Crusader Hillis
Crusader Hillis is a writer, editor, curator, and producer. He co-founded (with Rowland Thomson) the queer bookshop Hares & Hyenas in 1991. They have since presented over 500 literary and performance events for festivals in Melbourne and Sydney. Hares & Hyenas is now also a fully licensed performance venue presenting over 120 events per year.
Crusader’s fiction and non-fiction has been published in magazines and newspapers here and in the UK. He has had a distinguished parallel career in the arts, managing organisations and marketing teams for festivals, consulting for various major organisations, and serving on several boards and committees.
‘Coming out’ stories remain one of the most potent sources for young people to understand their own relationship to sex, gender, and sexuality. Living in a largely heteronormative society, many young people find a place in these stories to validate and challenge their thoughts and experiences. Nevo Zisin’s memoir, written at the age of twenty, covers these areas but also speaks to those livi ... (read more)
Peter Polites’s first novel is remarkable in its power to evoke growing up caught between conflicting cultural and sexual identities. It tells the story of Bux, a gay man haunted by his addiction to painkillers, his abusive relationship with his drug-dealing bodybuilder boyfriend, his violent alcoholic Greek father, and a childhood where his sexuality and his traditional Greek upbringing mark hi ... (read more)
Kings Rising is the final in C.S. Pacat's Captive Prince trilogy. Set in an invented world that evokes medieval France and Ancient Greece, it follows Damianos, the Prince of Akielos, and Laurent, Prince of Vere. When Damianos's half-brother overthrows their father in a palace coup, he imprisons Damianos and sends him to Vere as a pleasure slave for Laurent. The first two books follow Damianos, ren ... (read more)
Mattheüs (Mattie) Duiker is a thirty-something gay man with a chequered past and an addiction to porn. His Afrikaans father, Bennie, is a self-made man, a larger-than-life uber-masculine traditionalist who has forever cast a shadow over his family. Bennie is dying from terminal cancer, and Mattie is his primary carer. Mattie, desperate to make something of his life, sets out to create a business, ... (read more)
John Burbidge’s The Boatman was first published last year in India, by Yoda Press. Its moving afterword describes Burbidge’s return to India last year for the book launch and his attendance at an LGBT pride march there. Burbidge was struck by how strongly the cause of sexual rights had been embraced by other elements of Indian society who also face discrimination from their countrymen.
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Brooke Hemphill knows hers was not meant to be an ordinary existence, yet by her early twenties she is engaged and planning the perfect wedding – with the wrong guy. She breaks it off and moves in with a married man. He, too, is wrong for her. She works on an island resort and falls for another, but he takes off for Europe. She travels to the United States and works on a cruise ship. Life is a c ... (read more)
Eli Glasman’s début novel is aimed at a Young Adult audience, but should also enjoy a long life on adult fiction shelves. Seemingly based on Glasman’s own upbringing as an Orthodox Jew in Caulfield, a Melbourne suburb, the book is fascinating in its candid observations of the rituals, strictures, and arcane customs of Orthodox Judaism, particularly those of the Lubavitch sect, with its emphas ... (read more)
David Levithan’s latest book has proved extremely popular with adolescent and adult readers alike, particularly gay men who lived through the first wave of HIV/Aids. The main storyline, which takes place over a couple of days, centres on two gay teenagers, former boyfriends Harry and Craig, who set out to break the Guinness Record for a continuous kiss (more than thirty-two hours).
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The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy, a novel about addiction, compulsion, and recovery, is set within a fast-moving thriller. Traversing the worlds of health research, drug cartels, world politics, and corporations, it is a conspiracy novel that manages to stay just within the realms of credibility due to the specialist knowledge the author brings to the tale.
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