like most collections, this is a bit hit or miss. it's a little unusual (in a way i like) in that it's a mixture of poetry, fiction, and essays.

at first i was surprised that the works from the mid-80's didn't talk at all about hiv or aids; i kept waiting for it to come up. i guess when you're trying to represent an entire year in one or two samples of work, you can't get everything. still, it was surprising to me that the first reference to aids was in a poem from 1989, and it's oblique and not directly mentioned at all.

i didn't like all of this, and some of the essays, i thought, were too much of their time. out of context of the time they didn't have nearly the same meaning. or maybe that's not true if you're a part of this community, and the references to those groups and community partners has more of a connection. for me, a white woman, the meaning had been lost because i hadn't heard of the places or people or groups they were talking about in such detail. some of the poetry was really good, but mostly it was the fiction that resonated most with me in this collection, and mostly the more recent work. of course the james baldwin and samuel r delany were great, even though it's never my preference to read an excerpt from a longer work as both of these are. actually their two pieces were the only ones in the first decade (1979-1989) that i really liked in the book. it started to get better for me after 1989, and i especially liked melvin dixon's piece from 1989. other authors i liked were craig g harris, randall kenan, and brian keith jackson (especially this last, which was an essay, and probably the only nonfiction piece in the entire book that i really liked). toward the end and the most recent writings, i really liked the james hannahan - his was the best writing since the baldwin and delany early on - and bruce morrow and e lynn harris.

there were at least a couple of instances of sexualizing violence that really bothered me, where it seemed the author wanted the reader to be turned on by rape or forced sexual acts. and a handful where the writing was really not good. (plus some typos - audre lorde's name was misspelled, differently, a couple of times.)

not all of these are good, and some of the ones that aren't, i didn't like at all. but some of these are really good, and more than that, this collects 25 years of black, gay writing, all in one place. it's mostly authors i'd never heard of before, and i'm eager to learn more of them, and of more than them. i think it's an important book, even as i didn't enjoy everything in it. ( )

Let me begin with a confession: this cannot be a completely unbiased review. Many of the men whose works are collected here are my friends and colleagues. I’ve laughed with them, whined about the writing life with them, exchanged e-mails and drafts of work with some, took one out dancing, another out to dinner, bought a third the last drink he had in my city. The men represented here are in many ways my brothers. Picking up this volume is like seeing myself and my past reflected back at me. It is a glorious sight.

I will get my few quibbles about the anthology out of the way as well. Perhaps one more pass by an editor would have picked up on the all caps printing of Marvin K. White’s poem. The relatively small ratio of poets to prose writers in the collection does not accurately reflect the centrality of verse in the making of contemporary black gay America. Finally, the bibliography at the close of the book, is also somewhat frustratingly incomplete, listing, for example, only one of Cyrus Cassells four books of poetry, and Randal Keenan’s fiction, but not his nonfiction tour of black America Walking on Water. Use of the word ‘selected’ here would have solved this problem.

But enough nit picking: This is a wonderful, panoramic collection of work. ( )