A thoroughly-researched, minutely detailed and documented, and very intimate and readable biography of each of the twelve Apostles.

In Not Paul, But Jesus Jeremy Bentham offers solid proof that the books of the Bible ascribed to Paul could not have been divinely inspired due to the numerous fallacies and contradictions contained within them. Indeed, argues Bentham, Paul’s works even contradict the teachings of Christ. It is likely the books ascribed to Paul, many of which are merely letters to early Christian churches, were added by the church because the doctrine of Paul allows the church to play a far larger role.

Thought by some scholars to be the "rival poet" of Shakespeare's sonnets, Richard Barnfield is best known for The Affectionate Shepherd, which appeared in 1594, published anonymously, and shocked many with its openly homosexual verse.

The Great Plague, which hit London in 1665 and killed an estimated 100,000 citizens, one-fourth of the city's population, was followed a year later by the Great Fire, which burned the City of London and destroyed approximately 70,000 of the city's 80,000 homes. Fortunately, the fire also killed many of the rats that were spreading the plague.

A collection of romantic poems Byron wrote for John Edleston, Lord Clare, Earl Delawarr, Lucas Chalandrutsanos, and other boys. The collection spans Byron's life. Some poems for Edleston, Clare, and Delawarr were among the earliest verse he wrote; the poems to Chalandrutsanos were his very last. Selected and introduced by Keith Hale.

What happens when someone who doesn’t speak English attempts to write a Portuguese-English phrasebook? THIS is what happens. "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.” – Mark Twain

Household Gods, written by Crowley in Italy in 1911, is one of his most erotic books. He called it a comedy.

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving...

Andre Gide presents his remembrances and candid impressions of Wilde the person and the writer, focusing on the changes he observed in his friend once Wilde settled in France after his release from Reading Jail. In prison, we learn, Wilde discovered the beauty of pity through his friendships with fellow inmates.

Hafiz has been called “the master of the erotic ghazal,” and much of the sexuality in his work is homoerotic. Hafiz’ ghazals are infused with same-sex mysticism that startles many Western minds because of the expression of male-male love as not only approaching but actually reaching a state of divinity. Hafiz believes one can see an image of the creator in the face of one’s beloved. His religious fervor is matched by his intense carnal desires, and he sees no contradiction in the two.

Ode to Boy is a collection of same-sex attraction in literature. Included in this volume are works by Homer, Solon, Sappho, the Old Testament, Anacreon, Theognis, Pindar, Plato, Xenophon, Callimachus, Meleager, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Petronius, Plutarch, Ovid, Aelian, Strato, Agathius, Rumi, Sa'di, Hafiz, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Richard Barnfield, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Anna Seward.

Ode to Boy, Vol. 2 is a collection of literature devoted to same-sex attraction from the 19th Century through the war poets. Hale's introductions to the authors are to the point and sometimes witty, specifying why the author or work is included in the volume and sometimes providing a larger biographical scope.

Ode to Boy is a collection of poetry devoted to same-sex attraction from antiquity through the First World War.

Keith Hale examines the bowdlerization of Brooke in existing biographies and looks into the poet's self-proclaimed bisexual identity. He examines the same-sex relationships Brooke enjoyed with Michael Sadleir, Charles Lascelles, and Denham Russell-Smith and explores Brooke's sexuality within its historical context.

Rupert Brooke of Rugby, revised 2nd edition, contains biography and commentary as well as Brooke's poetry, prose, and photographs. The edition includes Keith Hale's complete Rupert Brooke: The Bisexual Brooke, Updated and Expanded Edition, Brooke's Collected Poems with introductions by Margaret Lavington and George Edward Woodberry, and Brooke's Letters from America with an introduction by Henry James.

A Survey of Gay Literature is a single-volume collection of literature devoted to same-sex attraction from antiquity through the First World War.

The first half of the anthology of gay literature in a slightly different configuration than our title Ode to Boy.

The second half of the gay literature anthology in a slightly different configuration than our title Ode to Boy.

Just as the Great Fire of London took place one year after the Great Plague broke out, in the 14th Century, Germany and Latvia were still burying their dead from the Black Death, or bubonic plague, when they were hit by a strange epidemic--often called Dancing Mania, St. John's Dance, or St. Vitus' Dance--that caused thousands of people to literally "dance" themselves to death.

As Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in The New Yorker (October 31, 2011), after noting that it took Pope seven years to complete his volume: “Many consider it the greatest English Iliad, and one of the greatest translations of any work into English. It manages to convey not only the stateliness and grandeur of Homer’s lines, but their speed and wit and vividness.”

The complete editions of A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems together with an introduction by Keith Hale that ties the poems to their historical root: Housman's love for his friend Moses Jackson.

The story of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple is a beautiful and intriguing love story, well worth being treated as serious literature and appearing between covers of its own. For this version of the story, editor Tobias Skinner has chosen to believe that it was Lazarus who first wrote this version of the gospel--Lazarus, who is so comfortable in his love relationship with Jesus that he can confidently refer to himself as "the disciple whom Jesus loved."

A compilation of the Georgian Poetry anthologies published by Edward Marsh from 1911-22, edited and with a new introduction by Keith Hale. The Georgians in their day were acclaimed as bold, fresh, and realistic in their use of language. D.H. Lawrence, a contributor to the anthologies, said the first collection was “like a big breath taken when we are waking up after a night of oppressive dreams."

