Sex and the Single Guy: E. Lynn Harris

''He came up with a magical recipe for his urban dramas: gay and bisexual stories packaged very accessibly and very romantically, in a way that no one's going to be offended,'' says Stephen Rubin, president and publisher at Doubleday-Broadway.

''My audience is a little bit of everything,'' confirms Harris, perched on a kitchen stool in the sleek, expensively decorated Chicago apartment he shares with his longtime partner. ''It's probably 60 percent African-American women, 20 percent gay, and 20 percent other, from an 18-year-old girl in Austria, to a Japanese housewife, to a 51-year-old white woman.''

His readership may soon be getting even larger: Two of his books, Invisible Life and Just as I Am, have been optioned for film, and he's just been tapped to write the screenplay for the remake of the 1976 movie Sparkle, set to star Romeo Must Die actress/R&B singer Aaliyah and produced by Whitney Houston's BrownHouse and Warner Bros. In December, New American Library will publish Got to Be Real, a compilation of four original love novellas written by Harris and his fellow literary mack daddies Eric Jerome Dickey, Colin Channer, and Major. He has a young-adult book series titled Diaries of a Light-Skinned Colored Boy in the works for Hyperion. And his as-yet-untitled memoir — a searing excerpt of which was published in The Washington Post last summer — is due from Doubleday in 2001.

One thing's for sure: With a future like this, Harris is going to be anything but invisible.