Queer Spirits: A Gay Men's Myth Book

An anthology edited by the scholar Will Roscoe that gathers myths, folktales, literature and ethnographic accounts about male same-sex desire, offered as a shared body of story for gay men.

The book is arranged in sections including "Stories for Boys," "Rites of Passage," "Gay Ways: The Path of the Two-Spirit," "The Way of Initiation" and "The Ecstatic Body." The entries run from Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Zeus and Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinthus, and the Hijras of India to Native American accounts of two-spirit people, Ihara Saikaku, Hans Christian Andersen, William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Cocteau and Flannery O'Connor, with commentary from Roscoe. It has a bibliography and an index. Beacon issued the hardcover in 1995, and the paperback followed.

Roscoe (b. 1955) is a San Francisco writer and historian of gender and sexuality. His other books include The Zuni Man-Woman (1991), Changing Ones (1998) and Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love (2004). He also edited Radically Gay, the writings of Harry Hay, whom he met at the first Radical Faerie gathering in 1979.