connection."

Curiously, he seems to have forgotten E. M. Forster's celebrated mantra that drives so much gay writing, "Only connect," an injunction that honors differences even as it stresses the need to bridge those differences.

Nava's decision to abandon the Rios series was greeted with disappointment by many of his fans, but the disappointment was alleviated by the news of a non-mystery novel-in-progress, to be entitled The Talking Tree, an excerpt of which was published in 2005 in Lit, the San Francisco Bay Guardian literary supplement. Apparently a historical novel featuring a blind child as protagonist, The Talking Tree concerns atrocities performed against the Yaqui Indians by the Mexican government.

In his Henry Rios novels, Nava proves himself a worthy, if somewhat uncomfortable, successor to Joseph Hansen, whose Dave Brandstetter novels pioneered the gay male mystery genre in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Hansen, Nava presents an engaging gay detective living and working in a vividly described California landscape. Also like Hansen, Nava has attracted an enthusiastic crossover audience that includes heterosexual as well as homosexual mystery fans.

There is a major difference between the two writers, however. Whereas Hansen found a kind of liberation in writing mystery novels--testing the boundaries of the genre while also observing them, Nava seems to have increasingly bristled at the limitations of the form and, ultimately, abandoned it altogether. Nevertheless, his contribution to the gay mystery is immense; and despite his tiring of the form, it enabled his growth as a writer.

Still a young man, Nava may well establish himself as a mainstream novelist, as well as a chronicler of the gay male and Chicano experience within the boundaries of mystery fiction.

In the twenty years since its first appearance in the West, AIDS has been the subject of a large body of literature, most of it written by gay men and much of it designed to expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of affected individuals.

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.

Latina/o glbtq communities in the U.S. pursue multiple visions, diverse politics, and a variety of struggles for identity and liberation; their efforts have helped shape the meaning of what it means to be queer and Latina and Latino in the U.S. and transnationally.

Latino gay men have published novels, poetry, drama, and essays that deal directly with gay themes, but the cultural forces of machismo and Catholicism have slowed the development of a Latino gay identity.

The glbtq history of Los Angeles, the U.S.'s second largest metropolis, is replete with cultural, social, and political firsts.

In the decades since Stonewall, gay male mystery fiction has burgeoned in United States, both in quantity and in quality, and has increasingly been issued by mainstream presses.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

Canadian novelist Anthony Bidulka, author of the Russell Quant detective series, creates mysteries that skirt the dark side of detective fiction through humor and emotional buoyancy.

Alexandrian Greek poet C. P. Cavafy has written some of the greatest homoerotic poems of all time.

In the Divine Comedy Dante treats male homosexuality first as violence against God and then more sympathetically as merely one of the kinds of love.

Lambda Award-winning author Larry Duplechan is best known for Blackbird (1987), a coming of age novel about a black teenager growing up in the bland outer suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1970s.

Writer and editor Katherine V. Forrest has played a major role in bringing lesbian fiction to the forefront of the mystery and science fiction genres.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Best known as the author of the Dave Brandstetter mystery series, Hansen also published a considerable body of nonmystery fiction and poetry, most of it dominated by homosexual characters and themes.

One of the most prolific gay writers of recent decades, John Preston helped elevate pornographic fiction into a genre viewed as having literary merit.

The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, an annual glbtq-themed literary festival held each May in New Orleans, has become one of the world's most influential alternative literary festivals.

John Morgan Wilson is best known today as the author of a gay male mystery series featuring a flawed and often exasperating amateur detective named Benjamin Justice.