Works by
Brian Bouldrey
(Writer)

Fiction

• The Boom Economy: Or, Scenes from Clerical Life (2003)
  Dennis Bacchus is a man who has outlived himself. HIV-positive and prepared to die at any minute, he finds himself in the late 1990s blessed with life-giving drugs, supportive friends, a boom economy, and an era of never-ending celebration-and he doesn't know what to do with himself.
  
  For ten years he has traveled and celebrated a curtailed life with the similarly infected Jimmy and, though Dennis was never that close to Jimmy, he decided to let the friendship run its course to the end. Now there's no end in sight. Stuck with leftover friendships, careers, and commitments, what can a man do but become a priest? The Boom Economy covers what was supposed to be the last decade of Dennis Bacchus' life, but turns out to be the first decade of the rest of it. The Boom Economy is a novel about conversion-not just seroconversion or religious conversion, but all of the social, spiritual, and emotional problems of changing from one life to another. At once raucous and serious, pagan and saintly, it's a look at the way we live now. Again.

• Love, the Magician (2000)
  In April of 1997, Tristan Broder makes a pilgrimage of sorts from San Francisco to the prickly desert and scalped mountains around Tucson, Arizona, the place where he helped bury his partner Joe five years before. Guided by a comet that crossed the spring sky that year, he wanders toward renewal and resurrection, memory and mystery, deadly secrets and dark intentions.
  
  There are plenty of people in the desert who still love Tristan as much as they did Joe. There's Maria, Joe's wild sister, now a converted Pentecostal; her truck-driving husband Earl; Joe's mother with the dog Murphy she found one day abandoned in the desert; and Joe's best friend Mik, a tough-minded Punjabi Muslim whose one vanity is his long silken hair. With open and glad hearts, they join Tristan to help him make a memorial to the whole-souled man he loved. Yet, despite the fact that they are all bound, like Tristan, by the memory and love for the saint who once lived among them, every one of them is hiding something.
  
  But Tristan has secrets too, deadly ones, and when he sees how spellbound he and the others remain in the memory of Joe and what he meant to each of them, he finds himself fighting to break the power of the invisible magician. Romance has beauty and glamour, but it also possesses dark and even dangerous ends. And in order to find his own way toward renewal, Tristan must one by one harm the people who want to love and protect him.
  
  Set in a swift, single weekend against the stark backdrop of the Sonoran desert amid the extraordinary Easter ceremonies of the Yaqui Nation--a Native American tribe that mingles their own customs with Western Catholicism to create a passion play of rejuvenation--Love, the Magician is a tale of a broken-hearted soul who will, in order to live, break more hearts.

• The Genius of Desire: A Novel (1995)
  Michael Bellman is not your average little boy. He speaks to plates, banisters, and other household objects (preferring them to people). He frequently confesses to sins he never committed (like adultery). And he's hopelessly drawn to the romantic notion of a secret, double life.
  
  Michael spends summers in Monsalvat, Michigan, coming of age in a loving tangle of great aunts, great uncles, cousins once-removed (but ever-present), and one tough-looking, silently scary grandmother. The Kaisers are a wild, highly eccentric bunch: Great Uncle Jimmy speaks to his dead wife during meals and proudly proclaims himself the Fattest Man in the World; Cousin Anne torments and taunts Michael beyond endurance; reckless Cousin Tommy secretly smokes cigars and can't wait to "kick butt in 'Nam"--and Michael watches every magical move he makes.
  
  A few years and one driver's license later, as family alliances change and long-silent desires surface, Michael begins to understand his attraction to the double life because he's living one--at roadside rest stops, in library washrooms and public parks. Coming out is the first step, coming to terms is the next....

• Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica (2007)
  Brian Bouldrey traveled to the island of Corsica, with its wine-dark Mediterranean waters, powdered-sugar beach sand, sumptuous cuisine, and fine wine. And then he walked away from all of them.
  
  Bouldrey strapped on a backpack and walked across Napoleon's native land with the same spirit many choose to dance or drink: to celebrate, to mourn, to think, to avoid thinking, to recall, to ignore, to escape, and to arrive.
  
  This wonderfully textured account of a two-week ramble along a famous Corsican hiking trail with his German friend Petra (she was good at the downhills while he was better at the uphills) offers readers a journal that is a launching point for reflection: thoughts on cultural differences, friendship, physical challenge, personal challenge, and getting very, very lost. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part lampoon, this book offers readers an impressionistic view of a little talked about yet stunningly beautiful landscape.

• Monster Adventures in American Machismo (2001) -- Finalist 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Autobiography/Memoir
  Straight, gay, macho man, or great big sissy, it's tough to be a guy. Brian Bouldrey is a bona fide sissy - but he was also an Eagle Scout and a member of the Order of the Arrow with a secret Indian name that translates as "Active One."
  
  In "Monster" Bouldrey goes undercover and over the top to stalk machismo in action. At the same time Bouldrey bares his own soul - and imperfections - with disarming, and often hilarious, honesty.

