Works by
William J. Mann
(Writer)

Anthologies

• All I Want for Christmas (2003) by Ben Tyler, Chris Kenry, Jon Jeffrey, and William J. Mann

• Masters of Midnight (2003) by Jeff Mann, Michael Thomas Ford, Sean Wolfe, William J. Mann
  Erotic Tales of the Vampire

• Summer Share (2002) by , Andy Schell, and Ben Tyler, Chris Kenry, and William J. Mann. -- Finalist, 2002 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction Anthologies

• Grave Passions (1997) - Finalist, 1997 Lambda Literary Award for Science/Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
  18 stories of highly sexed vampires, ghosts, and werewolves.

Fiction

• Object of Desire (2009)
  “It’s always been golden for you, Danny. You’ve always been the golden boy.”
  
  Danny Fortunato seemed to have it all. He was cute, funny, sexy, smart—the hottest go-go boy in West Hollywood. When he danced on stage, all eyes were upon him and all men desired him. But something always kept Danny from ever really believing he was the golden boy that others said he was...a secret that he'd carried with him ever since he was a teenager.
  
  Twenty years later, living in Palm Springs, Danny is celebrating his 41st birthday—although “celebrating” might not be the right word for how he feels about his life today. To the outside world, he's still golden: he still has his looks, and he still loves Frank, his boyfriend of nearly two decades. But something is missing in his life. Passion. Romance. Adventure. The same something that's been missing ever since that day when he turned fourteen, when his sister Becky disappeared and his whole world flipped upside-down.
  
  Now into Danny's life walks a gorgeous young bartender named Kelly, who becomes for Danny an obsession, an object of desire and fascination. But Kelly's indifference to this onetime golden boy only confirms what Danny secretly believes: that he’s “vanishing” into thin air—like his sister, so long ago.
  
  As he reflects on his angst-ridden childhood—the shattering of his family, the sex and drugs of his youth as one of L.A.’s most coveted boy toys—Danny begins to recognize certain patterns. Somewhere along the way, he gave up on his dreams—not only of becoming an actor, but his very lust for life.
  
  And yet—all that’s about to change, when a surprising, agonizing connection with Kelly sends Danny on a soul-searching quest to reclaim the things he has loved and lost.
  
  Filled with unforgettable warmth, incorrigible humor, and irresistible charm, Object of Desire takes readers through three milestone eras in one man’s life—his youth in the 1970s, his days of abandon in the 1980s, and his more sober, reflective existence today—and reaffirms William J. Mann’s reputation as one of gay fiction’s major narrative powers.

• All American Boy (2005)
  A darker, more mysterious change of pace for William J. Mann.
  
  “Would you come home, Walter? Please?" With these desperate words from the mysterious, distant mother he hasn’t seen in ten years, Wally Day finds his carefully constructed world falling in on itself. For years, the handsome actor has made denial his own particular art form — from his stalled career to his emotionless embrace of the hard-edged boys who regularly traipse through his bedroom. But now, faced with this sudden intrusion from his past, Wally must confront the reasons he left his hometown of Brown's Mill in a cloud of anger, shame, and guilt.
  
  But Wally isn’t the only one who’s confronting ghosts. His mother Regina had dreams too once, dreams corrupted by fate and circumstance. With her own world unraveling, with strange, confusing memories of a murder that may or may not have occurred, she turns to the son she barely knows for help.
  
  It’s a journey that will take both Wally and his mother back to their pasts — to a time when Regina was a starry-eyed girl and Wally the good son, the smartest boy in his class, the shining picture of the All-American Boy. It’s a journey, too, that takes a chance on the future — for now, mirroring his own involvement with Zandy twenty years before, Wally finds he may have something to teach about love and self to a sixteen-year-old boy.
  
