How does one reconcile the tension between the community of one's own Catholic upbringing and a sexuality and gender identity that may be in conflict with some of the tenets of the faith - especially when one is a member of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex community? Queer and Catholic offers a source of comfort to members of these communities, focusing on not only practicing Catholics, but also the entire experience of growing up Catholic. This unique book discusses Catholicism beyond its religiosity and considers its implications as a culture of origin. This widely varied and entertaining book pulls together a comprehensive collection of essays, stories, and poetry that together represent an honest and engaging reflection of being a queer person within the Catholic experience.

Sweet Son of Pan is a collection of erotic poems, born of crushes, love affairs, fantasies, dreams, and real experiences with men from around the world. These poems are written in a mood of devotion, a praise through language of the sweetest garden we enter as physical beings. They are a response to the sadness that is often a consequence of sex; the fear that so unnecessarily surrounds it; the disrespect that is visited upon it. They are wishes; elegies for our lost brothers-and for the parts of ourselves that our lost; parts we rediscover. They are a reaffirmation of sexual freedom and the wisdom that can be gained from the journey along that path-glimpses of paradise, our oneness and timelessness-and if we are lucky, of a small horned creature with cloven hooves who reminds us we came here only to share, and to share joyfully.

Selection, Over the Rainbow Project, GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association Finalist, General Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards Winner, Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, Publishing Triangle Winner, Duggins outstanding Mid-Career novelist Award, Lambda Literary Foundation
Award-winning novelist Trebor Healey depicts San Francisco in the 1980s and '90s in poetic prose that is both ribald and poignant, and a crossing into the American West that is dreamy, mythic, and visionary.
When troubled twenty-one-year-old Seamus Blake meets the strong and self-possessed Jimmy (just arrived in San Francisco by bicycle from his hometown in Buffalo, New York), he feels his life may finally be taking a turn for the better. But the ensuing romance proves short-lived as Jimmy dies of an AIDS-related illness. The grieving Seamus is obliged to keep a promise to Jimmy: "Take me back the way I came."
And so Seamus sets out by bicycle on a picaresque journey with the ashes, hoping to bring them back to Buffalo. He meets truck drivers, waitresses, college kids, farmers, ranchers, Marines, and other travelers--each one giving him a new perspective on his own life and on Jimmy's death. When he meets and becomes involved with a young Native American man whose mother has recently died, Seamus's grief and his story become universal and redemptive.

How does one reconcile the tension between the community of one 's own Catholic upbringing and a sexuality and gender identity that may be in conflict with some of the tenets of the faith especially when one is a member of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex community? Queer and Catholic offers a source of comfort to members of these communities, focusing on not only practicing Catholics, but also the entire experience of growing up Catholic. This unique book discusses Catholicism beyond its religiosity and considers its implications as a culture of origin. This widely varied and entertaining book pulls together a comprehensive collection of essays, stories, and poetry that together represent an honest and engaging reflection of being a queer person within the Catholic experience.