Careful study of the lives of others leads to a greater understanding of the self, a fact amply demonstrated by Other Men’s Sons, a collection of essays by Toronto-based author and editor Michael Rowe that is a unique blend of biographical portraits and personal introspection.

A longtime journalist, Rowe’s primary stock-in-trade is profiles of notable figures inside and outside the gay community. Other Men’s Sons compiles Rowe’s best writing from the past six years, much of it previously published in magazines. With profile subjects who range from actors to painters, soldiers to ministers, Rowe’s insightful studies blur the lines between gay and straight to compelling and provocative effect.

Barry Winchell, a U.S. Army private, dated a woman who used to be a man. When fellow soldiers discovered his girlfriend’s medical history, Winchell was branded a “fag” – and murdered. Rowe introduces Winchell’s grieving parents and chronicles how their straight son’s death transformed the traditional Midwestern couple into activists against anti-gay violence within the military.

The volume’s other distinctive subjects include a young girl raised within Toronto’s LGBT community, straight and gay performers from TV’s Queer as Folk, and a Playgirl model who comes out of the closet. Rowe’s autobiographical essays further explore this cultural complexity – whether he’s writing about his marriage to another man and their decision to raise another man’s son, or his anguished childhood in which he considered suicide, wondering whether nature intended him to be a boy or a girl.

A few shorter, disparate essays – introductions to other books, a travel piece – hint at hodgepodge. But they also elucidate Rowe’s status as a multi-dimensional social observer, a devout Christian whose first book celebrated gay pornography and who has put together anthologies of gay horror fiction. Other Men’s Sons leads the reader to reflect upon not only what it means to be a gay man, but what it means to be fully human.