  Bestselling author William J. Mann has written his most powerful work yet: a searing novel about the difference between going home and finding yourself there. Along the way, he asks tough, heartrending questions: What is the price of regret? Is love ever wrong? What does it mean to forgive? By turns poignant and sexy, harrowing and hopeful, All American Boy is a big, wise book filled with insight, humor, hurt, truth, and the ever-renewing hope of love.

• The Biograph Girl (2001)
  A novel of Hollywood, then and now.

Jeff and Lloyd Trilogy

1. The Men from the Boys (1997)
   The perennial favorite and long-running best-seller, the start of the popular series chronicling a decade of life for Jeff O’Brien and his friends.
   
   Featuring three "generations" of gay men, The Men From the Boys is a romantic romp between summers in Provincetown and winters in Boston. Thirty-something Jeff O'Brien is torn between his longtime lover Lloyd and a summer romance with Eduardo, a 22-year-old houseboy, who turns out to be much more than a one-night stand. All the while, Jeff's world threatens to unravel as the health of his ex-lover and mentor, the 47-year-old David Javitz, continues to decline. Ultimately The Men From the Boys is a story about sex -- safe sex, unsafe sex, casual sex, real sex --- and love -- young lovers, old lovers, ex-lovers, falling in love, and staying in love. A brilliant slice of gay life at the turn of the millennium.

2. Where the Boys Are (2002) -- Finalist, 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
   In the sexy and provocative follow-up to The Men From the Boys, Jeff O'Brien—still in search of love and sex—navigates the circuit scene from Provincetown to San Francisco, from Montreal to Palm Springs, in the company of friends, tricks, old loves, and irresistible strangers, going any place Where the Boys Are.
   
   Jeff and his on-again, off-again lover Lloyd Griffith are both thirty-something professionals still grieving the death of their mentor Javitz. Jeff bounces from party to party, finding it easy to forget his grief when he's on the dance floor, immersed in a sea of beautiful boys with sculpted pecs and speed bumps for abs. With him at all times is his protégé, best friend, sister, and not-so-secret admirer Henry Weiner, once a ninety-eight-pound weakling who, in his late twenties, has blossomed into a hunky muscle-boy escort. Meanwhile, Lloyd deals with his own grief by rejecting the sex-and-drugs culture and buying a guesthouse in Provincetown with an eccentric widow named Eva Horner.
   As the lives of Jeff, Lloyd, and Henry intertwine, each faces his own mystery. Henry's repressed feelings of love for Jeff propel him on a fascinating quest to discover his own identity amid the often seedy world of sex for cash. Lloyd experiences the dark side of the “fag hag” experience when Eva exhibits increasingly bizarre behavior. As petite as the Bride of Chucky, she might possibly be just as deranged. But the most intriguing mystery of all involves the beautiful, mysterious stranger Jeff meets on the dance floor at yet another circuit party and invites to move in. Anthony Sabe is a young man seemingly without a past, whose bright-eyed ingenuousness at first charms everyone, but later raises suspicions. Jeff, once an investigative journalist, sets out to uncover the truth about Anthony. What he finds is progressively more disturbing, raising questions not only about Anthony but also about himself.
   As each of these stories intertwines, Jeff, Lloyd, and Henry deal with the myriad issues confronting gay men today: sex, drugs, grief, AIDS, barebacking, body image, commitment, one-night stands, and the search for love. The first novel to be set on the gay party circuit—a phenomenon that has in recent years been much in the media, for good and bad— Where The Boys Are evokes a world with its own language, customs, traditions, and idiosyncrasies, set to a backdrop of sex, drugs, and dance music.
   An evocative slice of gay life in the 21st century, Where The Boys Are is sexy, funny, and insightful—and, ultimately, about the meaning of friendship and the acceptance of self.

3. Men Who Love Men (2007)
   For Jeff O'Brien, life has finally fallen into place. He's now a bestselling author, living in Provincetown full-time with Lloyd Griffith, his longtime lover and soon-to-be legal husband. Forty has nothing on Jeff and Lloyd--they're the still-sexy poster boys for settled, contented domesticity. They seem to have everything, in fact--even a foster son, Jeff's 10-year-old nephew, whom they're helping to raise.
   
