Books
by
Byrne Fone
Utopia Falls
When a series of brutal murders rocks the calm of the small upstate town of Utopia Falls, where native inhabitants--"Old Falls"--who have lived in the Falls for generations bitterly resent the "New Falls" residents--straight & gay antiques dealers, artists, actors, musicians, celebrities and wealthy newcomers--who have made the once sleepy town an elegant and chic destination, Jeremy Hudson, a young writer recently arrived from New York, realizes that the method and brutality of these shocking crimes echo equally brutal and shocking crimes he has uncovered in his research into the city’s past. It is obvious that someone has also discovered the same grim events from another time and is repeating them, determined to set Old Falls against New Falls. Whoever made that discovery must also be the murderer and Jeremy Hudson must discover who it is.
Tadzio: A Life Imagined
Tadzio: A Life Imagined, invokes Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice, in which Gustave von Aschenbach, a writer of international fame, visits Venice where he becomes obsessed by the beautiful Tadzio. Fearful to act upon his obsession, he can only watch Tadzio from a distance overcome by his passion. Tadzio: A Life Imagined is told decades later by Tadzio, who, just as was von Aschenbach, is himself now a celebrated author.
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
IS AMERICAN READY FOR A GAY PRESIDENT?
What is the connection between a murder in a gay bathhouse in New York, a front-running presidential candidate, and a shadowy cabal who want to destroy the candidate at any cost?
Gay reporter Philip Kristopher discovers that he is playing a double game as both hunter and hunted as his quest leads from gay activist rallies to the inner sanctums of the rich and powerful, the pulpits of the religious right, and the secret headquarters of militant private armies, and finally to the door of the White House itself. This compelling gay novel is about America's great obsessions: Power, Politics, Money, and Sex.
Ilios: The Fall of Troy
Ilios is a re-imagining of the oldest and the greatest story in Western literature, indeed what many have called the foundation text, the epic clash of cultures we call the Trojan War as first told by Homer in The Iliad—a title that Homer did not give to his poem. But all later readers, in Greek, called it the Poem of Ilios, the epic title derived from the city of Ilios--the city later called Troia, that we know as Troy. In a thousand ships, it is said, the Greeks came from all the corners of Hellas commanded by Agamemnon, King and lord of all the Achaean peoples. They came with the manifest intention of despoiling Troy of its uncountable treasures, razing its high walls to dust, and taking back the woman abducted by Prince Paris and now held there, she who was Queen of Sparta, wife of Menelaus, but whom all the world called Helen of Troy.
For Homer, Troy was no myth and the war that destroyed it was real, an event that resonated down the ages from the time that Troy’s walls were razed by Agamemnon to Homer’s own, some four hundred years after the time that most in the ancient world believed that Troy fell. Nor did ancient authors doubt the historicity of Troy and the war that destroyed it. The Greek historian Herodotus assigned the date of Troy’s fall to about 1250 BCE, and a marble tablet called the Parian Marbledated the fall of the city precisely to June 5, 1209 BCE Indeed age after age has believed the story of Troy, and so over two millennia, in art, in music, and in literature, and lately in film and in shreds of popular culture, Troy and the terrible war that engulfed it and the names that made it an all-too human tale, has remained a story that is central to our understanding of those times and through them of ours.
Ilios is a revised and re-written version of the original novel, War Stories. Sections of this book have been published separately as Trojan Women, and Achilles: A Love Story.
CASTLES IN THE AIR
CASTLES IN THE AIR
Coming Home to the Perigord.
BY BYRNE FONE AND ALAIN PIOTON
The senses are heightened in the Perigord, what the French call la France profonde, deep France. The taste of food, the sweetness of the country air after one of the spectacular late-summer thunderstorms suddenly etching the sky with alarmingly jagged bolts of lightening. The drowsy rich summer days, followed by cool autumn nights and then the chill brilliance of a mid-winter frost. Perhaps because men and women have for so long worked the fields and every inch of land that can be tilled, the entire countryside has the effect of having been landscaped by some master hand. History is always present here, in the lichen-covered golden stone of every ancient house, in the narrow streets of ancient tiny villages, in the hauteur of a forbidding and crenellated chateau that towers imposingly next to a rushing river. Indeed history seems to infuse the very air of the Perigord, heir to all the ages of eternal France. There is mystery here and some say that it was born with the magic that scholars claim the ancient cave paintings may have been trying to conjure. Whatever the cause, the Perigord is indeed the most magical and the most beautiful region in all of France and as you drive along a narrow country road, the rich dark forest bordering either side, you suddenly see in the distance ghost-like towers rising above the trees, floating, it almost seems, on the horizon, the misty towers of a castle in the air. This is the story of how we came home to the Perigord.
