Some Men Are Lookers.

Reading one of Ethan Mordden's Buddies books is a lot like visiting an old friend with whom you'd lost touch. The series began with 1985's I've a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore, a catchy collection of stories about a gay Manhattanite named Bud (presumably Mordden himself) and his oddball friends. The book became a gay staple, and the subsequent titles in what became known as the Buddies trilogy (Bud dies in 1986 and Everybody Loves You two years later) revisited Mordden's queer world of curious man-children (Cosgrove and Virgil, formerly Little Kiwi) and original cast recordings (Mordden is an inveterate audiophile).

But by the time he'd written the third book, the buddies were in a rut, and Mordden set the series aside to pen his second novel, 1986's One Last Waltz. With Some Men Are Lookers, he returns to his previous cast of queer characters to ask that musical comedy question "What happens to people?" He then sets about telling us: We change, and often we hurt people along the way.

This impeccable collection of short stories recaptures the abundant humor of the earlier books with a new supporting cast and an occasionally heartbreaking update on the returning company. In the first books Virgil is a sexy kid, a gay innocent with a childlike demeanor. This time out he's grown into a traitorous fellow who's willing to sell out his friends and abandon his lover for a little attention and a handful of hot sex. Dennis Savage, Bud's long-suffering best friend, has decided to become a writer himself and somewhere along the way has become a bitter man who won't even visit an old friend dying in the hospital.

These characters--and Mordden's stories about them--are the fictional equivalent of those scholarly examinations of homosexual life that are currently ascending bestseller lists. In "Jeopardy!" Mordden decodes the redemptive power of a sexy man in working-class clothes and neatly sums up our very essence with exchanges like these: "He's so beautiful," says one character. "I want him. How do I get him?" The other character replies, "You spoke the history of gay life in three sentences." In "What a Difference Miss Faye Made," the author observes our intolerance for certain sorts of queers without once using the phrase internalized homophobia.

The book's one real flaw--and one that may keep it from being accessible to readers who haven't cracked the other Buddies books--is its occasionally self-conscious narration, in which Bud points out that he is writing a book about his friends and that three similar volumes have preceded this one. In these asides he speaks directly to the reader, interrupting his own story to impart information that's at once slightly smug and delightfully funny. In fact, the book closes on this same self-conscious note. But by the time we've arrived there, we've been treated to a sophisticated stack of stories that reunite our favorite fictional cast and provide wry commentary on queer life from one of our most reliable authors.