More than just a bookstore, DC’s Lambda Rising (1625 Connecticut Ave., NW,) functions also as a community center and intellectual resource for the capital’s queer residents. Please continue to support it by buying this and other titles on their website or at the TNG shelf at their brick and mortar location. If you do the latter you get to chat with their employees, which I promise is always a pleasant experience.

Former TNG contributor and all-around talented guy Rob Kirby was a natural choice for our inaugural “Lambda Rising Book of the Week” feature. Opening his book “Curbside Boys: The New York Years” you immediately get two hints that it is unlike many other works of so-called “gay literature.” For one, its opens with a quote from an obscure Magnetic Fields song. Secondly, it is an engaging, heart-wrenching, hot-animated-sex-featuring cartoon. The fact that the characters are drawn with pen and ink, and not exacting prose, is the only thing that keeps them from being some of the most realistic gay fictional creations since your high school boyfriend who lived in Canada.

“Curbside” tells the story of Drew, a dorky bookworm with a sad past who will be a ringer for anyone who has ever felt apart from the gay “scene.” He begins to fall for his self-centered, hot roommate Nathan in a way that almost everyone reading knows is not going to end well. Throughout this, his roommate Kevin continues an on-again/off-again romance with an ex-fling named Rain that mirrors Drew’s own tryst.

Such description doesn’t do justice to the three dimensionality of all the characters involved, and the degree to which this book actually reflects a real, unfabulous, sweaty, work-a-day gay life. My copy has had the spot of honor next to my toilet for months now. My boyfriend has already gotten hooked and I’m pretty sure that friends and neighbors now just come to our house to use the john, read a few pages and leave. If there’s higher praise for a book I’m not aware of it.

Support your local bookstore today by purchasing this book online at LambdaRising.com.