Friends and Lovers: Gay Men Write About the Families They Create - Softcover

Preston, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1994, and Lowenthal, a freelance writer who contributed to Preston's Flesh and the Word series, have fashioned an absorbing, fresh and unpredictable collection of essays that explore the alternative "families" gay men create. The book is the third in another series?Preston also edited Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong and A Member of the Family: Gay Men Write About Their Families. The better essays move beyond the trappings of upscale gay culture (a preoccupation limiting Eric Latsky's Fire Island reminiscences and activist-writer Michael Bronski's valentine to a Boston bar). Michael L., in retreat from a family "addicted to normal," finds solace among the straight and gay members of his Alcoholics Anonymous group, the "good parent." Novelist Christopher Bram wittily describes his fleeting but intense collaboration with friends in making a movie short. Randy Boyd?black, 30-plus, HIV-positive?movingly recounts his friendship with a 19-year-old, straight Los Angeles Hispanic. Jesse Monteagudo, a Latino converting to Judaism, finds his new faith, more than his sexuality, the defining factor of his life.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The third set of reports (after Hometowns [1991] and A Member of the Family [1992]) on contemporary American gay men's lives from coeditor Preston is his last; he became too ill to complete work on it and died last year. In at least one respect, this is the best of the three anthologies: the writing overall is mechanically better, thanks, perhaps, to Lowenthal's less indulgent editorial hand. Many contributors to its predecessors appear once more (Christopher Bram and Michael Nava are, as before, outstanding), and all write about their love partnerships or most significant circles of acquaintance. Some refer to their one-on-one relationships as marriages and several more to such relationships as well as others involving more than two as their families, although only one reports that he and his partner care for a child and thereby fulfill the most common duty of a traditional family. Despite occasional lashing out at the traditional family, a worthwhile addition to popular gay studies. Ray Olson