In this age of Will & Grace and gentrification, the "dream market" and gay investment advisors, you don't hear much about working-class queers. In fact, some would even consider the idea a contradiction in terms. But the contributors to Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-Less Gay Life would beg to differ. The first collection of short stories by working-class queer, gay, and bisexual men, Everything I Have Is Blue is a rich and long-overdue contribution both to the burgeoning field of working-class studies and to LGBTIQ fiction.

The international writers include a professional trucker, a Texas prisoner, a librarian, a poet, an activist, a retired English professor, and a street mime, to name a few, but what makes their voices powerful and unique isn't their professions, it's their ability to straddle ideological and cultural divides that would give Paul Bunyan pause.

In Everything I Have Is Blue are love stories and stories of lives gone wrong; narratives of hope and songs of despair; tales of revenge and chronicles of redemption. In short, Everything I Have Is Blue showcases a literature of depth and complexity that brings much-needed color to the palate of queer cultural and literary identity.

Wendell Ricketts is a writer, editor, and translator currently living in the ruins of San Francisco. He has worked as a cocktail waiter, a teacher, a house painter, a telephone solicitor, and a Kelly Girl, among many other day jobs. His fiction, poetry, essays, and journalism have appeared in such publications as The Advocate, Out, Spin, James White Review, Salt Hill, Mississippi Review, Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, and the anthologies Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, and Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools. He was born on Wake Island, an atoll that is slowly sinking into the Pacific Ocean, and raised in small towns on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i.