   And so, from near and far, friends are converging on Provincetown for the wedding of Jeff and Lloyd...but can these two famously non-monogamous freethinkers with their roving eyes really agree to "forsake all others?"
   
   Meanwhile, their best friend Henry Weiner, escort-turned-erotic energy worker, wonders if he'll ever find what Jeff and Lloyd have with each other. Thirtysomething, no longer the muscle boy of his twenties, Henry's searching for that one special someone--though he's just about ready to give up when a meeting at Tea Dance changes everything.
   
   Enter Luke West. Dangerously young, boyishly handsome, with a seductive charm and a rich fantasy life, Luke tells everyone he's come to P-Town to find himself both personally and as a writer. But his real agenda may possibly be very different--and far less innocent. Once he's worked his way into Jeff and Lloyd's lives, Luke find his presence arousing intense feelings in all the men around him: desire, longing, recognition, need, compassion--and suspicion.
   
   For as much as Henry desires Luke, he's been around long enough to know that the new boy isn't what he appears to be. Even as he succumbs to his charms, again and again, Henry's determined to reveal the secrets Luke is hiding. But what he learns only forces him to confront his own loneliness and his seemingly never-ending search for true love.
   
   Behind the heady beach days and party nights of summer, Jeff, Lloyd, and Henry will face their futures alone and together, closing the door on some chapters of their lives while opening others to new love and hope.
   
   With Men Who Love Men, William J. Mann tackles the big questions of contemporary gay life, delivering a beautiful, thoughtful book about love, sex, commitment, friendship, and fantasy, about the lives we engineer and the joyful surprises that happen when we least expect them.

Non-fiction

Hollywood Film History

• How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood (2009)
  In the 1960s, Elizabeth Taylor’s affair with the married Richard Burton knocked John Glenn's orbit of the moon off front pages nationwide. Yet, despite all the gossip, the larger-than-life personality and influence of this very human woman has never been captured. William Mann, praised by Gore Vidal, Patricia Bosworth, and Gerald Clarke for Kate, uses untapped sources and conversations to show how she ignited the sexual revolution with her on- and off-screen passions, helped kick down the studio system by taking control of her own career, and practically invented the big business of celebrity star-making. With unputdownable storytelling he tells the full truth without losing Taylor's magic, daring, or wit.
  
  Readers will feel they are sitting next to Taylor as she rises at MGM, survives a marriage engineered for publicity, feuds with Hedda Hopper and Mr. Mayer, wins Oscars, endures tragedy, juggles Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton and her country's conservative values. But it is the private Elizabeth that will surprise —a woman of heart and loyalty, who defends underdogs, a savvy professional whose anger at the studio's treatment of her led to a lifelong battle against that very system. All the Elizabeth's are here, finally reconciled and seen against the exciting years of her greatest spirit, beauty, and influence. Swathed in mink, staring us down with her lavender eyes, disposing of husbands but keeping the diamonds, here is Elizabeth Taylor as she was meant to be, leading her epic life on her own terms, playing the game of supreme stardom at which she remains, to this day, unmatched.

• Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn (2006) -- New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; Publishers Weekly's 100 Best Books of the Year
  Kate garnered great attention upon publication, being serialized in Vanity Fair and the New York Daily News. “A corrective to the hagiography that has often been passed as her personal history," wrote The Washington Post. Indeed, Mann’s portrait of the American icon differs from her public legend in many ways, not least of which was her steely determination to make it to the top and her obsession with staying there.
  
  And yet the book remains respectful and even affectionate toward Hepburn, the beloved movie queen and Connecticut Yankee. The real woman, as Mann points out, was far more interesting than the one-dimensional legend she fostered. Katharine Hepburn was her own creation. She charmed the public with the image of an East Coast aristocrat, wearing pants and freely speaking her mind, and the image stuck. But that show didn't come easily to her, or without tremendous effort and concealment. None of her success did. What lay beneath Hepburn's public roles was an ambitious, vulnerable woman whose relationships and sexuality were never as simple as Kate--and previous biographers--suggested.
  
