"The responsibility, the challenge of gay writing," Peter Weltner has said, "is to write in an uncoded way without [the writing becoming] sociology or journalism. Coding allowed for an extraordinary development of metaphor, which we can now abandon. We need other kinds of metaphors" (personal interview with Jim Tushinski). It is this search for other kinds of metaphors to tell the stories of gay men that unites Weltner's published work. In each book, he has found a different narrative and stylish approach to join with the thematic concerns--redemption, memory and loss, intellect and emotion, the interconnection of geography and sexuality--and create works that both celebrate and examine life without violating the mystery and simplicity of emotions.

Weltner's first book, Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts, is divided into two independent sections separated by a group of Gerald Coble's haunting drawings. The first section, "Beachside Entries," consists of 30 short pieces, each less than a page--prose poems on themes of love and loss. Weltner chooses to ignore linear components of short fiction such as characterization and plot, achieving unity, tension, and climax through his use of recurring imagery. A swirl of Scotts, Dons, Phils, and Joes move through "Beachside Entries," their lives and relationships irrevocably altered by AIDS, while images from fairy tales and mythology and vignettes of natural disaster, war, religious persecution, and pestilence weave in and out. The vague collection of proper names takes on personalities, not from the scattering of information Weltner provides, but from one's own memories of dead friends. By the end of "Beachside Entries," the effect of Weltner's skillful image weaving is profoundly moving. He takes on the emotional enormity of AIDS by creating a patchwork of memory and myth that, when seen as a whole, is formally beautiful and ultimately healing.

Memory also plays a central role in the second part of the book, "Specific Ghosts." Here Weltner uses the classic form of the literary ghost story, borrowing specifically from Mary Wilkins Freeman, to study the effects of the death of a lover or friend on the survivor. "Specific Ghosts" consists of ten brief, but traditionally narrated, short stories, each dealing with the restless dead and the unhappy living. Weltner refrains from ambiguity about the supernatural and makes it quite clear that the spirits depicted are no more or less real than a memory and that memory itself can be quite physical. The strengths of "Specific Ghosts" reside not only in the subtle craft of the ghost stories, but also in Weltner's successful transposition of the modern gay male experience onto a classical literary form.

Identity & Difference, Weltner's first novel, alternately tells two unrelated stories. One is about Preston, a self-absorbed gay man in San Francisco who does not need to work and who spends too much time analyzing and agonizing over his relationship with Jim. The other story deals with Darryl, a working class teenager in San Mateo, California, who is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Glenn. Their stories never intersect and are even stylistically different. Preston's is told in a somewhat distant, analytical third person, while Darryl relates his own story in a searching and immediate voice. The novel's two-story structure resembles William Faulkner's The Wild Palms, and like that book, Identity & Difference succeeds by juxtaposing its stories in ways that are seldom obvious, but that seem to rhyme with one another.

On the surface, Preston and Darryl are about as different as two young men can be, yet both are deeply involved with trying to understand and accept aspects of their sexuality. Preston, older than Darryl and more experienced sexually, is nevertheless the immature one, groping toward commitment and monogamy in his relationship with Jim. Darryl only begins to accept his homosexuality by the end of the book, but seems better prepared to face the difficulties of coming out and loving men. Weltner's exploration of the difference between the two men and of analytical and emotional responses to love, instead of pulling the book apart into two distinct narrative and stylistic clumps, weaves together their disparate experiences into a celebration of a shared "gay male experience."

The three "short novels," as Weltner calls them, that make up In a Time of Combat for the Angel all take place in the South and center on characters struggling with his sexuality. Yet it would be a grave misreading of these works to call them "coming out" stories or "Southern" stories. They are, however, all intensely concerned with place and the yearning for a home--both real and imagined. In "Dying," the home is real enough, a familiar place where the narrator, a school teacher, and his younger brother Gerald have come to care for their dying mother. He watches with anger and helplessness as Gerald tries to break away from the sexual and emotional bond the two brothers shared for years. Their home becomes a place of death and waiting, their relationship an uneasy dance of denial and pain. Even so, breaking away from his brother is ultimately as inconceivable for Gerald as leaving the family home is for the narrator. After their mother's death, the brothers draw closer to each other, closing off the outside world for a relationship that seems both comforting and suffocating.

A similar inability to escape from the past haunts Eric, the main character in the second story, "Summers." Now a resident of California, Eric idealizes the summers he spent as a teenager in the South and his love for high school football star Charlie Kittinger. Weltner uses these nostalgic yearnings as an entryway into Eric's past, painting a broader canvas of characters, opening the narrative out and becoming omnipotent, but always returning to Eric in the present. By making these summers so complete and populated, Weltner allows us to participate in and understand Eric's feelings of loss, to examine nostalgia without succumbing to it.

"Backswimmers," the final story, again deals with a young boy's yearnings, but this time sexuality is barely understood and home is an emotional vacuum. On their way to a favorite secluded lake, Mark Morehead and his friend Dewey discover Cal, a returning World War II veteran who is squatting on what used to be his family farm. Mark attempts to help Cal rebuild his house and his life, looking for the affection Mark's father, a wealthy businessman who dabbles in poetry and sketching, cannot give him. Mark's relationship with Cal is eventually cut short by the forces of the law and "Backswimmers" ends with Mark watching business and progress pave over the land he and Cal hoped to restore.