Stonewall Literary Book Club

The Stonewall Literary Book Club meets the second Monday of each month and the book to be discussed is Holleran’s The Beauty of Men (1996).

From Publisher’s Weekly

“Lark, the protagonist of Holleran’s profoundly sad, elegant and insightful new novel, his first since Nights in Aruba was published 13 years ago, is virtually unique in today’s gay literature: he is a 47-year-old gay man, caring for his quadriplegic mother in a small town in Florida, whose sex life is confined to rest rooms and the baths, who has never come out to his family and whose increasingly empty existence is defined by agonizing loneliness. All the friends from Lark’s long-ago glamorous youth in New York are dead of AIDS, and his mother’s health has consumed his life as surely as HIV has destroyed the world of Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1977), one of the classics of gay literature. Age and gray hair have rendered Lark invisible in the sexual competition that defined his life until AIDS, and his mother’s impending death has forced him to see that his failure to come out has made him fundamentally invisible to her as well. But Lark, as retrograde and politically incorrect as his life in the closet may make him appear, is nevertheless a chillingly emblematic Everyman, failing to find meaning and purpose in a world devastated by AIDS. Holleran’s trademark prose-lush, carefully cadenced and keenly observed-creates a mesmerizingly claustrophobic world where the trapped elderly residents of Lark’s mother’s nursing home, the lonely men Lark encounters in his fruitless search for love and the overwhelming anonymity of suburban America have equal power to break the heart.”

The Stonewall Library focuses on LGBTQ themed fiction, memoir and biography, mostly from the 20th and 21st centuries.  Participants will be asked to read a new book each month and then collectively discuss it at their meetings.  Members of the group will be encouraged to help select titles of books.

The Club is led by Clayton Littlewood.  Born and raised in England, Clay now lives in Fort Lauderdale.  A musician, playwright and actor, he is the author of two books Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho (Cleis Press 2008) and Goodbye to Soho (DWB Press, 2012).

Enjoy an interview Clayton Littlewood conducted with Christopher Isherwood’s partner, Don Bachardy.

The Club is limited to 15 participants and is held on ZOOM. Participants may join by video or phone. Admission is free, but you must be a Stonewall Library member to participate. To sign up, please contact Executive Director  Hunter O’Hanian.