Both intimate and detached, this poetry compilation delves into the politics and aesthetics of desiresacred and profane, frantic and serene, refined and grubby. Reflecting upon the comedy of human needs and the vanity of human wishes, these poems consider times of crisis when history is lived and reinvented, myth degenerates into faith, and reason falters. On this journey in which chance always prevails, the mood ranges from cheerful equanimity to gloomy desperation."

This important book is the first full-scale account of male gay literature across cultures, languages, and centuries. A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion. "Woods' own artistry is evident throughout this elegant and startling book. . . . These finely honed gay readings of selected Western (and some Eastern) literary texts richly reward the careful attention they demand. . . . Though grounded in the particulars of gay male identity, this...