Robert Ferro

The Violet Quill Club brought together the finest and most important gay writers to emerge after the Stonewall riots. Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Felice Picano, George Whitmore, and Christopher Cox--these are the writers whose novels, plays, short stories, essays, and journalism defined what it was to be gay before that first announcement of AIDS.

This novel explores the romance between Matthew and Mark, two young men who are both suffering from AIDS, and the tensions that this illness creates between Mark and his family. It is an uncompromising study of family life and the place of gay men within the family institution. Other novels by Robert Ferro include "The Others", "The Blue Star" and "The Family of Max Desir". He was the recipient of the Ingram-Merril Award 1984/5 in the United States. From Goodreads: Written shortly before Ferro's death, this beautiful, deeply moving novel reaches to the very core of the terror of the AIDS epidemic.

The alternate Earth of "The Blue Star" is no home to swashbucklers or soldiers. It's a carefully worked out society, approximating the 18th-century Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this world, gunpowder has not been discovered, but magic works. The Empire centered around the city of Netzigon is corrupt, collapsing, decadent, and basically tiresome. The novel follows the adventures of Rodvard Bergelin, who begins as an ineffecutal, milquetoast government clerk and becomes embroiled in a massive plot to pull the Empire down and rebuild a free society. Great Stuff! Originally published by Twaine in 1952. This is the first paperback appearance, one of the early entries in the "Adult Fantasy" series that [Lin Carter](/authors/OL1813446A) constructed for [Ballantine Books](/publishers/Ballantine_Books).

Max Desir loved his Italian-American family--even after his iron-willed father exiled him from its intimate inner circle. Max Desir loved his lover, Nick, with whom he openly took up life first amid the enchantment of Rome, then amid the realities of New York. Two loves so deeply felt--in a man so painfully divided.