Encounters with Men

Holding his queer community, his country, but mostly himself up for scrutiny, Bob Ostertag achieves the rare feat of balancing attraction and revulsion in such perfect equilibrium that rather than giving us answers, he poses ramifying ethical conundrums. Once upon a time, I’m told, they would douse an infected wound in live maggots. The maggots would eat dead flesh thereby promoting healing. Bob Ostertag is a similar sort of creature, and his stomach for America’s putrefaction is awe-inspiring. But, unlike insects, he’s not only fully aware of, and sickened by, what he’s ingesting, he is also fascinated, even attracted, to it. Addicted to truth-telling, he plays with his food in lean elegant prose at once stupefying and searing. And reading him, we become that rare jury that stands implicated in the crime.
– Jonathan D. Katz

Like so much sand–men and the memories they ignite can slip through one’s recollection all too easily. But with this unbendable straightforward collection Ostertag has cast a wide net on the moments and memories of these charged liaisons and pulled them to back to shore. An introspectively bare bones account of both love, lust, and a life bravely lived.
– Brontez Purnell

Bob Ostertag is our companionable chaperone at his meetings with men. His intimacies and distances with mass murderers and queer saints have sex at the core: the highways and byways of male desire. Ostertag guides us through this phantasmagoria, the welcome and unwanted violence, the erotic spaces, the activism, the deaths, the life changing encounters, the profundity of orgies.  What arises is a portrait of Bob, the man himself, tender explorer of love in more forms than you can imagine.
– Robert Glück

In Encounters with Men, Bob Ostertag writes about the men he has known. He writes of love and loss, artists and cops, rapists and friends, leather daddies and shy immigrants, the closeted and the uncompromisingly out, military guys and go-go dancers. Ostertag manages to create an image here of manhood that could only be seen by a gay man who’s lived through several generations of queer life and politics. Anyone who wants to know about masculinity from quiet emotional strength to outright villainy should read this book.

-Alex DiFrancesco