Playwright Tony Kushner has called the remarkable generation of gay and lesbian playwrights examined in these two books a “weird little golden age” of dramatists, filmmakers, and theorists. Each book deals with aspects of this twentieth-century gay – lesbian renaissance and, for scholars, opens the field of sexuality and gender to an emphasis on theatre history, culture, and literary theory. Of these two works, Alan Sinfield's Out on Stage stands out as an essential critical history of homosexuality in modern drama, while Straight with a Twist, edited by Calvin Thomas, is an interesting collection of a dozen essays on aspects of Queer Theory (embracing variant definitions of the term from Rimbaud to Foucault) viewed through the prism of the heterosexual gaze and its complex relation to the gay – lesbian “other.”