Preservation-minded: a new book by the best-selling author of Farm Boys makes an interesting connection between gay men and historic preservation.

A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture * Will Fellows * University of Wisconsin Press * $30

When Will Fellows was a young boy he wasn't much interested in typical "boy" activities. Instead, he collected old photographs and spent long hours gleaning family history from his grandmother, and as a teenager he opened his own antiques shop on the family farm in Wisconsin. Like so many gay men, he says, he has always had an interest in preserving old things, a trait that straight men don't seem to share.

Early on in Fellows's book A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture, he compares his life to that of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a German transvestite whose antiquarian efforts during the Nazi era are the subject of the book I Am My Own Woman and a subsequent Broadway play. "You can't appreciate what is distinctive in gay men's lives without appreciating their gender-atypical nature," says Fellows, who had a best seller in 1996 with Farm Boys, about gay men in rural America. "That is why gay men and straight women are often the collaborators in preservation and have been for so long."

While admittedly unscientific, Fellows's book argues that there are very real differences between gay and straight individuals that might lead gays into historic preservation. And he uses a compelling collection of stories and first-person accounts from gay men across the country who have chronicled histories, preserved antiques, and renovated old structures, in some cases bringing whole neighborhoods back from the brink of destruction. "I think most gay men have a strong streak of the romantic in them and can live it out vicariously by being associated with these fine old homes," Richard Jost, a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, says in the book.

But homophobia has kept their contributions obscured, Fellows writes in the book: "Many historic sites and house museums carry on the tradition of concealing and denying the gayness of the men who have had so much to do with the preservation of those places." And the gay preservationists themselves have worked to stay under the radar, Fellows tells The Advocate. "Some of the people I approached about participating in the book said they would love to but felt uncomfortable," he says.

Still, there was far from a shortage of willing participants; in fact, the constant stream of individual stories can seem a bit overwhelming. Yet they provide a colorful picture of a landscape that has not really been painted until now. "I was just amazed by the magnitude of it, both in terns of how long it's been going on and in so many places," Fellows says. "My task went from trying to make a book out of it to trying to organize it all."