"...you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend."

Owen writes of bullet-heads that “long to muzzle in the hearts of lads” and of “a boy’s murdered mouth” and “hearts made great by shot.” In doing so, the outrage of war intermingles with eroticism to produce a powerful emotion in the reader.

One of Classical Greece's premiere philosophers and writers, Plato wrote Symposium and The Phaedrus as treatises on homosexuality, with the subject covered not only from Plato's restrained point of view but also from the point of view of those who consider the love of adolescent males the highest form of love and at least one person, Pausanias, who feels the greatest love is between males who are more mature and more equal in age.

One of Classical Greece's premiere philosophers and writers, Plato wrote Symposium and The Phaedrus as treatises on homosexuality, with the subject covered not only from Plato's restrained point of view but also from the point of view of those who consider the love of adolescent males the highest form of love and at least one person, Pausanias, who feels the greatest love is between males who are more mature and more equal in age.

One of Classical Greece's premiere philosophers and writers, Plato wrote Symposium and The Phaedrus as treatises on homosexuality, with the subject covered not only from Plato's restrained point of view but also from the point of view of those who consider the love of adolescent males the highest form of love and at least one person, Pausanias, who feels the greatest love is between males who are more mature and more equal in age.

"There is a grainy taste I prefer to every / Idea of heaven: human friendship." At his best, Rumi expresses love for another man more profoundly and more poetically than any other writer except, perhaps, Shakespeare or Hafiz.

Many of the stories in On Love and Youth, the fifth chapter of Sa'di's Gulistan, involve love affairs between men and youths: masters with slaves, princes with youthful subjects, teachers with schoolboys, and other variations. In most cases, the context of the relationship suggests that the youth is an adolescent or young man. For decades, readers in the English-speaking world had no idea Sa'di's Gulistan contained such stories, for translators changed the references to boys. Not in this volume.

No scenes in Shakespeare's plays are as intimately homoerotic to imagine as the scenes in Cymbeline in which the two brothers fall head over heals in love with the main character, who would have been a male actor playing the part of a girl disguised as a boy. It is while the brothers think the person is a boy that they fall in love with... him. Cymbeline also contains one of the best songs in all of Shakespeare.

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, almost anyone in England who knew anything about Shakespeare knew that he had written his famous love sonnets to a beautiful adolescent male who was fifteen when the first sonnet was written. The debate was not about what gender the poems addressed but what specific young man had been the object of Shakespeare’s affection.

The renowned adventurer and travel writer pays tribute to some of the young friends he met along his way. This edition is fully illustrated with the original drawings by F.S. Coburn.

Regarded as one of America's foremost travel writers, a respected poet, and author of what is often called "America's first gay novel," Pennsylvania-born Bayard Taylor set out for a trek across Scandinavia in 1855 with the intention of capturing native life so accurately on paper that readers would liken his prose to photographs. His letters containing the accounts of his journey were published in newspapers then republished under the title Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures.

One of the most famous books in American literature, Walden has inspired Americans from Kerouac to the Kennedys to B.F. Skinner to the Roosevelts. Robert Frost cited it as a favorite book because it somehow managed to be “a tale of adventure,” a “declaration of independence” and a “gospel of wisdom” all at once. Frost said in one book Thoreau at surpassed “everything we have had in America.”

Sometimes gay readers and scholars have occasion to seek out the homoerotic passages of Whitman, whether to read for the pure pleasure of the experience or for scholarship. This has been problematic in the past because Leaves is a huge volume to read through and shorter editions of “selected” Whitman poems are generally more apt to omit his homoerotic material than to include it. This volume seeks to give readers a single source to consult when the aim is to read Whitman’s homoerotic verse.

Michelangelo, “Loves Flame Doth Feed on Age” Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” William Shakespeare, selected sonnets Lord Byron, selected poems Walt Whitman, selected poems Bayard Taylor, “To A Persian Boy” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray A. E. Housman, selected poems Rupert Brooke, “The Beginning” Wilfred Owen, selected poems

Freshman composition instructors will not find a more affordable basic textbook for their cash-strapped students. This book focuses on total literacy, with emphasis given to reading comprehension of increasingly challenging texts. Includes short stories by Poe, de Maupassant, London, Mansfield, Chekhov, Bierce, Chopin, Joyce, Gibran, Cather, and Vonnegut, poetry by Dickinson, Housman, Sassoon, Owen, Yeats, St. Vincent Millay, Frost, Barrett Browning, Byron, Poe, Whitman, and Shakespeare.

Includes short stories by Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather; poetry by Dickinson, Housman, Sassoon, Owen, Yeats, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Frost; and sections on writing personal narratives, brainstorming activities, suggestions for effective peer editing, logical fallacies, samples of MLA citations, a works cited exercise, a sample MLA-style paper, and fourteen rubrics and checklists.

Includes stories by Wilde, Joyce, Cather, and Vonnegut; selections from Kahlil Gibran; poetry from Browning, Blake, Poe, Housman, Whitman, and McCrae; and sections on writing personal narratives, brainstorming activities, effective peer editing, logical fallacies, MLA citations, a works cited exercise, an MLA-style paper, fourteen rubrics and checklists, and more.