Hidden History is a biweekly column looking at the nooks and crannies of the GLBT past.

I’ve spent almost 10 years publishing in the gay and lesbian press. Like any community, there are cold or crass or self-serving members of the gay literary world. I’ve heard tell of some and met a few others. But my great fortune has been that nearly everyone I have been in close contact with has been incredibly generous with their time, their knowledge, and their energy.

So let this edition of the Hidden History reading roundup serve as a token of appreciation to four of my favorite members of that part of my life. The authors and editors of these books are not only skilled at their craft, but they’re also great people.They’re the sorts who make everything fun and worthwhile. Thanks, folks!

Christopher Bram, The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes (2000)

A grand, sprawling epic of a novel, from a gay novelist whose books (Hold Tight; Almost History; Father of Frankenstein) have frequently been informed by more than just a dash of historical background. The Notorious Dr. August follows its narrator and title character, Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, through his career as a “spiritual pianist” and possible clairvoyant, and his love for Isaac Kemp, a former slave he first met during the Civil War. His life takes him across continents and over 50 years, from the battlefields of the Civil War, through Europe and into Turkey, and on back to the United States and a fiery conclusion at Coney Island. Complicated issues of race and sexuality and religion are grounded in the intricacies of messy human emotion, as “Dr. August,” Isaac, and Isaac’s wife Alice (a white governess) negotiate tricky alliances and truces over the decades of their journey. Top-drawer historical fiction, the kind that isn’t showing off its research, but instead incorporates the research into providing a setting and backdrop for the stuff of real human relationships. “Dr. August” also makes for one of the best narrators in all of gay fiction, with an assured voice both earnest and smart-aleck, the memoirs of a man with the chutzpah to tell the young man to whom he is dictating, “Write it all down, my recording angel, every word. Later we can delete and shape and lie.”

If you enjoy The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes, try Bram’s Almost History, a more modern multi-decade epic, or Exiles in America, which uses recent events to help frame another story of tangled lives and loves.

Daniel Curzon, Dropping Names: The Delicious Memoirs of Daniel Curzon (2004)

This book is unique.While the basic form of these memoirs was written in 1986, Daniel Curzon—author of Something You Do in the Dark (1971), the first gay protest novel—didn’t publish them until 2004. Instead of using the intervening time to edit the entries and ‘make nice,’ Curzon left them “pretty much as they were when I first wrote them.” The result is a hilarious, if scathing, assessment of dozens of literary and celebrity figures from the gay liberation era. Tennessee Williams (“If you don’t want people to stare at you, you shouldn’t dress like an oversized dead bear!”), Joyce Carol Oates (“an old fart in a young body”), Edmund White’s novels (“airless mansions of Art”): all of these and many more receive the razor edge of Curzon’s observations. What keeps the book level is that Curzon doesn’t hide or condone his own mistakes and prickliness; his self-criticism is as tough as his criticism of others. There are also tremendously affecting memories of fellow writers he liked very much, including Richard Hall, James Broughton, and Roger Austen.A quirky, endlessly readable quasi-autobiography of a gay writer who has, for better or worse, “kissed very little ass along the way.”

If you like Dropping Names, try: well, like I said, it’s unique; there’s really nothing like it that I’m aware of. Curzon’s fiction and plays are available through Amazon in reprinted editions; of those, I particularly recommend The World Can Break Your Heart (1984).

Lisa C. Moore, publisher and editor, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (2008; originally edited by Joseph Beam, 1986) and Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (originally edited by Essex Hemphill, 1991)

Lisa C. Moore, publisher of the black lesbian and gay Redbone Press, undertook the massive editorial task of reissuing these two seminal anthologies of black gay male writing. Both Beam and Hemphill died from AIDS, but these collections serve as living testament to their passion and community spirit. Nearly every important black gay writer of the 1970s and 1980s is collected here: Melvin Dixon, Reginald Shepherd, Craig G. Harris, Donald W. Woods, Samuel Delany, Assotto Saint, Adrian Stanford, David Frechette, Marlon Riggs, Ron Simmons. These books function as a roll call of poets, fiction writers, essayists, and filmmakers who helped to redefine what it meant to be a black, gay man. Race relations, masculinity and femininity, black gay history, the creation of community, the achievement of individual authenticity: all of these major themes wind throughout the writing, creating a kaleidoscope of the issues confronting black gay men during the post-Stonewall decades and up to the present day.

If you enjoy In the Life and Brother to Brother, try: any of the collections of writing by the contributors to those books. Other anthologies worth reading from the era (and that share contributors) include Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (ed. B.Michael Hunter) or The Road Before Us and Here to Dare (ed. Assotto Saint; exclusively poetry). Redbone Press has also published a variety of book of interest to black lesbians and gay men.

Ian Young, Out in Paperback: A Visual History of Gay Pulps (2007)

I wouldn’t say that Ian Young saved my life, but the two poetry anthologies he edited, The Male Muse (1973) and The Son of the Male Muse (1983), were a tremendous source of strength to me when I was in high school. Once copies found their way into my hands, I carried them around everywhere, loving both the poems themselves and the sense of a gay literary history that they gave me.

Speaking of gay literary history, Out in Paperback is top-notch. A slim, heavily illustrated extended essay that talks of the “gay paperback explosion” of the 1950s through the 1980s, Out in Paperback also shows how the themes, motifs, and taglines on the book covers reflect the changing perceptions of gay life and community throughout the gay liberation era and the decades leading up to it. A fascinating and beautiful mini-history lesson.

If you enjoy Out in Paperback, try: Michael Bronski’s Pulp Friction, which excerpts some of the pulp novels Young depicts here and provides further historical background and analysis. Another collection of essays about gay paperbacks, The Golden Age of Gay Fiction, is tentatively scheduled for a 2009 release from MLR Press. And everyone should read Ian Young’s “gay psychohistory,” The Stonewall Experiment.

Have a suggestion for a Hidden History topic? Love, hate, agree, or disagree with something I wrote? Just want to talk? Feel free to direct e-mail to philipclark@hotmail.com.