"A riotous party," says David Leavitt of this anthology, in which seventeenth-century samurai mingle with twentieth-century Russian emigres and Chinese peasants. As in The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, writers both gay and straight explore the complicated questions surrounding love and sex between men, homosexual identity, relationships between gay men, their friends, and their families.

From Plato to Boccaccio, Marguerite Yourcenar to Reinaldo Arenas, Yukio Mishima to Manuel Puig, these writings reveal an unexpected cultural and historical flexibility of attitudes toward homosexuality.