Books like Love in a Dark Time by Colm Tóibín

A Little Life follows four college friends in New York as they confront trauma, love and the enduring scars of their pasts, weaving themes of friendship, family, and identity into a profound coming‑of‑age story.

Alma Singer, a fourteen‑year‑old New Yorker, searches for a book that might cure her mother’s loneliness, while Leo Gursky, an immigrant in the city, hunts the hidden author of a novel that once inspired his love in Polish exile.

A diary-like portrait of Anna, a young single mother, writer, and Communist Party member, whose inner and outer lives collide amid domestic upheaval and political turmoil, marking a watershed moment for the Women’s Movement.

A romantic novel about a talented woman of aristocratic background who defies Victorian expectations and commercial success while pursuing her love for other women.

Working from classic texts of European and American writers―including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde―Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.

The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage surveys nearly four hundred works across historical periods, highlighting the contributions of figures like Michelangelo, Armistead Maupin, Sappho, and Shakespeare to gay and lesbian literature.

Austin has traced the history of the homosexual novel from its murky beginnings in the dim past, into the hesitant 20s, the gay pulps of the 30s, the breakthrough in the 40s, the rising (and hostile) reactions of the critics in the 50s, and the decline that began in the 60s. In a literate, perceptive account, laced with dry, iconoclastic humor, he described some two hundred novels written during these decades. With Kraft-Ebing et alia relegating homosexuality to the realms of psychopathic behavior, gay literature was almost totally in the closet until the 1920s. Even through the 1950s, the writers had to add a tone of "respectability" to their novels in order for them to be even partially accepted by straight readers and critics. They "played the game" by changing pronouns or by tossing their protagonist to the wolves: more than one of the star-cross'd lovers at book's end (1) saw the light of day and married the girl next door, or (2) committed suicide. All of this changed with the emergence of honest writers like Rechy, Isherwood, Vidal and Capote, and with the growing confidence of the gays themselves. This literary genre has finally come out of the closet.

In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it? Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Stoker's Dracula, and Lawrence's Women In Love.