Meanwhile, In Another Part of the Forest

One of the books I read this summer is a collection of gay short stories of Keith's titled Meanwhile, In Another Part Of The Forest, edited by Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson. I have several collections of gay short stories myself so I was familiar with many of them. However, this is a large book and many of the stories were new to me. They're all gems by masters such as E.M.Forster, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, among others.
One of my favorites is by Shyam Selvadurai called; "Pigs Can't Fly". It's the story of a young boy who prefers to play 'bride' with his girl cousins instead of soccer with the boys. He and all the girls agreed he played the lead best until a new girl joined them, got jeolous, told her parents, and he was forced to quit in shame.
In the introduction the author and the editors compare the hero's experience to Alice in Wonderland: " Moments of joy... enlarge the self. ...we grow in the world... We are that colossus Alice in Wonderland shooting up to the ceiling after downing the bottle labeled "Drink Me". ... if we are ridiculed by adults and peers, the magic vanishes, the joy evaporates, and, like Alice shrinking to the point where she falls in her own pool of tears, we are reduced to something even smaller than we were in the pale beginning."
For me this was a revelation into the meaning behind part of Alice's strange adventure and the genius of Lewis Carroll as well as throwing light on a common childhood tragedy.