In his most recent work, War Against the Animals (2003), Russell explores the issues of class, community allegiances, and the divide between gay and straight culture. The novel is set in a small town in upstate New York, where tensions are rising between the working class locals, many of whose families have lived in the community for six generations, and newer residents--predominantly upper-class, and gay--who have begun moving in.

Sponsor Message.

In homage to Henry James's The Wings of the Dove (1902), which Russell avows has a perfect plot, War Against the Animals revolves around Cameron Barnes, an HIV-positive, middle-aged, retired landscape architect who has recently migrated from Manhattan, and Jesse Vanderhof, a 19-year-old local who, under the somewhat sinister influence of his older brother, gets involved in a scheme to take financial advantage of the older gay man.

The scheme unravels, however, when Jesse unexpectedly finds himself attracted, both emotionally and sexually, to Cameron. Jesse begins to view his burgeoning homosexuality as a paralyzing form of destiny: "like when their dog Apache had run in front of a car, and he'd watched it from the front porch, helpless to stop it from happening."

Russell is also the author of The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present (1994). The book contains short biographies of such luminaries as Socrates, Sappho, Oscar Wilde, and Gertrude Stein, among others.

In his introduction, Russell explains the premise of the book: "One of the ways by which gay men and lesbians have survived through the centuries is by recognizing one another in the various disguises we have worn. We have survived on the consolation of knowing there are others like ourselves. . . . The men and women whose names were secretly whispered, repeated, cherished as homosexual helped create and sustain that amorphous phenomenon we know today as gay culture."

Recent short fiction and essays by Russell include "Underwater," published in Clifford Chase's Queer Thirteen: Lesbians and Gay Writers Recall Seventh Grade (1998); "The Golden Book of the Civil War," in Matthew Rottnek's Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood (1999); "White Lily," in James White Review (Spring 1999); and "Delicacy," in Gastronomica (February 2001).

Russell is a Professor in the English Department at Vassar College where he has taught several gay and lesbian studies courses, including "Minority Culture in America: The Gay Experience," "The Gay Male Novel in America, post-1945," and "Queer Alphabets," a freshman-only course that features readings in gay and lesbian literature.

He lives in Rosendale, in upstate New York.

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.

Perhaps no other book has been more influential--for better or worse--in determining the construction of gay and lesbian identity in the modern world, as well as social attitudes toward homosexuality, than the Bible.

Controversial writer Dennis Cooper is best known for his series of strikingly original, critically acclaimed, albeit transgressive and contentious, novels exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, brutality, and death.

Though closeted, Henry James had a number of intimate relations with young men, and his sexual orientation imbued his fiction.

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial images typically combine rigorously formal composition and design with extreme subject matter.

Filmmaker Paul Morrissey was the auteur who created many of the "Andy Warhol films," works that unflinchingly document modern urban subcultures, including the lives of drag queens, hustlers, and addicts.

One of the most important cultural figures to emerge from post-World War II Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a versatile man-of-letters, but he was foremost a filmmaker.

James Purdy's novels often describe obsessive love between men for whom homosexuality is unthinkable and whose fate is inevitably bleak.