Poetry. LGBT Studies. The forest is a place of refuge and story, created by characters who enter and enlarge it beyond the fantasy of any one person. Authority is diminished and recuperated. Personalities perform themselves via vivid and anarchic gestures. A condition of dereliction becomes the arena where bodies rustle with erotic pulse. My hope was that this book would be entered as its own social space. Like a gay bar of the fifties, entry would signal that you have taken membership in a stigmatized community, with the risk that entails. Can readership entail risk? Readership as a secret society.