Top 10 Novels for Men

There's a vast universe of gay male fiction out there, but these ten novels (presented in chronological order) will definitely be on the test. Disagree? Share your favorites on the Your Top Books message board.

	Better Angel, by Foreman Brown This true classic was published in the 1930s under the name Richard Meeker, then republished as a lost classic more than 50 years later. That astonished its then-80-year-old author, who had based his elegant, eloquent, and unusually cheerful coming-out novel (no tragic suicides here) on his own charmed boyhood.
	A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood John Rechy called this novel by Christopher Isherwood (whose Berlin Stories became Cabaret) one of the most perfect novels ever written. It's an unflinching and brutally funny examination of the indignities of the body and the durability of affection as passion fades, and it fits right into the contemporary debate on domestic partnerships, civil unions, and "gay marriage."
	City of Night, by John Rechy This poetic, existential novel narrated by a young hustler still stands as the template for every "underground" or "transgressive" queer book written since. Dennis Cooper, good as he is, is merely this guy's grandson.
	Dancer From the Dance, by Andrew Holleran One of the most memorable queer novels of the 1970s, the first to fully capture the heady, erotic, and romantic fast lane of gay New York City. It was a world most men could only read and fantasize about, captured in breathtaking prose.
	Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin This hilarious GLBT serial-soap is as dear as a gossipy old girlfriend. Maupin's six books, which got their start as a column in a San Francisco daily newspaper in the mid-'70s, have probably introduced more nongay readers to gay characters and situations than any other. Tales is San Francisco's answer to Dancer >From the Dance, but it's about a much more integrated group of people, featuring every color, class, and persuasion.
	A Boy's Own Story, by Edmund White Gay fiction came of age with A Boy's Own Story, the first in a series of semifictional, semiautobiographical novels (the other two are The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony) that chart the narrator's path from his provincial 1960s childhood to urban life in the '90s.
	Like People in History, by Felice Picano Along with Andrew Holleran and Edmund White, Felice Picano emerged in the 1970s as part witness to, part participant in an era. This early-'90s novel is the story of several generations of gay men, an epic saga that White has called the "gay Gone With the Wind."
	A Visitation of Spirits, by Randall Kenan The haunting, hardscrabble story of four generations in the life of an African American family in North Carolina. It's told through a powerful collage of voices, including that of a bookish 16-year-old struggling to come out.
	Comfort and Joy, by Jim Grimsley A high-powered doctor who doesn't think of himself as gay brings his HIV-positive hemophiliac lover home to meet his snooty Southern society parents (at Christmas, no less). Sounds like a variant on the classic queer coming-out tale, but Grimsley's characters have more depth than most, and the emotional twists lift this story several notches above the norm.
	The Notorious Doctor August, by Christopher Bram In the best of Bram's several novels, a white bugle boy and a black slave meet as the Civil War is drawing to a close. The two embark on a love affair that spans continents and decades.