sacollinsauthor

Hello All! New to this site (and am about to release my first full length (205K word) epic) and found this forum topic to be interesting enough to me to introduce and post: There are a few on my must have list - Recently - TJ Klune's "Into this River I Drown" is at the top of my recent discovery list. (Actually ANYTHING by him is on my must read list). Classically (cause I am an older cat who was around back in the 70's when these books were quite the controversial releases in the day) - Gordon Merrick's The Lord Won't Mind (which is part of a trilogy) [sidebar: Gordon Merrick's work was only in out of print for the longest time and now has finally been released in ebook format for the first time - if you'd like to read from our forebears of modern gay literature he's definitely one to pick up on - Lord Won't Mind was released in the early 70's.] John Rechy's - The Sexual Outlaw and Numbers - Two books that are gritty, brutally honest takes on urban gay life. One of them is fiction (Numbers) the other is more of a sexual documentary, These men (Rechy and Merrick) I credit with saving my young gay boy life in the 70's when I didn't think I had anything to look forward to by way of happiness. High school was hell what with bullying and taunts coming at me - Merrick and Rechy were my go-to's when I needed to lick wounds and say to myself that there was a world out there for me if I could just get through to graduation. Those books were in my backpack every damned day of my high school years. They were my gay boy bibles. A primer of what could be after the hell of school. And it did get better. So, for what it's worth, these are my recommendations (though I will say that I love the Jay Bell series too).