Gay men and women by Cowan book

have found this book to be very enjoyable, but it should in no way be considered light reading. There are many famous and infamous women and men portrayed, the most notable of whom include Plato, Alexander the Great, Da Vinci, Byron, Tchaikovsky, Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith, Tennessee Williams, Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev and 36 others. Tom Cowan does a wonderful job of removing these characters from their history books and humanizing them. In many instances these are people my friends and I learned about in school and often the exclamation "S/He was gay? You're kidding me! I never knew that!" is heard from them in reference to this book. It can also be a wonderful tool in the right cases, (i.e. providing a different perspective perfect for a paper or a hero for a child) often shedding new insight into the lives of these truly great people. As Cowan states in the introduction, "Confronting and accepting the value of one's gay identity, in spite of the efforts of society to deny the worth of gay people, can provide the basis for the strength and self-confidence needed to leave one's personal mark on the world." I consider myself to be a person who has great plans to leave a mark of my own before I go and as such I find this book to be a most wonderful collection of role models in whose footsteps I may one day follow.