ROOMMATES CAN'T ALWAYS BE LOVERS: An Intimate Look at Male-Male Relationships

Lige and Jack (they're inseparable) are the Miss Lonelyhearts of the closet queen set. This collection of their advice to the homosexually lovelorn culled from the tabloid Gay is interspersed with editorials on Coming Out, constructive narcissism, sadomasochism, democratic safeguards, venereal disease, aging, rough trade, Gay Liberation. Their political line: ""There is no 'straight' world or 'gay' world: there is only one world -- and in it, everybody is loving."" Walt Whitman, they think, ""had the right idea,"" so they quote his wisdom often to inspire their desperate correspondents. Despite the authors' middle-class morality -- alternately cloying or too cute and cocky -- this is still brown-paper-wrapper material for the fearful guilt-ridden pariahs trapped in communities like Merle Miller's Marshalltown, Iowa, and the double bind of their social and sexual desires.