My Life As a Mole and Five Other Stories

by Larry Mitchell

Genres: LGBT

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Larry Mitchell (1939 – December 26, 2012) was an American author and publisher. He was the founder of Calamus Books - an early small press devoted to gay male literature - and the author of fiction dealing with the gay male experience in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s.

With Terry Helbing and Felice Picano, he cofounded Gay Presses of New York in 1981. His book of short stories My Life As a Mole won the 1989 Small Press Lambda Literary Award. Mitchell's novel The Terminal Bar, published in 1982, is considered to be the first book of fiction to address HIV/AIDS. The feature film Acid Snow (1998) directed by Joel Itman is based on Mitchell's novel of the same name.

He died on December 26, 2012 in Ithaca, New York after a battle with pancreatic cancer. [wikipedia]

Reviews

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this based on the title and cool cover art and blurbs at a now-defunct east village bookstore in '97. I remember riding the train back to my parents' in NJ, reading some rauchy gay-sex-in-punker-club-bathroom scene that was really well done, worrying that neighboring riders would read over my shoulder and get the wrong idea and try to gamely stick their commuter fingers in mine earholes and other unlubed orifices. I still worry that my pop will pull it off the bookshelf in my childhood room and be all like wha et dis?! An apparently authentic, nearly autobiographical glimpse into a downtown NYC nevermore of sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, perversion, and death (exactly all the things I wouldn't let my fiction students write about) . . . .