The Blue Lady’s Hands, my first novel, a gay love story (I guess) set in the early years of safer sex. ALA Booklist called it “the first gay novel that is truly post-AIDS in consciousness.” Analyzed in Tom Piontek’s Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies.

When the Parrot Boy Sings, my second novel, an attempt to create a first person narrator decidedly different from the one in The Blue Lady’s Hands. Like all my books, this one is about sex and ethics and the whole damn thing.

The Ethics of Marginality, a New Approach to Gay Studies, a book in which I analyze several gay avant-garde films via the lens of my own position as “privileged marginal,” what that position makes possible, what it doesn’t allow.  I took a lot of heat for my critique of Tongues Untied in particular, though that critique did not typically counter my reading of the film’s demonization of white gay s/m culture. The subtitle was my publisher’s, not my own. The book was written on the eve of queer studies’ future.

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy, a book that argues that the variety of representations of masculinity that were produced out of the fascist regime alerts us to some of its contradictions. My hope is that it will generate interest also in gay artists from the period whose works are perhaps unfairly neglected. My favorite critique is that it represents a search for penises and anuses.

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema, an attempt to think about Italian culture’s larger contribution to the melodramatic sensibility and its unstable representations of masculinity.  In the book, I locate the “origins” of the melodramatic sensibility in Catholic responses to the Reformation (rather than, as is more typical, the French Revolution).