Our favorite books of 2007: by Kate Clinton.

• Author: Clinton, Kate

An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News , by Amy Hoffman, is a memoir of early gay liberation in Boston during the 1970s. GCN was a scruffy, challenging, informative, radical weekly newspaper. Despite its small circulation, it had a wide reach, not only as a cauldron of progressive gay ideas about class, race, art, and politics but also as a school for scandalizers who went on to found and run major national gay organizations.

Hoffman is a wicked funny writer. In sly detail, she interweaves her own gay story, the marginal characters that came and went at GCN , and her attempts to translate it all to her family.

Most surprisingly, it is an unlikely gay love story, between a Jewish lesbian and a very tall Irish gay man. Their love and friendship were no small feat in a time of lesbian and gay male separatism.

An arsonist's fire destroyed the offices of GCN , and with it, the fierce and fragile energy that had sustained it. Hoffman's well-researched memoir is an important record of a time pre-AIDS, pre-gay marriage, and pre-gay chic.

Map of Ireland is a novel by Stephanie Grant also set in Boston in the early 1970s. Set against the seething backdrop of busing in South Boston, it is a coming of age story of Ann Ahern, who could...