Long before Stonewall, young Air Force veteran Edward Field, fresh from combat in WWII, threw himself into New York's literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet. In this vivid account of his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and the bohemian outposts of Paris's Left Bank and Tangier--where you could write poetry, be radical, and be openly gay--Field's intimate portraits of literary contemporaries such as Susan Sontag, Alfred Chester, May Swenson, and Frank O'Hara bring back the sadness, bawdiness, humor, and romanticism of the nigh-forgotten postwar bohemian...

In the first anthology to survey the full range of gay men's autobiographical writing from Walt Whitman to the present, Gay American Autobiography draws excerpts from letters, journals, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies to provide examples of the best life writing over the last century and a half.
Volume editor David Bergman guides the reader chronologically through selected writings that give voice to every generation of gay writers since the nineteenth century, including a diverse array of American men of African, European, Jewish, Asian, and Latino heritage....