From the editor of Hometowns and A Member of the Family, this new anthology expands the literature that defines contemporary gay life. Its compelling essays serve as testaments to an evolving gay culture, based on enduring relationships filled with eros, compassion, and love.

Gay men have always created their own families. While some replace the "blood" kin who have denied their sexual orientation or expelled them, others have intentionally chosen to build new kinds of families, often ingeniously rewriting the rules society has prescribed. Steven Saylor shares the secrets of his domestic success with wit and poignancy as he writes about his seventeen-year marriage to Rick - their cats, their house, their shared history, and their other lovers.

Nikolaus Merrell smashes expectations and stereotypes with an emotional account of the child he and his lover adopted and are raising together. And both Jim Marks and Michael Rowe describe threesomes, although Marks's triad is joyously sexual and Rowe's is a union of chosen brothers, straight and gay, together since childhood.

1. The gay community, gay collectives, gay bars, twelve-step programs, and relatives of lovers all become part of the supportive structures that allow gay men to express their "family values" creatively. Powerful and emotional, Friends and Lovers is stunning social history, a book that deepens our understanding and challenges stereotypes about the form and substance of family.