  With this biography, William J. Mann challenges much of what we think we know about the Great Kate, and shows how a woman originally considered too controversial for Hollywood stardom learned the fine art of imagecraft, and transformed herself into an icon as all-American as the Statue of Liberty.

• Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger (2004)
  John Schlesinger's extraordinary career in cinema, stage, opera, and television spanned half a century. It was, however, his films that made him famous, including such classics as Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Marathon Man, Billy Liar, Darling, and Day of the Locust.
  
  In Edge of Midnight, William J. Mann chronicles Schlesinger's life and career from his early documentary days at the BBC to his emergence as part of the New Wave of British film in the 1960s (along with Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson), to his Academy Award for the X-rated Midnight Cowboy, to his glittering nights as a Hollywood host, and finally to his death on July 24, 2003, brought on by a massive stroke two years earlier.
  
  In writing this biography, Mann received the full cooperation of Schlesinger himself, as well as that of his family and his companion of 36 years, Michael Childers. In addition, he was granted complete access to tapes, diaries, production notes, and correspondence. Many of Schlesinger’s actors, crew members, friends, and colleagues shared their thoughts and memories, including Eileen Atkins, the late Sir Alan Bates, Alan Bennett, Julie Christie, Sir Tom Courtney, Placido Domingo, Robert Evans, Sally Field, Melanie Griffith, Sir Peter Hall, Ed Harris, Dustin Hoffman. Shirley MacLaine, Ali McGraw, Sir Ian McKellen, Lynn Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Nicolas Roeg, Isabella Rossellini, Roy Scheider, Martin Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Lily Tomlin, Brenda Vaccaro, Jon Voight, Robert Wagner, Billy Williams, Michael York, and Franco Zeffirelli.

• Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 (2001)
  Hollywood hasn’t always been the menacing behemoth most studies and memoirs have made it out to be. While gay men and women certainly faced more than their share of struggles, they also experienced opportunities for creative self-expression unavailable anywhere else in the world at the time — and without necessarily compromising their integrity or hiding their authentic identities.
  
  Until now, you’ve only heard one small piece of a vast and dynamic story. For every Rock Hudson or Tony Perkins forced to pretend to be straight, there were dozens of behind-the-scenes writers, designers, publicists and directors (and even occasionally some actors!) creating the magic for America’s Dream Factory — and doing so openly and without charade.
  
  Behind the Screen follows in the tradition of such works as Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Movies, which looked at the experience of Jews and women in the film industry. Here — finally — William J. Mann does the same for gay men and lesbians, offering the first serious, thoughtful, non-sensational look at the gay experience in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

• Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star (1998) -- Winner 1998 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Biography/Autobiography
  In 1930, William Haines was the Number One box-office-star in America. By 1933, he was forgotten -- kicked out of an industry where he once was king. The reason was simple: he had refused to play the game. While he romanced leading ladies like Joan Crawford and Marion Davies onscreen, in real life he was unapologetically gay -- living openly with his partner, Jimmie Shields. Together they hosted some of Hollywood’s trendiest parties, in an era far more tolerant than most historians remember.
  
  But once the Production Code was enacted, forever changing the political climate in the movie capital, the studios began insisting their stars live up to certain images. When MGM chief Louis B. Mayer insisted Haines give up Shields and get married for publicity purposes, Haines refused. Some three years before Edward VIII renounced his crown for the woman he loved, Billy Haines gave up his own Hollywood throne for the man he loved. William J. Mann brings back an important figure in both film and gay history, setting Haines fully in context with his times, illuminating a whole era of Hollywood, contrasting the free-living 1920s with the conservative backlash of the 1930s.

Other

• Gay & Lesbian Reading Group Guide (1997)

See also: