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The Gay Book Club
Podcast Episodes
A Hollywood horror writer is told to kill off his gay characters—or else. Chuck Tingle's Bury Your Gays takes its name from one of fiction's most tired tropes and turns it into something sharper. Booker and Reed dig in.
Two gay thrillers where love bruises back. P.J. Vernon's Bath Haus sends Oliver—recovering addict, doting doctor boyfriend, very wrong bathhouse hookup—spiraling into lies he can't outrun. Micah Nemerever's These Violent Delights follows two 1970s Pittsburgh college boys whose obsession gets exactly as ugly as it sounds. Lock the door behind you.
Two gay novels, two escape routes: Edward Cahill's Disorderly Men against Joe Westmoreland's Tramps Like Us. A Greenwich Village bar raid throws three closeted men into one paddy wagon and one impossible question: how much happiness am I allowed? Westmoreland's autofictional road trip burns through '70s New Orleans and San Francisco hedonism, right up to the AIDS crisis. One book about hiding, one about running.
Two boys, two islands of bad weather, one impossible question: how do you love someone in a language you're not allowed to speak? We pair Oleander — Scarlett Drake's BookTok-famous Great Expectations dark romance — with Douglas Stuart's literary heartbreaker John of John, and find the same wound told loud and told quiet.
Two gay YA love stories, two boys named Jamie, two very different ends of the world.
In Boy Like Me, the world is a 1994 British classroom where Section 28 has banned any mention of gay lives in school, so Jamie's romance unfolds in secret — in notes passed back and forth in the margins of a library book. In All That's Left in the World, the world has literally ended, and Jamie is holed up alone in a cabin when a half-dead boy turns up on his doorstep.
Nobody has the refractory period of a Norse god. Sir, that is not how any of this works. This one's about how sex gets written in MM romance — and how often it gets written badly. We run the pet peeves, we get generous about the authors who nail it, then we rate two dozen tropes: love it, hate it, or it depends, with a book for every single one.