Works by
Christopher Bram
(Writer)
[1952 - ]

• Exiles in America (2006) -- Nominated, 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
  Zack Knowles and Daniel Wexler have been together for twenty-one years. Zack is a psychiatrist, Daniel an art teacher at a college in Virginia. In the fall of 2002, a few months before the Iraq War, a new artist in residence, Abbas Rohani, arrives with his Russian wife, Elena, and their two children.
  
  But Abbas is not quite what he seems, and soon he and Daniel begin an affair. After love throws the two families together, politics threatens the future of both in ways no one could have predicted.
  
  A novel that explores how the personal becomes political, Exiles in America offers an intimate look at the meaning of marriage, gay and straight, and demonstrates the breathtaking skill and daring imagination that have garnered Christopher Bram widespread critical acclaim.

• Father of Frankenstein (1995, re-released 2005 as Gods and Monsters )
  Previously titled Father of Frankenstein, this acclaimed novel was the basis for the 1998 film starring Sir Ian McKellen, Lynn Redgrave, and Brendan Fraser. It journeys back to 1957 Los Angeles, where James Whale, the once-famous director of such classics as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, is living in retirement, haunted by his past. Rescuing him from his too-vivid imagination is his gardener, a handsome ex-marine. The friendship between these two very different men is sometimes tentative, sometimes touching, often dangerous—and always captivating.

  
  Movie (1998) Bill Condon, director with Brendan Fraser and Ian McKellen DVD  VHS

• Lives of the Circus Animals: A Novel (2003) -- Winner 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
  Critically acclaimed novelist Christopher Bram has written some of his best work about life in the performing arts. In Father of Frankenstein, the basis for the Academy Award-winning movie Gods and Monsters, it was Hollywood in the thirties and fifties. In The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes, it was the strange world of Victorian music and spiritualism. Now, in Lives of the Circus Animals, Bram explores contemporary New York theater, spending several days and nights with a diverse handful of men and women.
  
  There is Caleb Doyle, a hot new playwright whose newest work, Chaos Theory, has just bombed. His sister, Jessie, also loves theater but has no outlet for her talents except to work as the personal assistant to British actor Henry Lewse, "the Hamlet of his generation," while he does a Broadway musical. Henry loves Shakespeare, money, grass, and boys.
  
  Then there's Frank Earp, an ex-actor who courts Jessie and is directing a troupe of acting students in a homemade play. Among the students is Toby Vogler, a nice kid from the Midwest who has a whole other career at night. Toby was once Caleb Doyle's boyfriend.
  
  Overseeing this world like an unhappy god is Kenneth Prager, second-string theater critic for the New York Times.
  
  Leaping from one life to another, one day to the next, the novel throws these people together in a serious comedy about love and work and make-believe. Lives of the Circus Animals is a cross between a Mozart opera and a Preston Sturges movie. A look at theater people who are just like everyone else, only more so, it's a comic celebration of how we all strive to stay sane while living in the shadow of those two impostors, success and failure.

• The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes (2000)
  Spanning more than sixty years from the Civil War to the early 1920s, and moving from the battlefields of the South to New York City, through Paris, London, Constantinople, and Coney Island, The Notorious Dr. August features Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, alias Dr. August, an improvisational pianist who believes his music is sometimes inspired by the spirit world.
  
  He is in love with Isaac Kemp, an ex-slave who only sporadically returns his affections and who himself successfully woos Alice Pangborn, a rather prim white governess. The three, locked in a strange and often painful love triangle, travel the world--until a horrible tragedy forces them all to examine the choices they have made and shakes up their relationships in ways none of them could have predicted.
  
  Rich in historical detail and musical knowledge, The Notorious Dr. August is a brilliantly written exploration of race, class, spirituality, and sexuality -- and of what it really means to love another.

• Almost History (1993)
  American diplomat Jim Goodall struggles with his homosexuality for three decades, walking a fine line between his public and private personas.

• In Memory of Angel Clare (1989)
  This brilliant comedy of manners set among a group of Manhattan sophisticates depicts the friends of a dead filmmaker trying to put their lives back together--a task made more arduous by the young boyfriend he left behind.

• Gossip (1997)
  Ralph is a breezy East Villager, politically aware but only half committed, who is swept up in an affair with Bill, a young Republican journalist who "just happens" to be gay. Ralph's qualms about dating a man whose values clash with his own turn to disgust when Bill publishes a scathing tell-all book that attacks several prominent women in Washington. Illuminating the fine line between the personal and the public, Gossip brings wry insights and provocative questions to current political and social controversies. Bram's deft humor and subtle grasp of human character enrich a novel that is at once entertaining, surprising, and wholly original.

• Hold Tight (1988)
  Hold Tight confirms Christopher Bram's status as one of the outstanding gay novelists of our time. Erotic, romantic, and suspenseful, this wholly original story is a thriller set in a homosexual brothel in 1942 New York City. Hank Fayette, Seaman Second Class, had enlisted in his home town of Beaumont, Texas, used his shore leave to visit a movie house on 42nd Street, and ended up in a gay brothel near Manhattan's West Street piers. When this big, lanky blond with a country boy's drawl – and hard muscular body – couldn't fight his way clear of the Shore Patrol who raided the place, he figured he was on his way to the brig. But in 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, the Navy was more interested in capturing spies than in punishing "sex offenders." Their offer to Hank was simple: go back to the brothel, work undercover as a prostitute, and risk your life to entrap Nazi spies. This erotic, suspenseful novel captures the big-band feel of New York City in the forties, the intensity of a nation at war, and the passion of men for their country – and for each other.

• Surprising Myself (1987)
  Surprising Myself is the brilliantly realized debut novel of one of America's most promising young writers. It is a story about relationships. Between a young man and his father. Between the father and his ex-wife. Between a mother and her children. Between the children. And most important, between two young men. Beginning with their initial discovery of each other and proceeding by a series of deft twists and turns to a dramatic and very moving conclusion, Bram evokes with great elegance of style the love that grows between two special people and the adversity they must jointly overcome. Sometimes innocent and dreamlike, sometimes raunchy and wicked, this always entertaining tale is an affecting portrait not soon to be forgotten.

See also:

• Something Inside: Conversations With Gay Fiction Writers (1980, 1999)  by Philip Gambone, Compiler and Robert Giard, Photographer
  In the last twenty years, gay literature has earned a place at the American and British literary tables, spawning its own constellation of important writers and winning a dedicated audience. No one though, until Philip Gambone, has attempted to offer a collective portrait of our most important gay writers. This collection of interviews attempts just that, and is notable both for the depth of Gambone's probing conversations and for the sheer range of important authors included. Virtually every prominent gay author writing in English today is here, including Alan Hollinghurst, Allen Barnett, Andrew Holleran, Bernard Cooper, Brad Gooch, Brian Keith Jackson, Christopher Bram, David Leavitt, David Plante, Dennis Cooper, Edmund White, Gary Glickman, John Preston, Joseph Hansen, Lev Raphael, Michael Cunningham, Michael Lowenthal, Michael Nava, Paul Monette, Peter Cameron, and Scott Heim.

• Aphrodisiac: Fiction from Christopher Street (1984)
  Includes works by Andrew Holleran, Christopher Bram, Edmund White, Felice Picano, Jane Rule, Kate Millett, Tennessee Williams, and others.