• The Autobiography Box: A Step-by-Step Kit for Examining the Life Worth Living (2000)
  The memoir is fast gaining on the novel as the most popular literary form for readers and writers today. Gone are the days when people used to talk over the back fence, swapping stories and the day's gossip. Enter the next best thing: the autobiography, back porch conversation in book form. Contemporary and fresh, The Autobiography Box presents innovative writing suggestions in a visually dynamic, totally inviting, hands-on portable kit. Sixty appealing cards filled with quotes, questions, directions, and exercises provide the practice, while an engaging book with journal spaces for fill-in and excerpts from such literary greats as Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust, Muriel Spark, and Tobias Wolff offer the inspiration. Perfect for both beginning and seasoned writers, The Autobiography Box is all any memoirist needs to get started-that and maybe a comfy porch swing and a tall glass of lemonade.

Edited

• Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly Vol. 1 No. 1 1999 (1999)
  Includes works by David Ebershoff, David Ivie, Keith Banner, Kelly McQuain,  Michael Lowenthal, Michael Nava, Patrick Ryan, Peter Weltner, and Robert Gluck

• Writing Home: Award-Winning Literature from the New West (1999) with James D. Houston
  The James Duval Phelan and Joseph Henry Jackson awards, two of America's most distinguished and daring literary prizes, have long been administered by the San Francisco Foundation. Given to Western writers between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, many of the winners have gone on to notable writing careers and national prominence. Writing Home delivers some of the most vivid, playful, and provocative writings by previous award-winners. Fenton Johnson describes his first glimpse of California on a television screen in a Kentucky living room. James Houston lovingly traces the migrations of his ancestors from Buncombe County, North Carolina, over the Appalachian Mountains and eventually to the West Coast. Ernest Gaines tells of a young black man's return home to the Deep South after having lived in the Bay Area. Wendy Lesser, Frank Chin, James Broughton, Leonard Gardner, Jane Hirshfield, Philip Levine, and others add their own unique voices and perspectives.

  In this collection of memoir and personal essay, fiction, and poetry, a diverse group of award-winning and superbly skilled writers create a confederacy of voices. Sometimes they sing harmoniously, sometimes they argue with each other, but always, they return to the ambiguities and contradictions of living counter to and harmoniously with this mythic land.

• Traveling Souls: Contemporary Pilgrimage Stories (1999)
  This anthology contains a foreword by Pico Iyer and travel stories by Abigail Seymour, Alane Salierno Mason, Alice Walker, Anne Cushman, Barbara Wilson, Gary Paul Nabhan, Gretel Ehrlich, Jennifer Lash, John Hanson Mitchell, Malcolm X, Marvin Barrett, Michael Wolfe, Oliver Statler, Rachel Kadish, and Satish Kumar

• Best American Gay Fiction #3 (1998)
  Now in its third year, the "Best American Gay Fiction" anthology series is full of surprises. The exceptional writing collected here has been culled from mainstream and alternative publications, ranging from historical fiction to erotica, from high comedy to suspense, from the experimental to the documentary.

• Best American Gay Fiction #2 (1997)
  Following the success of last year's debut volume, this Best American Gay Fiction collection broadens the range of contributors, styles, and genres. Here is outstanding new work by such well-known writers as Andrew Holleran, Dale Peck, David Wojnarowicz, Michael Nava, William Sterling Walker and alongside fresh talents who capture the full spectrum of gay life today -- African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. The impressive writing presented here -- all drawn from works published in 1996 -- reflects this diversity as well, and ranges from coming-of-age narratives to reflections on growing older, from edgy 'zine fiction to elegant tales wrought with lapidary precision.
  
  Unified only by their excellence, these twenty-one selections are resounding proof of yet another banner year for gay fiction.

• Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men (1995) -- Winner 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Religion/Spirituality
  In highly personal twenty-one essays, gay men recount their struggles with institutionalized religion, their longing for spirituality, and the meaning of their experiences for theology.

• Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing (2004), Raphael Kadushin, ed.
  Living up to its title, Wonderlands comes fueled by wanderlust and features every kind of wonderland. In fact, the collection's contributors--a mix of established gay writers and the best of the new generation--don't settle for the obvious. Focusing on the sheer visceral thrill of travel, the adventure of it, they set out all over the world and always find something unexpected: love, passion, history, themselves. 
  
  The result is an anthology of dynamic writing that will motivate readers to book their next flight, or at least get them dreaming of other places. And the places are legion. Mack Friedman sets off into the deceptively butch wilds of Alaska. Robert Tewdwr Moss tracks through the back roads of Syria and his own version of Arabian Nights. Colm Tóibín discovers a Spanish Brigadoon and Edward Field drinks tea with Paul Bowles. For Wayne Koestenbaum Vienna is both a city of high low culture, and for Philip Gambone Asia becomes a place of second chances. Raphael Kadushin settles into the ethereal sun of a Dutch spring, Michael Lowenthal remembers a jarring encounter in the Scottish Highlands, and Tim Miller tallies the 1001 beds he has slept in all over the world. And Edmund White, in a classic of elegiac travel writing, recounts his harrowing drive through the Sahara with a man he loved.
  
  Contributors: Alistair McCartney, Boyer Rickel, Brian Bouldrey, Bruce Shenitz, Colm Tóibín, David Masello, Edmund White, Edward Field, J.S. Marcus, Mack Friedman, Matthew Link, Michael Lowenthal, Mitch Cullin, Philip Gambone, Raphael Kadushin, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Robert Tewdwr Moss, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Tim Miller.