Bobbie is a tomboy and a loner. She's sexually precocious, hates her rigidly religious mother, and adored her mechanic dad before he vanished. She can repair a car more intuitively than any boy in her high school shop class, and has a crush on her closeted English teacher. She's a familiar dyke stereotype - even her name is gender-neutral. From a less-skilled writer, these familiar tropes would herald glib storytelling. But Stevens' debut novel, about the struggles of a defiant blue-collar lesbian to survive and thrive, is exquisitely nuanced. The use of a first-person narrative voice preordains a happy-ever-after ending, but that predictability doesn't diminish at all the pitch-perfect tone of Bobbie's emotional downs, ups, and eventual even keel. Becoming Bobbie traverses the terrain of teen-adult sexual attraction, physical and emotional family abuse, schoolyard bullying, and on-the-job homophobia - everything that's awful in a young dyke's life. But it's ultimately about everything that's awesome in an adult woman's life - Bobbie is blessed, at book's end, with a loving partner (that same English teacher), reconnection with family, and the joy of parenting.

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Lives there a gay man in his early 20s with good looks, black trousers, and a white shirt who hasn't waited a table while awaiting his big acting break? Well, some - but not the sexy lads of Monkey Suits, a nostalgic Manhattan-set novel about unfocused youth, mercurial boyfriends, and the early days of ACT UP anger. The characters are all cater waiters - thus, the "monkey suits." Their underclass perspective on the upper class they serve at society functions is part sneering and part servile, a nervy imbalance that gives this novel a subversive, comic clout. If Provenzano wasn't himself a waiter, he must have slept with some - his behind-the-scenes details are a hoot. The novel's realistic energy is further heightened by the author's invocation of thinly veiled facts: there really was a mayor accused of being in the closet - think Ed Koch. And there really was a conservative editor who demanded the HIV-infected be tattooed - think William F. Buckley, who is further fictionalized, provocatively, as a perv who gets off by pouring blood on blindfolded hustlers.

Before this exhaustive but completely accessible study, a long shelf of books considered the intersection of homosexuality and civilization. This hefty survey does it all. Crompton's lifetime of academic gay activism powers his erudite, entertaining distillation and assessment of same-sex persecutions, politics, practices, and passions across centuries and through cultures. Chapters about the Han Dynasty of China and the samurai culture of Japan add breadth to the book's primary focus on Europe from the era of Homer to the early 18th century - and highlight the author's thesis that the Judeo-Christian abhorrence of homosexuality is in many ways a geographic and cultural anomaly. Crompton, an emeritus professor of literature who has championed queer studies since before Stonewall, was born to write this book; generations of queer scholars yet to inscribe their first footnote will draw inspiration from it. _Homosexuality and Civilization_ is a monumental work of interpretive scholarship - as well as a deliciously readable account of the "rich and terrible" stories of men who loved men (and, less so, of women who loved women.)