Achilles: A Love Story

ACHILLES: A LOVE STORY by Byrne Fone

Byrne Fone, who has written about non-fiction gay subjects for almost forty years, has moved into gay fiction with the publication of Achilles: A Love Story, a novel set at the time of the Trojan War. As the ancients all knew, the story of the war at Troy was also a tale of love between men--of the devotion of Achilles, unrivalled hero, terrible warrior, and so it is said in legend, the most beautiful man in the world, to another great warrior, the handsome Patroclus. Their names resound in the catalogue both of heroes and of lovers; their story remains one of the greatest, most emblematic, and earliest gay love stories ever told. But in the Iliad Homer also tantalizingly hints at another love story, that of the love of Antilochus, son of King Nestor and Prince of Pylos, for Achilles, who as the Iliad tells, love another. Achilles: A Love Story creates the story of Antilochus and Achilles as it plays out against the background of the last year of the Trojan war, a tale both epic and tragic, that has been told by no other writer. Five star reviews on Amazon.

Byrne Fone who has been called a pioneer in the field of Gay Studies, taught one of the earliest courses in Gay Studies in the United States in the 1970s at the City University of New York. His books include the largest and most comprehensive anthology of gay literature, The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, winner of a Lambda award, as well as a study of early English and American gay literary history in A Road to Stonewall: Homosexuality and Homophobia in British and American Literature. His study of Walt Whitman, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text examines the homoerotic context of Whitman’s poetry and life. In Homophobia: A History he examines the history of homophobia over a period covering almost two millennia. He has also published American Revolution: A Gay Novel about a gay American president.