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Sociologically and politically, Farm Boys is an especially relevant book for public schools and libraries throughout the heartland. It's an important reminder to the red states of the gay presence all throughout America. It also effectively undermines the straight (and gay) myth that all gay culture is somehow exclusively urban in nature.

Farm Boys was adapted as an off-Broadway play, Farm Boys, in 2004. It has also gained notoriety as it was used for inspiration and background reading for the co-stars for the movie Brokeback Mountain.

Frontiers
Michael Jensen

Set in 1797, in the then American wilderness of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains, Frontiers tells the tale of young John Chapman, an emotionally sensitive homosexual man trying to survive in the colonies' barely settled frontier borderland.

It is an Injun filled, musket totin' period action/adventure novel akin to the tales of pioneers like Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett. As a take on classic 18th century new world explorer literature, it has the grim and gritty feel Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage and the fun spookiness of Robert Louis Stevensons' Treasure Island.

Oh, yeah. And did I say it was gay? We are talking waaaay different drums along the Mohawk here.

Frontiers is the kind of novel I wish was available when I was a teenager in high school. It's a well-balanced combination of youth-oriented action, adventure, romance, history and dime store page-turning pulp fiction, (with plenty of violence and explicit gay sex thrown in). It's a great book to get any budding gay male mind interested in reading (way more so than that dreadfully boring Silas Marner!)

Were it not for numerous, steamy, explicit male-on-male sex scenes in this book, it could be recommended reading for even younger gay readers.

As a queer tale, Frontiers is naturally lacking in feminine love interest. Jensen provides a balancing female presence in the form of helpful, native American woman “Gwennie.” She provides a certain, earth mother, Native American wisdom and feminine, spiritual mystique to the otherwise exclusively man to man goings on.

In re-creating the world of late 18th century northeast America, Jensen has extensively researched the region' s flora and fauna, geography, weather patterns and long gone Native American tribes. He has additionally provided a good facsimile of old colonial settlers speech patterns and vocabulary. He is up on the technology, building materials, farming practices, tools, warfare, colonial customs and all manner of bric a brac from the era.

And yet the book is strangely modern.

This is due in part to its leading character's constant, very self-conscious, introspective thoughts and revelations about both himself and his surroundings that are continuously fed to the reader throughout the book. We see everything through Chapman's eyes. His hyper-sensitiveness brings up a wide variety of issues, and always with a certain tinge of modern day politically correct guilt.

Social injustices, abusive violence and crimes against the natural environment get their payback in Frontier's rip-roaring finish, which is part Last Days of Pompeii, part Hurricane and part Cape Fear. Without giving away the ending, let' s just say, “It' s not nice to fool Mother Nature”.

Frontiers is a also a quasi-historical novel, providing a gay twist to history as the character of John Chapman is one and the same as the man we know today as Johnny Appleseed.

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