One of the highlights of my year, and something I always look forward to, is BandofThebes annual list of the best LGBT books of the year, with authors picking their favourites.
This year I found some great choices, beginning with a book I'm currently reading and loving, Oddly Normal: One Family's Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality by John Schwartz. Other books I found, making my radar for the first time, include The German by Lee Thomas, The Survivors by John Eads, Birthday Pie by Arthur Wooten, Yield by Lee Houck, The Paternity Test by Michael Lowenthal and One By One by Penelope Gilliatt.
The list also pushed other books higher up on my "to read" list like Flagrant Conduct by Dale Carpenter, These Things Happen by Richard Kramer, Born This Way: Real Stories of Growing Up Gay, edited by Paul Vitagliano, Twentysix by Jonathan Kemp, and both books by Clayton Littlewood.
Not being an author, I wasn't asked to contribute of course, but if I was I would have said:
"My favourite LGBT book published this year was Letters to One: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s edited by Craig M. Lofton. It takes LGBT voices from the period and delivers them uncensored, something that has rarely survived to present day, in a way that blew my mind and connected me to the gay brotherhood. Cobra Killer: Gay Porn, Murder, and the Manhunt to Bring the Killers to Justice by Peter A. Conway and Andrew E. Stoner was almost as good as the wait was long to get it. The Golden Age of Gay Fiction by Drewey Wayne Gunn is an expensive book and a history lesson worth every penny. The best book every written on the gay pulp era. Finally, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story by Paul Monette is perhaps the best book I've ever read. It taught me that it's okay to be flawed and less than perfect, and also that the gay brotherhood and sisterhood is the best gift gays could have been given."
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