St. Martin's Press published a novel by Paul Russell called The Coming Storm, the plot of which revolves around a sexual relationship between a gay 25-year-old boarding school teacher, Tracy, and a troubled 15-year-old student, Noah. Reviewing the book favorably in the Washington Post Book World, Dennis Drabelle said it "persuades the reader" that "the sexual relationship between Noah and Tracy is not only not harmful to either but a boon to the precocious junior partner, who becomes a better, more engaged student after the affair gets under way." Drabelle finds that what is "troublesome" about the book is that the relationship it depicts "is apt to be stereotyped, not least by the legal system that makes it a crime."

Another book, The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay Man Should Read, edited by the award-winning author Robert Drake, includes an excerpt from Matthew Stadler's The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, which Drake calls "an operatic adventure into the realms of love, personality, ambition and art... a pure joy to read." The protagonist is "a pedophile's dream: the mind of a man in the body of a boy." Another excerpted book, The Carnivorous Lamb by Agustin Gomez-Arcos, features an incestuous relationship between a boy and his older brother. Drake calls it "the best, most complex yet satisfying novel of filial love ever written." Drake also excerpts William Burroughs's reliably nightmarish The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, which he says "tears straight to the heart of one of the greatest sources, community-wide, of 1990s gay angst: What to do with men who love boys?" Drake also criticizes mainstream gays who, in shunning pedophiles, seek widespread social acceptance: "Even as the homo culture of this fin de siècle seeks to puritanically clamp down on boy-love advocates, it riddles itself with a fixation on lithe, boyish sexuality and smooth-chested youthful attractiveness—and the perpetration of same as the physical and erotic ideal apparent in clubs, online profiles, porn films and mainstream advertisements. It is nothing more than blatant hypocrisy."

Yale University Press published a book called A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods, who is described as "the foremost gay poet working in Britain today." A long chapter on "Boys and Boyhood" offers a seemingly definitive account of pro-pedophilia literary works, without a whiff of judgementalism. Ignoring the fate of the child, the only moral ambiguity Woods contemplates is the role of the man: "By playing with boys, the man remains boyish. Whether you regard this as a way of retreating from life or, on the contrary, as a way of engaging with it at its most honest and least corrupted level, depends on which writer you consult at any given time."

And, in an introduction to the Penguin Book of International Gay Writing, David Leavett, one of the best known of contemporary gay authors, discusses "another 'forbidden' topic from which European writers seem less likely to shrink... the love of older men for young boys." Leavett calls attention to one of the excerpted works, When Jonathan Died by Tony Duvert. "The coolly assured narrative," writes Leavett, "compels the reader to imagine the world from a perspective he might ordinarily condemn." Duvert "offers us a homosexual Lolita—one in which the child is seducer as much as seduced." The book's plot revolves around a man and boy who are living together in Italy. The excerpted scene is sexually graphic, and the age of the child is "hardly seven."

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