"Concentrating on the friendship between impresario Larry Parnes, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and showbiz solicitor David Jacobs, the book details how they shaped the Swinging 60s, along with their associates including songwriter Lionel Bart (author of the hit musical Oliver!), record producer Joe Meek, Sir Joseph Lockwood (the head of EMI), Vicki Wickham (manager of Dusty Springfield and assistant producer on the influential TV show Ready Steady Go), songwriter and record label head Norman Newell, Simon Napier-Bell (manager of Marc Bolan), Kit Lambert (manager of the Who), playwright Joe Orton, and Robert Stigwood (manager of the Bee Gees and Cream). Drawing on rare and unpublished archive material, personal diaries, and new interviews from some of the survivors of that turbulent decade, The Velvia Mafia shows how--in the period leading up to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality and the founding of the Gay Liberation movement--LGBT professionals in the music industry were working together, supporting each other and changing history."--Publisher description

I'LL LOCK HER IN A GILDED CAGE AND THROW AWAY THE KEY. The night we met, she thought she was tasting freedom.I devoured her once and left before I even knew her name. Four months later, Bratva business leads me to the house of my enemy with one objective:Burn it down and kill everyone inside. That's exactly what I plan to do...Until I find her cowering before me.The innocent girl from the club.My beautiful caged bird. I'm not here to save her--I'm here to ruin her.But something stops me in my tracks.Something I never expected. Did she say that's my baby in her womb? GILDED CAGE is the first book in the Kovalyov Bratva duet. Artem and Esme's story will conclude in Book 2, GILDED TEARS.

I made a bet with my newlywed submissive wife. I told her that if she could behave herself impeccably for a week, she could wear the trousers for a day. That included being able to dominate me. The bet was almost guaranteed to be impossible to achieve, and yet somehow she did it. It looks like I'm in for a fun night, doesn't it?If that wasn't bad enough, Kyle has been spotted near our home. It scares me. I can feel the net closing in, and I'm still no closer to unravelling the pieces. We need to figure out what Redcliff wants, and fast.In order to do this, I'm going to have to talk to my mother-in-law, who still isn't speaking to me. I have no idea what her problem is. She tried to kill me, not the other way around...

LGBT musicians have shaped the development of music over the last century, with a sexually progressive soundtrack in the background of the gay community’s struggle for acceptance. With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music. David Bowie Made Me Gay is the first book to cover the breadth of history of recorded music by and for the LGBT community and how those records influenced the evolution of the music we listen to today.

In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called “the Homintern” (an echo of Lenin’s “Comintern”) by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some defense against dominant heterosexual exclusion, the grouping brought solidarity, celebrated talent, and, in doing so, invigorated the majority culture. Woods introduces an enormous cast of gifted and extraordinary characters, most of them operating with surprising openness; but also explores such issues as artistic influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Traveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this sharply observed, warm-spirited book presents a surpassing portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.

A collection of 16 stories about gay men's 'obsessions' with mobsters, hit men and shadowy spirits from the other side, delivering powerful short fiction that explores the seedier side of gay sexual adventure.

Best known for being the editor of edgy gay fiction of the Velvet Mafia Web site, Meriwether has been writing short fiction and building up a body of his own work, collected for the first time in "The Silent Hustler."

What is it about cops that so excites gay men? Could it be the buzz cut and chiseled jaw, those bulging thighs under tight blue serge, the cool mirrored glasses that reflect unbridled lust in the eyes (and other body parts) of their beholders? Maybe it’s the promise of punishment at the end of a nightstick. Perhaps it’s the sheer pleasure of transgression — of getting down and dirty with a man who’s supposed to enforce the law but seems more interested in the perp than in his crime. Hot Cops: Gay Erotic Stories explores the hotter, wilder side of these masculine icons.

Smart. Funny. Fearless."It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" --Dave Eggers. "It's a piece of garbage" --Donald Trump.

The wife of a Jewish gangster describes what it is really like to be married to the mob, including competing with mob "groupies," dinner with Meyer Lansky, and watching a man bleed to death in her bedroom. Reprint. K. AB.