Best LGBT Books of 2012

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."

Things That Are Good # 3 - Songs About the Golden Girls

I didn't expect there to be so many things that are good, but they just keep coming! 

I don't know how I ever lived without it, but:

 

The FANTASTIC "Songs About the Golden Girls" includes the songs:

1. Zbornak
2. Blanche Deveraux
3. Take Me To Saint Olaf (A Song for Rose)

 

Things That Are Good #2 - Five cup salad

My favourite author Brian Francis runs a cooking blog in his spare time.

The speciality of this cooking blog is it's for lazy people, so there's no too much actual work involved with the receipes or too many ingredients. And it's REALLY funny!

I've made a couple of his receipes, including Mars Bars and Low-Cal Peanut Butter Cup Pie. But it was with this 5-cup salad that things hit the stratosphere.

Also known as Alaska Salad, or Ambrosia Salad, if got were a salad, He would be this one.  I can't believe how amazing this is, there is no baking in making it, and with all the fruit and fat free sour cream, how bad can it be for you.

I love it.  Plus no one knows if it's a salad or a dessert, so you can have 5-cup salad for dinner and ambrosia salad for desert.  Yum, yum!

• 1 cup miniature marshmallows 
• 1 cup flaked coconut
• 1 cup pineapple pieces, partially drained
• 1 cup mandarin oranges, drained
• 1 cup sour cream

Things That Are Good #1

And now we come to a new feature of our program, Things That Are Good.

In this the first installment, I recommend the blog of author Rupert Smith, link here.

Smith is a great author, writing one of my favourites last year, Man's World, and he also writes erotica under the name James Lear.  So multi-dimensional!

Smith has started a fantastic idea project, counting down his 100 favourite books, with a new post every couple days, and is up to number 64.

Of his #65 choice, Lolita, he says:

65. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

‘Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze./ Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet./ Age: five thousand three hundred days./ Profession: none, or “starlet”.’ That sinister little jingle has been going round in my head ever since I first read Lolita in the early 80s. Back then I thought it was exciting and taboo-smashingly controversial – which it is – but over the years I’ve found it harder to go along with Humbert Humbert’s horribly seductive persuasions. And that, of course, is exactly what Nabokov was up to, pinpointing what was to become one of the biggest anxieties of our times, paedophilia. Lolita is without doubt one of the greatest masterpieces of C20th literature, and the only reason it’s not higher in this list is because I find it really gruelling to read these days, even though it does all the things I want novels to do. It’s funny, it’s got engaging, pacy narrative and an unmistakeable voice, that of HH himself – likeable, plausible, pitiful. Just typing about him makes me feel uneasy. I love all the Nabokov I’ve subsequently read, particularly the magnficient Despair, but Lolita towers over the lot of them. Footnote: I never knew until now that there had been an ‘acclaimed but failed’ musical Lolita, My Love by no less a team than Alan Jay Lerner and John Barry. What were they thinking?

Of his #64 choice, London Belongs to Me, he says:

64. London Belongs to Me, Norman Collins (1945)

OK, I’m cheating here, because I’ve just finished reading this and it’s been washed into the Top 100 on a tidal wave of enthusiasm. London Belongs to Me is exactly the sort of novel that I dream about discovering, and so rarely do. It’s a big busy book about the residents of a south London boarding house during the Second World War, and it’s written in an elegant, conversational tone that disguises the superb craftsmanship of the narrative. Collins (a hugely successful author who went on to become one of the most important post-War TV executives) handles his large, diverse cast with a juggler’s skill, and manages to juxtapose sentiment, comedy and hard-boiled action without ever striking a false note. There’s a camp old retired actress living upstairs, a phony Spiritualist medium in the basement and all human life in between. They eat disgusting food, smoke a lot of fags and trundle around streets that we are still familiar with. The fact that it’s set in Kennington, just down the road from my house, makes it a special joy. Oddly, the introduction to the Penguin reissue goes to great lengths to tell us that London Belongs to Me is a second-rate novel, ‘just a soap opera’ etc, which is absolute bollocks. I can’t recommend it highly enough.