John Preston, born in Medfield, Massachusetts, was an author of gay erotica and an editor of gay nonfiction anthologies. Preston was among the first writers to popularize the genre of safe sex stories, editing a safe sex anthology entitled Hot Living in 1985. He helped to found the AIDS Project of Southern Maine. In the late 1980s, he discovered that he himself was HIV positive. Some of his last essays, found in his nonfiction anthologies and in his posthumous collection Winter's Light, describe his struggle to come emotionally to terms with a disease that had already killed many of his friends and fellow writers.

Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics and Practice
1991
ISBN 9781555831868
Winter's Light
1995
ISBN 9780874517811
Flesh and the Word: An Anthology of Erotic Writing
1992
ISBN 9780452267756
A Century of Gay Erotica
1998
ISBN 9780785808909
Get It Done When You're Depressed
2008
ISBN 9781440631931
Getting It Done When You're Depressed, 2E
2021
ISBN 9780744041415
Mr. Benson
1983
ISBN 9781573441940
Franny, the Queen of Provincetown (Little Sister's Classics)
1983
ISBN 9780932870315
I once had a master and other tales of erotic love
1984
ISBN 9781573442077
Golden Years (Mission of Alex Kane/John Preston, No 2)
1984
ISBN 9780932870650
Safe sex
1986
ISBN 9780452258969
Flesh and the word 3
1995
ISBN 9780452272521
The dig
2008
ISBN 9781590517802
Fall
2021
ISBN 9780062997517