Gay: the tenth anniversary collection

Forty-seven essays on what it means to be gay today: the marriage fight, religion, politics, Mardi Gras, body image, drugs, HIV, media, families, babies, gender identity, sport, literature and arts. Steve Dow is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based journalist and author whose original publication of Gay in 2001 was critically well-received and now he revisits the original 14 essays from a decade-on perspective, and includes 33 new essays, including pieces on Michael Kirby, Pauline Pantsdown, Ian Roberts, Matthew Mitcham, Norrie mAy-welby, Augusten Burroughs, Tony Kushner, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Rufus Wainwright, Lily Tomlin, Paul Capsis, Meow Meow, Anton Enus, Cyndi Lauper and Tommy Murphy. Writes Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap, in the foreword: “Dow is a journalist and the book in your hand is a very fine piece of journalist’s writing. That’s something we don’t have enough of in this country ... It’s the changes, the continuities, the breaks and the persistent discord that Gay examines and documents, and always in Dow’s honest, humane voice.” Mike Shuttleworth in The Sunday Age reviewed the original Gay as pick of the week in The Sunday Age: “Steve Dow delivers an engaging set of profiles and essays … Articulate, compassionate, witty and crafted, Dow’s writing is timely and not merely topical and this collection is well-paced and varied. The piece Keitho and Davo is a quietly angry elegy …” while Debra Adelaide wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald: “With the Mardi Gras a TV institution, do we really need arguments for gay rights? Journalist Dow proves indeed we do, in calm, readable, humorous essays tackling a range of contemporary social anxieties about the subject. … An honest, witty and powerful espousal of human rights.” Dow is also the author of the fiction e-novel All Sorts, published in 2011.