The bad news: Alyson Books, founded 30 years ago and for a time the preeminent gay and lesbian press, flamed out in October despite a bid by editor Don Weise to purchase it mostly for debts. More than a dozen contracted books are languishing in limbo and Alyson authors are organizing to demand unpaid back royalties, while owners Here Media plan to emerge in 2011 as an e-book only press. The good news: in November, Weise announced the launch of Magnus Books (after Magnus Hirschfeld, an outspoken German advocate for gay rights in the 19th and early 20th centuries), with plans to publish up to a dozen titles next year.

More good news: Victoria A. Brownworth has launched Tiny Satchel Press, a young adult publisher whose first list features books by J.D. Shaw, Greg Herren, Patty Friedman, Diane DeKelb-Rittenhouse and the anthology From Where They Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth. Jameson Currier started Chelsea Station Editions with three books released in 2010. J.M. Snyder expanded JMS Books, which publishes both print and e-books with a focus on male romances. And novelist Marshall Moore announced Signal 8 Press and BookCyclone, based in Hong Kong, the former a print publisher whose first 2011 book is Philip Huang’s story collection, A Pornography of Grief, the latter focusing on e-book reprints, with a list that includes Juliet Sarkessian’s Trio Sonata and backlist/out of print books by Andy Quan and Neal Drinnan.

Beale’s memoir-style novel – about a 13-year-old girl struggling with an unstable home life (her suicidal mother is bipolar, her ineffectual father is mean-tempered), an unrequited crush on another schoolgirl, and bullying by her peers in 1970s East Yorkshire – is heartbreaking, heroic and, somehow, also humorous.

Antarctica, which Bledsoe has visited three times – feet-on-the-ground research that captures the southern continent’s blend of mystery, menace and majesty with ravishing immediacy – is as much a character in this crystalline novel as are the three women confronting the emotional puzzles of their lives in a riveting narrative.

It’s quite likely Cox’s second novel qualifies as one of the two most original queer stories of the year. Radek Tomaszewski is a sometimes-bisexual parkour-loving queer pyromaniac and activist whose fiery romance with fellow fire-lover Dora is set against a backdrop of Polish homophobia, Pope John Paul II’s death and the music of Pink Floyd.

The allure of astounding beauty and how the mind can betray the body are the core of Cunningham’s elegant novel about mid-age angst, the hollow nature of elites, the elusiveness of once-dreamed goals, and the vanity of unexamined lives – all qualms confronted in a poetically pyrotechnic mix of humor and pathos.

It would be a mistake to pigeonhole this controversial book as solely about the politics of safe sex versus barebacking in the middle years of the AIDS epidemic. It’s first a heady intellectual narrative, a rich novel of ideas and then, amidst the tumult of personalities at war with each other, the story of romance gone awry.

Love comes late for Joanna Kane, who denied her sexual self well into her 40s. Debut novelist Gitlin’s breezy novel about a late-bloomer is told through sometimes manic, sometimes maudlin, sometimes wise, and sometimes simply wonderful journal entries, a narrative tack that propels the tale with engaging quirkiness.

Spanky is an unborn baby who can flit from one character’s thoughts and emotions to another’s – a storytelling perspective that might have come off as a diaper-load of a gimmick. But Henderson handles the unorthodox point of view with inventive style and charm – and this is the other truly original queer read of the year.

Houck writes about 20-something queers with perfect emotional pitch, as they scramble to make their way in contemporary Manhattan, navigating uncertain years of youthful drift. This luminous debut novel captures big-city New York hustle with the values of small-town heart.

What better themes for a skewed-view gay novel than the concepts of self-loathing, gym culture and body image, abetted by a supernatural solution to avoirdupois and a money-buys-anything sense of entitlement? Moore’s razor-sharp dialogue and well-honed disdain for the concept of beauty at any cost makes this unsettling novel irresistible.

Fascinating fact is transformed into sumptuous fiction in Sledge’s debut novel, in which he re-imagines poet Elizabeth Bishop’s 15 years in South America – when she was tumultuously in love with aristocratic architect and activist Lota de Macedo Soare – with extraordinarily atmospheric prose and unflinchingly emotional intimacy.

