Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of The Pirates

O and Ange. Artaud and de Nerval, Pussycat and Ostracism, Antigone, and St. Gall Bladder. Desire, memory, agony and revolution. These are the characters and terrains you?ll discover in an Acker book, and no other of her books? titles speak more clearly of who she was ? a pirate who didn?t give a fuck about thieving anything and everything that suited her up on her journey toward finding the buried treasure. She was among the first of the samplers and a true cyber-punk, slipping through skins, genders and time while rewriting woman?s body like no one else has before or since, and the treasures she brought back for us were the beauteous/hideous monsters that dwell in the River Styx of our collective subconscious. Kathy?s thieving was one small facet of her alchemical prowess at mixing part pirate?s booty, parts her own formidable intelligence and fierce imagination into the headiest of gumbos. Don?t read Kathy looking to theorize, code, or even understand. For those who haven?t experienced her, cut the chain on your anchor and open a page to anywhere. Go on, take a spoonful, and try not to freak when the taste makes you deconstruct and explode. (Musical companion CD, Pussy, King of the Pirates, by Mekons and Kathy Acker on Quarterstick/Touch and Go Records,1996)

Adele Bertei

Giorgio Bassani, The Smell of Hay

Reading Giorgio Bassani is like travelling on the Orient Express: the ride is smooth and luxurious, then you enter a station and look out the window and see in the distance thugs clubbing an old man to death. And so it is with 'The gold-rimmed Eyeglasses', a novella to be found in a book entitled The Smell of Hay. The report of a 20th Century tragedy, 'The gold-rimmed Eyeglasses' is a masterpiece which shows that it is small quotidian acts of unkindness that lead to the persecution and the eventual death of outsiders. The narrator of the book is Jewish: he watches as the good people of Ferrara (Bassani's hometown in the North of Italy) force the homosexual town doctor to commit suicide: he sympathizes with the doctor but his own desire to belong - a desire the reader knows doomed to failure - prevents him from lifting a finger to save his unhappy friend. 'The gold-rimmed Eyeglasses' captures a moment when European history was on a knife-edge and abandoned to barbarism by the timidity of 'respectable' people: its power lies in its elegant understatement. As they say, a must read.

Pete Ayrton

Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels

A series of unstoppable tiny novels collected under the title Dangerous Angels, this book has passed through the hands of more generations and populations than any of the other books I lend or give. The stories whirl around the hallucinatory landscape of LA, with equal ecstacy, tragedy and ultimate beauty, telling the story of a band of teenagers of multiple and variable sexualities and gender identifications (all treated as part of the magic of being alive, as painful as that may express itself) raising each other, themselves and sometimes their parents. This book is labelled for Young Adults and we're lucky if we can all call ourselves that on a good day. Despite its fairytale quality, Francesca Lia Block holds no punches when it comes to isolation, body dysmorphia, drug addiction and child abandonment, but she never, never abandons her beloved heroes and heroines and through the love of her pages, the freak/geek inside of you feels protected and celebrated as well. Tear falls on page / love.

Kathe Izzo

Augusten Burroughs, Dry

Augusten Burroughs' autobiographical account of rehab and the struggle towards sobriety combines an astonishing balance between the cocky irony of a twenty-something ad executive, the ugly honesty of addiction, the raging pain of personal loss and the dark humor of self-discovery. When the slick young Burroughs finds his lucrative career in danger as a result of his drinking binges, he is forced into an all-gay Midwestern rehab program where his worst nightmares of un-cool, touchy-feely ?openness? surround him. Back home in New York City on his own again, Burroughs chronicles his daily fight against alcohol while falling in love with the entirely wrong man, losing his best friends and hitting rock bottom. Burroughs does not present his tale from the peak of absolution, but carries the reader along with him on a fascinating, hilarious and horrifying ride.

