Waves

Library Journal

With an ever-increasing number of anthologized gay writing, each collection must convincingly define some sort of mission to justify its reason for being. In his lengthy introduction, Mordden purports to have uncovered the vanguard of new gay male writers and baptizes them the ``Third Wave'' (that is, following the Seventies' Violet Quill aesthetes and Eighties AIDS realists). While some of the individual pieces contain pertinent and solid writing (notably those by Jon Weir, Richard Davis, Scott Heim, and Jim Provenzano), Mordden's uneven selections, which include also-ran magazine pieces and a chapter from a successful 1990 novel (Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, LJ 10/15/90), do not deliver his desired ``sense of urgency.'' Discontents (LJ 5/15/92) better revealed the experimental fringes of contemporary gay writing, and Mordden's essential literary objective-the clarification of ``the gay condition for gay readers''-has been better realized in the ongoing ``Men on Men'' series from Dutton. By comparison, this collection amounts to merely a ripple.-Douglas McClemont, New York