Allusions: LGBTQ Writing

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Two women are found murdered. One is Lorraine Quinn, Cantor Gold’s most recent one-night-stand. The other is political power broker and aspiring New York socialite Eve Garraway, a regular client of Cantor’s stolen art trade.

Police nemesis, Lieutenant Norm Huber, wants to pin the murders on Cantor, send her to prison, and put her in the electric chair. He’ll get evidence on her any way he can. Into this cauldron of danger and death come two other women, each with ties to Cantor’s past. One hates her until passion intervenes; the other harbors darkly hidden feelings.

Set during the earliest stirrings of the Homosexual Rights Movement, Cantor begins to question her own tenuous identity, and the trade-offs she must make to get what she wants.

Cantor Gold, dapper butch art thief and smuggler for whom survival is everything, must now grapple with two fronts: surviving the shifting sands of the criminal underworld, and navigating the changing tides of society.

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When cattle begin to turn up dead on the family farm, twenty four year-old Landon Winfield assumes it's the usual culprits. But along with the string of mysterious deaths that threaten him and his mother’s struggling farm, the arrival of a handsome newcomer with strange tattoos brings Landon face to face — or more like face to frothy mouthed muzzle —with the real predator that stalks the forests of Rock Creek.

A werewolf.

Yeah, those exist. And apparently, so do people that hunt them. Crazy, right?

The shocking revelations continue as the attractive hunter Rousseau reveals that Landon is a witch and has the power to summon fire at his fingertips. But his hands aren’t the only thing that heats up as he and the hunter work closely together to rid the small town of its werewolf problem and Landon finds himself falling for the knife-wielding stranger from Texas.

As they get closer, so does the angry beast that’s stalking them and Landon must embrace his newfound power if he hopes to save the farm, his family, and the hunter that holds his heart.

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Aidan Headly never wanted to be the man giving orders.

That's fine with the Democratic State Force base he's been assigned to command: they don't like to take orders. Nicknamed the Wildcards, they used to be the most effective base against the seven Corporations owning the former United States in a war that has lasted over half a century. Now the Wildcards are known for creative insubordination, chaos, and commanders begging to be reassigned.

Aidan is their last chance. If he can pull off his assignment as Commander and yank his ragtag crew of dreamers and fighters together, maybe they can get back to doing what they came to do: fighting for a country worth living in.

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An electric romance set against a rebel art scene sparks lethal danger for two girls in She's Too Pretty to Burn, an expertly plotted YA thriller by Wendy Heard.

The summer is winding down in San Diego. Veronica is bored, caustically charismatic, and uninspired in her photography. Nico is insatiable, subversive, and obsessed with chaotic performance art. They’re artists first, best friends second. But that was before Mick. Delicate, lonely, magnetic Mick: the perfect subject, and Veronica’s dream girl. The days are long and hot—full of adventure—and soon they are falling in love. Falling so hard, they never imagine what comes next. One fire. Two murders. Three drowning bodies. One suspect . . . one stalker. This is a summer they won’t survive.

Inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, this sexy psychological thriller explores the intersections of love, art, danger, and power.

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From the Author of the groundbreaking Chicago LGBTQ history book, Chicago Whispers!

Chicago After Stonewall: Gay Lib to Gay Life is by award-winning historian, journalist, and Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame inductee, St Sukie de la Croix – author of the groundbreaking Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall.

Chicago After Stonewall is a detailed account of how LGBTQ Chicagoans responded to the Stonewall Riots. The book pulls together jigsaw pieces of information from many sources, including a wealth of documents held in the McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, to reveal a picture of a raggle-taggle band of dysfunctional rebels with one cause.

In post-Stonewall Chicago, several attempts were made to publish a gay newspaper, but none lasted. The longest was the Chicago Gay Crusader with twenty-six issues, between 1973-1975. However, the paper was irregular and a hangover from the 1960s hippie underground press in style. It wasn't until June 20, 1975, when Grant L. Ford published Volume 1/Number 1 of Chicago Gay Life, that Chicago boasted a professional gay newspaper.

However, from the Stonewall Riots until the publication of Chicago Gay Life, there was no reliable source for local gay news, only irregular gay publications like The Paper, Mattachine Midwest Newsletter, or hippie underground/alternative rags, Seed, Kaleidoscope, Reader, and Second City, and college newspapers like Maroon and Roosevelt Torch.

This book begins with Stonewall and Henry Weimhoff, a University of Chicago student, and ends with the first issue of Gay Life on June 20, 1975, and an impassioned editorial by Valerie Bouchard for the community to "come together, unite, and focus on similarities and not differences."

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DISASTERAMA: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997, is the true story of Alvin Orloff who, as a shy kid from the suburbs of San Francisco, stumbled into the wild, eclectic crowd of Crazy Club Kids, Punk Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies, Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks of post-Stonewall American queer culture of the late 1970s, only to see the “subterranean lavender twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto” ravished by AIDS in the 1980s. Includes an introduction by Alexander Chee (How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

In Disasterama, Orloff recalls the delirious adventures of his youth—from San Francisco to Los Angeles to New York—where insane nights, deep friendships with the creatives of the underground, and thrilling bi-coastal living led to a free-spirited life of art, manic performance, high camp antics, and exotic sexual encounters, until AIDS threatened to destroy everything he lived for.

In his introduction, award-winning essayist and novelist Alexander Chee notes, "There’s a strange love I have for these times that can be hard to explain. How can I love what I lived through from a time that was as ‘bad’ as that? But as I read this, and those days came into view again, what I think of that love now is that there was a beauty to the beauty you found then that was made the more fierce by the horror of what was happening. If you could still find the worth of your life, still find sex, love, friendship, your own self-worth amid these attempts by the state at erasure and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, then it had the strength of something forged in fire."

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Kind Soul Closet Maniac is about a scared white kid Growing up in abject poverty in the ghetto of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Raised by “black out” alcoholic parents. Trying to navigate the violence, fear and child abuse put upon him and his siblings by abusive, malicious people. Finally escaping that situation only due to the house burning down and killing his mother. He went to live with a sibling in an all-white neighborhood but the violence at home was the same.

He escaped it all at around 16 and he tried to navigate life completely through trial and error. Trying to come to terms with his addiction to alcohol and doing every thing he could to not repeat the cycle of violence and substance abuse he witnessed and suffered as a child.

Finding true love and having it stolen away by cancer, he loses his battle to stay sober and is once again crashing down. A cycle that repeats itself to this day. The peaks and valleys he experiences in his life are supplied by an indomitable will that keeps him moving forward. Farther and faster away from a horrible beginning. And trying to fight against addiction to alcohol that keeps him crashing. Time after time.

There are many funny moments that come through. Our protagonist never gives up hope for better tomorrow. He tries to work his way through the anger he feels about his childhood. No, the rage he feels. Most of his struggle is to never become what he witnessed and was put upon him as a child. He fights against becoming the Closet Maniac. Is it too late?

In the end of it all, this is a tale of a kid trying to escape a horrible past and navigate an uncertain future. All the while never giving up, and eventually coming to terms with life. Ever vigilant and ever hopeful.

This is my life's story.

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