A Collection of Gay Romance Novels
Book 1: Teaching Finance
A newly-hired professor who will be teaching Finance returned to academics after a tour in Afghanistan. He's having lunch with colleagues when a waiter drops a tray, and that triggers a PTSD flashback to an attack in Kabul. One of the colleagues is a professor of Clinical Psychology who's involved in the PTSD programs at the nearby VA hospital, and a relationship between them ensues.
Book 2: Jonathan Edwards, Itinerant Preacher
Two newly-hired professors meet over lunch, and they see the complexities of their different understanding of the meaning of relationships between men. A prominent modern Episcopal priest explains his advice to the President about how maintaining gay men and women in the military services supports the national interest and how even the Pope had asked "Who am I to judge?"
Book 3: The Chef
A former chef in the Navy takes a job as a chef in the dining room of the Faculty Club, and his staff ID gives him access to the sauna in the faculty locker room, where a professor of European history meets him. They bond over a discussion about the role of the Crusades in changing the way foods were prepared in European castles during the high middle ages, in part because of the role of the herb-gardens of monasteries in France, England and Wales.
Book 4: Sunderland Fields
When a professor of English literature realizes that it's time to stop throwing money into rent, he meets a construction site-manager who introduces him to the complexities of home-building. The professor offers the complexities of the characters of novels by both Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to that man, and each of them comes to feel new aspects of their own lives.
Book 5: A Death in the Family
When a professor's father dies, he becomes capable of allowing himself to recognize aspects of his own life that have been missing. He learns that collaborating with a colleague involves more than writing essays in academic journals, and he comes to understand complexities of male relationships that he himself had not experienced.
Book 6: The Portraitist
When a professional photographer enrolls in a life-drawing program at the university, he encounters the complexities of trying to draw seductive portraits, and encounters aspects of male relationships that he hadn't expected. He also meets a fellow-student who has experienced social bonding among men in the Teamsters Union that had no sexual component but gave those men anchoring in their own lives. A group of men sharing a ski-house in Vermont can find the same anchoring.