Transpeople. Genderqueers. Trannies. Sex/gender radicals. Transsexuals. They’re all represented in this prose-and-poetry anthology of intense, painful memoirs and breezy, joyous mini-biographies addressing the fluidity – sometimes hard-won, often wholly fabulous – of the sexual self, many voices mulling a singular theme and bringing younger gender outlaws into the queer literary mainstream.

Allen Barnett and Christopher Coe, Melvin Dixon and Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley and Paul Reed: fiction by writers taken by AIDS – too young, their books now out of print – is celebrated in Cardamone’s loving collection, part book review, part social history, part literary excavation and, in summation, a loving memorial for queer writing and writers.

The moral redemption at the core of Clegg’s relentless, self-flagellating memoir about hapless addiction and palpable paranoia is likely as psychically searing for the reader as it was for the writer. Clegg, young, handsome, in love and at the top of the literary management game in Manhattan, was everyone’s ideal – until he encountered crack.

There’s more to lesbian lit than The Well of Loneliness – and novelist Donoghue (Room, one of the best non-lesbian books of 2010) has done the research to prove it. With completely accessible (and often witty) prose married to rigorous academic research, this treasure trove focuses on writing about girl-girl relationships from the medieval to the modern.

Kilmer-Purcell’s account of a retired drag queen and his Martha Stewart-employed boyfriend settling into a rural setting has many hilarious high points. But the stress of holding down day jobs while handling farm chores on weekends while launching an online business takes a toll on the men’s relationship too, a reality the author never shies away from.

As Congress dawdled over the inevitability of repealing "Don’t Act, Don’t Tell," art historian Lord’s posthumous wartime memoir arrived at an opportune time. His cheeky recounting of WWII service as a practicing homosexual – he was good at it, once he eased out of the closet – makes clear that queers, even back then, were everywhere, even in the military.

Reyes, an accomplished playwright and theater professor, bares his soul with searing candor in this graceful memoir about growing up as a Chilean immigrant in America, a handsome lad drawn to other young men but nonetheless bedeviled for years by body shame, paralyzing fear expressed with a compelling combination of poignant honesty and rueful wit.

Though the likes of Burroughs and Ginsberg wander through Chelsea Hotel hallways of this memoir, they’re merely colorful bit players. The real stars, memorialized in pre-fame days, are then-waiflike Smith and her late-1960s cohort in cool ambition, Robert Mapplethorpe. Their relationship endured physically until Mapplethorpe’s death and, as this exquisitely tender book makes clear, emotionally well beyond his passing.

Spring’s biography of tattoo artist, avid sexhound and erotic author Sam ("Phil Andros") Steward is a gay nonfiction standout in its own right – but this limited-edition collection of Steward’s one-night-stand sketches, Polaroid pics of tricks, tattoo flash art and written remembrances from his "stud file" is a stunning visual companion to a story of a remarkable gay man’s life.

It’s hardly surprising that boundary-shattering filmmaker Waters claims an eclectic roster of role models – the women and men he says molded him into a healthily neurotic man. For a man whose shtick is to shock, what’s most shocking about these essays is how sentimental, un-ironic and humane they are.

It was the year of queer life stories. Country singer Chely Wright asked readers to Like Me; actor (and Ellen DeGeneres’s wedded wife) Portia de Rossi wrote about her Unbearable Lightness; and, for former boy band performer and current balladeer Ricky Martin, it was all about Me: three performers wrote about their queer selves (and Wright and Martin came out) in not-bad autobiographies. (And, in January, muscularly fey Johnny Weir proclaims Welcome to My World – it’s the year of pop star tell-alls. But serious books told the stories of serious queer lives, too: R. Tripp Evans, in Grant Wood: A Life, tracks the subsumed homosexuality in the gothic artist’s life; Sjeng Scheijen, in Diaghilev: A Life, gays up a ballet master; long-closeted British novelist E.M. Forster (Maurice, published after his death in 1970), is caressed critically in Frank Kermode’s Concerning E. M. Forster, and his homosexuality is made central to his life in Wendy Moffat’s celebratory A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. And another venerable British gay scribe’s life is also queered up in Selena Hasting’s The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham. More prosaically – but no less importantly – Will Fellows writes about grandmother Helen P. Larson and her Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s, and Archbishop and AIDS activist the Rev. Carl Bean tells how I Was Born This Way: A Gay Preacher’s Journey Through Gospel Music, Disco Stardom, and a Ministry in Christ by Archbishop Carl Bean.