GAY BOOK CLUB BOSTON
After enduring an injury at Dunkirk during World War II, Laurie Odell is sent to a rural veterans’ hospital in England to convalesce. There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance. Then one day, Ralph Lanyon, a mentor from Laurie’s schoolboy days, suddenly reappears in Laurie’s life, and draws him into a tight-knit social circle of world-weary gay men. Laurie is forced to choose between the sweet ideals of innocence and the distinct pleasures of experience.
Originally published in the United States in 1959, The Charioteer is a bold, unapologetic portrayal of male homosexuality during World War II that stands with Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories as a monumental work in gay literature.
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Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of name or situation or orientation—he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Intolerable memory accompanies sobriety. A-sail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us a nasty heartless blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.
They said I've done something wrong? . . . And they've just left me down here to starve. They'll see this inanition and be so damned they'll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them . . . : the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I'll pat their heads and nod. I'll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.
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In the fall of 1940, with the world at war, a young man arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are already set on joining the Royal Air Force as a pilot. Handsome, charismatic, a powerful athlete and oarsman, David Sparsholt seems at first unaware of the effect he has on others--especially on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax, son of a celebrated novelist, himself also destined to become a writer. While the Blitz rages in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove from the action: a place of transience and uncertainty, the fears and rigors of the blackout both encouraging and concealing unexpected liaisons. Between these two young men of very different backgrounds an unusual friendship develops, one whose consequences will unfold over the many years that follow.
PAST SELECTIONS
2025
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
A Single Man, Isherwood
The Immoralist, Gide
In Tongues, Grattan
Confessions of a Mask, Mishima
2024
Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde
Maurice, Forster
To the Lighthouse, Wolff
The New Life, Crewe
Love Junkie, Plunket
The Beautiful Room is Empty, White
Death in Venice, Mann
Faggots, Kramer
Plays Well With Others, Gurganus
2023
Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, Hager
Necessary Errors, Crain
City and the Pillar, Vidal
Dancer from the Dance, Holleran
Song of Achilles, Miller
Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin
Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst
Tops Bottoms and Sidepockets, Robin Versage
This Boy’s Life, White
Swimming in the Dark, Jedrowski
2022
Brideshead Revisited, Waugh
Memoirs of Hadrian, Yourcenar
MacArthur Park, Durban
Book of Salt, Truong
Boy Culture, Rettenmund
POSSIBLE FUTURE SELECTIONS
Emperor of Gladness
The New Life
The Normal Heart
Destiny of Me
Shuggie Bain, Young Mungo
Ways & Means
Caledonian Road
Gay Bar
Justin Torres
The Baccae
Unnecessary Errors