Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Literary Fiction by African-American Writers

In a 1984 Village Voice interview, James Baldwin said, ""The best advice I ever got was from an old friend of mine... who said you have to go the way your blood beats."" As editor Ruff translates it, this means ""live life instinctively, intuitively, with integrity and an awareness of consequences, and without self deception."" Organized by themes, this rich array of short stories and novel excerpts ranges from thoroughly enjoyable conventional narrative like Harris's captivating chapter from Just As I Am about homophobia in black fraternities to accounts of personal liberation that border on magical realism such as Bruce Marrow's ""Near the End of the World,"" about a young gay man who finds consolation for the loss of his gay father in the company of a half-crazy Smith alumna cum tattoo artist on the Venice boardwalk. In Becky Birtha's ""Ice Castle,"" a young woman contends with her parents disapproval and her own bewildering infatuation with an underage upper-class white girl. In Gayl Jones's ""The Women,"" a young girl recalls her mother's revolving door of lesbian lovers. Although many of the stories transcend color to strike universal chords, it is perhaps inevitable that the collection concentrates so much more on pain than on pleasure, self-knowledge or liberation. (Aug.)