It was only after the Stonewall riots and the birth of the gay liberation movement in 1969 that the official category "gay writing" came into being. Yet writings by and about lesbians and gay men have a much longer history than that. In Pages Passed from Hand to Hand David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell have charted 200 years of writing about gay men that includes such obscure items as Charlotte Chark"s 1755 novel The History of Henry Dumont Esq. and Alan Dale"s 1889 A Marriage Below Zero as well as surprisingly homoerotic work by Herman Melville, Henry James, and Ambrose Bierce. While most of these works were already known to serious readers of gay literature, Leavitt and Mitchell"s contribution in Pages Passed from Hand to Hand is in consciously placing the material in a clear, unambiguously gay tradition for readers of all sexual persuasions.