Tessa Leigh Derfner

Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

Burroughs' jaw-dropping biography is off the scale in terms of dysfunctional family life. Its power stems from the innocence that allows him to attend school with beard-rash from a lover twice his age when he isn't surviving suicide attempts encouraged by his own parents. Burroughs develops a neatness fetish and a desire for all things to possess 'star quality', which involves gold-mirroring his bedroom and wrapping the dog in foil. He longs to be a beautician and memorises dialogue from Brook Shields' movies, but his outsider status quickly vanishes in a family where everyone operates beyond normal rules. Burroughs admits he has become addicted to a permanent state of crisis, because it turns life into an adventure. The boy is drawn between polarised adults who are either totally self-absorbed or insanely liberal. His status as a sexual outsider provides him with a survival mechanism for coping with events that most children would have collapsed beneath.

Christopher Fowler

Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servants

While Quentin Crisp often proclaimed, 'Books are for writing, not for reading', it would be a bad idea to follow his advice, especially when it comes to his own memoir. A wonderful book from start to finish, The Naked Civil Servant was garnered from his long exodus away from humanity because of what society at that point could only refer to as his 'difference'. First published in London in 1965, the book was the result of what Mr Crisp later became wildly famous for - his profound and funny point of view, first spoken in radio interviews that lef to the book's publication. The book sold poorly at the time, but was later made into a film and catapulted both its star (John Hurt) and its subject (homosexuality) into the limelight. Everyone sees the film. My advice is read the book and see why the story of Quentin Crisp's life, written with extraordinary insight into the human condition, brought homosexuality kicking and spouting witticisms into the mainstream.

Penny Arcade

E M Forster, Maurice

Forster wrote that a friend's lover touched him at the top of the buttocks and the novel Maurice was the direct result of that physical contact. Maurice Hall is gay in Edwardian England (not a good combo) and the novel's bitter-sweetness derives principally from Maurice's search for genuine feeling in a society that has all but denied feeling of any kind, let alone the 'unspeakable act of the Greeks'. Forster himself felt it necessary to suppress publication of the novel until after his death. It may be a tale of material privilege - beautiful floppy-haired boys at Cambridge - but it's also an indictment of poverty of feeling, and a gentle reminder that our freedoms, all too recently won, could be all too easily lost.

Martin Firrell

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

My bandmate, Verity, gave me this book for my birthday about six years ago. Once i started reading it, I couldnt put it down until I'd finished. In fact, Verity & I became a bit obsessed with it & then Verity went off & wrote the words to 'On Parade'- which is all about Stephen. I think many women would identify with the young Stephen - I couldnt believe that it was written about so clearly fifty years before I was born & that it was still so relevant. I really wish I had read it when I was a lot younger - I think I would have felt a lot less weird about being such a tomboy. There are things in the book which did annoy me, but I kept reminding myself that it was written in the '20's... I'm not surprised by the outrage it caused, Radclyffe Hall was well ahead of her time & for that I am very thankful.

Emma Gaze

Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Stories

Reading Isherwood now, you can really creep yourself out - especially if you despise the Bush Administration. Taking place in the years before and during Hitler's coup in Germany, Isherwood portrays the scrappy merchants, working class tenement dwellers, conspiratorial intellectuals, dogged journalists -all vocally opposed to the Nazi regime - complaining about them, shaking their heads and bitching about them to each other in cafes - but still hopelessly in awe while The Third Reich slips into power. A little too familiar. Compared to today's constant sluttiness, all that pre-war Berlin hedonism doesn't seem all that seemly, which can creep you out even more. Also Sally Bowles is less plucky and lovable than her portrayal by Liza in the movie Cabaret. She is a pretentious, irritating little poseur who kind of uses the narrator's good will and then drops him once she finds a rich guy to cling to - perhaps the best example in literature of the kind of person you think is your friend when you are very young and just getting your grounding as an urban gay.

Mike Albo

Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

I not sure I understand what a queer book is, but one where its almost impossible to tell the gender of the narrator seems pretty queer to me. It is such an impressive literary trick that its hard to believe that it doesn't get in the way of the narrative flow or the emotional journey, but it doesn't. In my early twenties I definitely saw the narrator Laurie as a young man struggling with his guilt at his relationship with his married lover Vere. Now I simultaneously enjoy Laurie as both male and female. It's like reading two different narratives at the same time. It's a beautiful experience. The book is about a High Anglican mission to Turkey involving bad tempered camels and long essays on religion. It's got one of the most famous opening sentences in English literature. Oh - did I mention that it's very funny too.

Christopher Green