Michael Lowenthal will read from and sign copies of The Paternity Test at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline on September 24 at 7 p.m. and at Porter Square Books in Cambridge on October 16 at 7 p.m. He will also appear at the Boston Book Festival on October 27.

Note: The following is adapted from a story that ran in the September/October 2012 issue of Boston Spirit magazine.

By Loren King

For Michael Lowenthal, whose latest novel The Paternity Test (Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press) came out this September, gay parenthood is a jumping off point into a rich and complex story that explores what creating a family means for one gay couple.

Same-sex marriage and the “gayby boom” has penetrated the culture — gays pushing strollers are ubiquitous in certain Boston neighborhoods and TV shows like Modern Family and The New Normal have brought gay parents into living rooms across America. But Lowenthal, whose other books include Charity Girl (2007), Avoidance (2002) and The Same Embrace (1998), is too good a writer to simply tell a conventional unconventional story. Lowenthal weaves what he calls a “completely imagined plot” about boyfriends Pat and Stu who hire a surrogate to bear their child with a Cape Cod setting and secondary characters far more familiar to him.

Author and media commentator Keith Boykin preparing to speak at the Hispanic Black Gay Coalition gathering at Club Café in Boston

Have you heard of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover?

Author and media commentator Keith Boykin visited a standing-room-only gathering of the Hispanic Black Gay Coalition (HBGC) of Boston over the weekend to talk about the underreported concerns of gay and queer Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Still Not Enough, as the title of his new collection of essays, which he edited, puts it.

Boykin pointed out that many people are familiar with Tyler Clementi, who was the gay man who committed suicide in New Jersey after his roommate recorded him with his boyfriend, but that few know of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover.

by Loren King

“Summer’s beginning to give up her fight,” say the lyrics of a song by the lesbian folk duo Indigo Girls.

It’s getting darker earlier, but there’s still a few good beach days ahead.

Here’s a handful of new, gay-authored or queer-themed books to settle down with in the sun and sand before autumn gets the upper hand.

Are You My Mother?
[Houghton Mifflin Harcourt]
by Alison Bechdel

For those who think the memoir reached its tipping point long ago, Are You My Mother? Alison Bechdel’s follow up to her 2006 bestselling memoir Fun Home, is so lively, brilliant and incisive that it breathes unimagined life into the genre. The author of the wildly popular Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip has illustrated and written this dense, ultimately generous account of her prickly but close relationship with her complicated mother, the former actress who was a memorable character in Fun Home. Bechdel covers some of the same autobiographical details in her “Mom book” that she did in her “Dad book,” particularly her gay, closeted father’s suicide and her own coming out. But Bechdel this time delves even deeper into her own psyche. Are You My Mother? takes the reader into Bechdel’s universe. She writes honestly but with keen wit about therapy, the publication of Fun Home and her mother’s cool response to it, her lovers, her ambivalence and ambition, and all while shifting effortlessly from past to present and back again. The writing is funny, heartfelt and smart—Bechdel references everything from Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich to psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, with a little Sondheim thrown in for good measure- and the artwork is beautifully detailed. This is a first-rate book that you won’t be able to put down.