Michael Lowenthal

A fiercely honest exploration of the risks and rewards of contemporary relationships--and hookups--Sex with Strangers embraces the dizzying power of attraction across the spectrum of passion and infatuation. In this fearless collection, lust and loneliness drive a diverse cast of queer and straight characters into sometimes precarious entanglements. Recognizing that any partner is unknowable on some level, Michael Lowenthal writes about how intimacy can make strangers of us all. A newly ordained priest struggles with guilt and longing when he runs into his ex-girlfriend. A woman weighs the cost of protecting her daughter from a man they both adore. A teenage busboy has a jolting brush with a famous musician. A young man tries to salvage a long-distance relationship while caring for his mentor, an erotic writer dying of AIDS. In edgy, disquieting stories, Lowenthal traces the paths that attraction and erotic encounters take, baffling and rueful as often as electrifying. This fraught and funny volume forces us to grapple with our own subconscious desires and question how well we can ever really know ourselves.

Sex with Strangers

During World War I, after an impulsive night with an infected soldier, Frieda Mintz, a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl, is sent to a makeshift detention center for medical treatment with other "charity girls" in similar circumstances.

Charity Girl

Jeremy Stull, a Harvard student, studies a Amish family's sense of community and exile and compares it to his own lifestyle as a camper and counselor at a Vermont summer camp.

A Novel

Avoidance

John Preston

Gay men have always created their own families. While some replace the "blood" kin who have rejected or denied their sexual orientation, others intentionally choose to build new kinds of families, often ingeniously rewriting the rules society has prescribed. In this collection of powerful stories, Christopher Bram, Larry Duplechan, Michael Bronski, Andrew Hollran, and many others offer heartfelt assessments of the effort to create a place where one can belong.

Gay Men Write about the Families They Create

Friends and Lovers

Charity girl

From the author of The Same Embrace: A “lively and illuminating” novel that explores a little-known chapter of World War I history (The Washington Post Book World). Frieda Mintz refused her mother’s plan to marry her off to an older, wealthy man. Now she’s determined to make her own way in the world—and find love on her own terms. Earning her keep in a Boston department store, she spends her nights in the dance halls, intoxicated by her newfound freedom and the patriotic fervor of the day. That is, until her soldier beau reports her as his last sexual contact, sweeping her up in the government’s wartime crusade against venereal disease. Soon, Frieda is quarantined in a detention center, forced into manual labor, and subjected to questionable cures. But she finds comfort among those around her, including an incorrigible woman of the night and a sympathetic social worker, as they all seek to build a new kind of independence. At once a horrifying exposé of a dark period in US history and an unexpectedly hopeful story of desire, identity, and righteousness, Charity Girl is a stunningly researched and expertly crafted work of literature, guaranteed to enrapture even as it enrages. “Lively and illuminating . . . marrying the facts of history with the details that make a fictional life come alive.” —Anita Shreve, The Washington Post Book World “A lively, emotion-laden novel of an irrepressible young woman’s punishment for rebelling against upbringing and society.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Expect to be drawn into this absorbing page-turner.” —USA Today

Having a baby to save a marriage—it’s the oldest of clichés. But what if the marriage at risk is a gay one, and having a baby involves a surrogate mother? Pat Faunce is a faltering romantic, a former poetry major who now writes textbooks. A decade into his relationship with Stu, an airline pilot from a fraught Jewish family, he fears he’s losing Stu to other men—and losing himself in their “no rules” arrangement. Yearning for a baby and a deeper commitment, he pressures Stu to move from Manhattan to Cape Cod, to the cottage where Pat spent boyhood summers. As they struggle to adjust to their new life, they enlist a surrogate: Debora, a charismatic Brazilian immigrant, married to Danny, an American carpenter. Gradually, Pat and Debora bond, drawn together by the logistics of getting pregnant and away from their spouses. Pat gets caught between loyalties—to Stu and his family, to Debora, to his own potent desires—and wonders: is he fit to be a father? In one of the first novels to explore the experience of gay men seeking a child through surrogacy, Michael Lowenthal writes passionately about marriages and mistakes, loyalty and betrayal, and about how our drive to create families can complicate the ones we already have. The Paternity Test is a provocative look at the new “family values.”

The Paternity Test

An uncensored collection of erotic secret fantasies, elusive loves, and titillating, forbidden encounters features Scott Heim's "I Am Going to Eat You," Brian Bouldrey's "Ex Marks the Spot," "Field of Vision" by Stephen Greco, and Charles Flowers's "In This Corner." Original.

Michael Lowenthal

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