The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing (1995, Ed. Mark Mitchell)

I picked up this dry-looking tome in a charity shop in Driffield of all places a number of years ago and finally got around to opening the cover and diving in. 47 extracts and short stories, spanning centuries of gay writing, authors of the pieces include Jean Cocteau, Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Plato, Marquis de Sade, Thomas Mann and many others from around the world, most of whom I wasn't familiar with. 

Some of the pieces are raunchy and sex-filled, others languid and romantic, some are stuffy and self-important, and a slog to get through however short, and others were confusing for their inclusion - a handful of pieces didn't seem to be about gay issues or people at all! Maybe they were written by gay people - it would have been helpful for each story to have more of an introduction than 3 or 4 lines that didn't always tell you the nationality of the writer or when the piece was written. 

Of the 47 pieces not many stick in my mind, although the best and most memorable was the longest, more of a novella the complete story Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, about an older gentleman who goes to Venice for a holiday of sorts and becomes besotted by a teenage boy - nothing happens between them, but Mann's descriptions of beauty and obsession were a dream to read. Prikli by Michel Tournier also made an impression - a short story about a boy who clearly has some issues with his gender and ends the piece by castrating himself with a penknife. Lovely. It turned out to be a bit of a scholarly tome, less enjoyable than a regular book of gay shorts would have been, but it was interesting to see how homosexuality was depicted in different cultures and at different times, even if all each vignette gave was a snapshot.