Waves — Ethan Mordden

Avant-garde photographers and closeted cops. Sexual buccaneers and yearning celibates. Dutiful uncles and embittered sons. Healthy men who live in terror of getting sick. Sick men who find that their debility suddenly makes them fearless.

What unites the characters in this triumphantly outspoken anthology is a sexual orientation that has made them outsiders in contemporary America. What unites the fourteen stories that Ethan Mordden -- himself one of our best-known gay writers -- has collected here is an outsider's acuity of vision, a gaze that deconstructs the straight world even as it explores the landscape of sexual otherness.