HISTORIC HUDSON
An Architectural Portrait
An architectural portrait of the city of Hudson, NY (est. 1783), featuring more than 200 antique and modern photographs and antique maps, with many of the photographs dating from 1850-1930. The city of Hudson, founded in 1783 by Quaker merchants and whalers from New England, has been called "a dictionary of American Architecture" because of its many 18th and 19th century buildings that have survived to the present day.
HOMOPHOBIA: A HISTORY
January 20, 2023
It is the last acceptable prejudice. In an age when racial and ethnic name-calling are viewed with distaste, and physical epithets are frowned upon, hatred of homosexuals remains. Now, in a tour de force of historical and literary research, Byrne Fone chronicles the evolution of homophobia through the centuries. Delving into literary sources as diverse as Greek philosophy, the Bible, Elizabethan poetry, and the Victorian novel, as well as historical texts and propaganda from the French Revolution to the Moral Majority, Fone finds that same-sex desire has always been the object of legal, social, and religious persecution. homosexuality. He charts the subtle shifts in public attitudes and law, from Anglo-Saxon edicts that imposed death by burning upon "confess'd sodomytes," to Victorian decrees that punished sodomy with "forfeiture of all rights, including procreation" (i.e., castration). Sifting the evidence of our own times, including Reader's Digest articles and TV talk-show transcripts, Fone demonstrates that homophobia remains one of the central tenets of law, science, faith, and literature, and defines the very essence of what it means to be male or female. Written by an acclaimed expert in gay and lesbian history, Homophobia is the best sort of history: lively, accessible, and enlightening.
MASCULINE LANDSCAPES
Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text
Scrutinizing the weave and texture of Walt Whitman’s earliest poetry and fiction, the notebooks of 1855–56, the first edition (1855) of Leaves of Grass, and the Calamus poems, Byrne Fone demonstrates that from the beginning and throughout, Whitman’s homoerotic muse, his "Fierce Wrestler," dictated the shape, tone, and message of the poetry.
Fone shows how Whitman’s presumed homosexuality is reflected in the work. He identifies the definitive signs, symbols, metaphors, and structures unique to homosexual texts as he examines the ways in which the social, emotional, spiritual, aesthetic, and sexual facts of homosexuality shape and define such texts. Further, he places Whitman in the context of nineteenth-century literary/social homosexual life as well as in the context of homosexual fantasy as expressed in certain nineteenth-century texts.
POEMS
Written Mostly in France
ACHILLES
A Love Story
January 20, 2023
THE TROJAN WAR--the legendary battle. ACHILLES--the most fearsome warrior, hero of the Trojan War, and the most beautiful man in the world. PATROCLUS--handsome and heroic. They loved one another. ANTILOCHUS--who comes to the battlefield of Troy to find Achilles, the man he has always loved. When the tragic death of Patroclus leaves Achilles shattered and alone, it is Antilochus who stands at his side, as friend, companion in battle, and lover. "Achilles: A Love Story," written in the tradition of Mary Renault’s "The Persian Boy" and "Fire From Heaven," is the first modern novel ( 2010) to re-imagine the "Iliad" as not only a tale of battles and heroism, but as a passionate story of love between men. "Achilles: A Love Story" creates the passionate tale of Antilochus and Achilles as it plays out against the legendary battles of the Trojan war in an exciting and moving story told by no other writer.
TROJAN WOMEN
January 20, 2023
When men make war, it is women who suffer. Trojan Women is a gripping re-imaging of one of the greatest stories in western literature, the epic clash of cultures we call the Trojan War. As Homer tells it in the Iliad, men fight, suffer, and die. There men tell the tale. But the Trojan women, whose lives are at the center of Homer's tale, and who are the prizes to be won, are silent. Trojan Women gives these women a voice. In the novel six legendary women a voice: Chryseis, captured and taken as a slave to the bed of Agamemnon, bravely and resourcefully confronts the horrors of war and the brutality of men. Captured with her and saved from death by her, Briseis stands with Chryseis when death threatens them. Slaves and playthings of the Greeks, the two women are at the moral and emotional center of the drama and tell a story that even Homer never knew. From within the besieged city of Troy, Queen Hecabe, and her daughters Andromache and Kassandra, look from the walls at the vast Greek army camped below, and bravely face the terrors that confront them: for Hecabe the loss of a crown and kingdom, for Andromache the loss of husband and child, for Kassandra the loss of sanity itself. <br />Once desired and now despised, Helen, the prize over whom Greeks and Trojans fight, has lost everything and now can only wait to learn if she will live or die.
Hidden Heritage
History and the Gay Imagination
January 20, 2023
An anthology of Gay Literature
Bell's British Theatre: Selected Plays, 1791–1802, 1797
Edited with Introduction and Prefaces
Byrne R. S. Fone
