The women / Gayl Jones -- The outing / James Baldwin -- Meredith's lie / Shawn Stewart Ruff -- What has been done to me / Jacqueline Woodson -- To taste fire once more / Charles W. Harvey -- Ice castle / Becky Birtha -- Near the end of the world / Bruce Morrow -- The alternative / Amiri Baraka -- The truth of the matter / Bennett Capers -- Run, mourner, run / Randall Kenan -- There's a window / Sapphire -- Smoke, lilies and jade / Richard Bruce Nugent -- The Statue of Liberty / John Edgar Wideman -- The place of excrement / Samuel R. Delany -- Bathesda of Sinners Run / Maude Irwin Owens -- Man of all work / Richard Wright -- The temple of my familiar / Alice Walker -- Just friends / Brooke M. Stephens -- Obi's story / Cary Alan Johnson -- Asphalt / Carl Hancock Rux -- Infants of the spring / Wallace Thurman -- Dissimulations / Orian Hyde Weeks -- The two / Gloria Naylor -- Zami : a new spelling of my name / Audre Lorde -- Afro Jew fro / Catherine E. McKinley -- Song of Solomon / Toni Morrison -- Babylon / Max Gordon -- A carnival jangle / Alice Dunbar Nelson -- Just as I am / E. Lynn Harris -- Undressing Lady J. / Artress Bethany White -- Summertime, and the living is easy-- / Reginald Shepherd -- Epithalamion / Carolivia Herron.

An anthology of gay and lesbian fiction by black writers. In Bennett Capers' The Truth of the Matter, a reporter realizes his true sexuality as he investigates a murder, while an excerpt from E. Lynn Harris' Invisible Life tackles the male bonding--spoken and unspoken--that goes on in fraternities.