What Kind of Gay Books Do You Like to Read?
A review of my favourite gay authors and stories
Recently, I have been thinking about gay book as I struggle with writing my own gay book. I wrote a long blog post on my personal website on the subject. I have excerpted from that post my thoughts on why we read gay book and offered some of my favorite gay writing. The complete essay can be found here:
Gay people like to read fiction for the same reasons that straight people do.
There are, however, a few extra reasons. Since straight fiction is basically the default literature, straight readers do not usually notice their absence in their own representations. Straight writers and readers don’t have to highlight their presence because they are always there is some way or another. With gay people, this is usually not the case. LGBT people notice their own absence.
People, whether gay or straight, want to see people like themselves inhabiting the world of fiction and literature. Stories that you can imagine yourself in. Places where you can escape to and explore that you could never visit in real life. To flee from the everyday world, and even more importantly, to a world that values you as a person that does not represent you as evil or a villain or some kind of threat to society. It is a more significant experience when it could be you experiencing these real or imagined communities.
Whether you like classic gay novels or contemporary queer fiction, it is nice to see someone like oneself fighting that dragon, or better yet riding it, or solving that murder and unmasking the killer, or having the magnetic lure of the sexy queer vampire, or falling in love with that gay cowboy. It is better when we no longer have to identify with someone who is usually not very much like ourselves.
For people searching for this kind of self-identification, just having a gay/lesbian/bi/trans person as a character in a story might be enough (depending on how the character is presented). Negative and stereotyped portrayals of gay characters will turn readers away. It’s not that the gay or lesbian sexuality of the character is vital to the story, they just happen to be gay — like me.
Sometimes that is good enough, just being included counts. I wouldn’t call these kinds of stories gay/lesbian literature as such, but they present characters that readers can identify with and see themselves participating in the same kind of stories that hetero-sexual readers simply take for granted. These stories emphasize the point that LGBT+ people are everywhere, and are not that different from the majority in their lives, interests, struggles and the things that they enjoy.
There has been a lot of debate over the years if there is such a thing as “gay literature” in the sense that it exhibits some kind of “gay sensibility” that is different from straight fiction. To take this position would also be to argue that women’s fiction, black literature or Jewish writing have their own sensibility. People from different cultural groups will certainly have different perspectives, but a sensibility? Considering that the LGBT+ community cuts across racial and ethnic groups, includes both men and women, people of different economic status, and in different parts of their lifespan, it is unlikely that such a diverse group could ever develop a single sensibility.
Although there will be commonalities across these diverse groups as people who share the same kind of problems, struggles, and consequence of living life as an LGBT+ person.
And finally, why we read gay fiction: for the joy of reading good writing.
Reading something beautifully or artistically rendered, to be entertained and amazed by the creativity and imagination of someone else (especially someone like us). We can share in the wonders and emotions of others, and create empathy with the joy and sorrows, the love and affection, or alienation and pain of community members.
Empathy and altruism are prime motivators for reading and sharing stories, especially when composed in beautiful words.
Since I asked what kind of gay books do you like to read, I thought I would take a moment and offer a few of my favorites. Generally, I read literary fiction, so I don’t have any genre fiction on my list. I also have an interest in religion in fiction, particularly myths, rituals, symbols, and mysticism, and my selections reflect that interest.
Here are eleven of my personal favorite gay writers and their fiction and poetry.
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1875–1955). This is one of the most famous of all “gay novels,” but it’s not all that gay in our modern sense. The novella follows an aging novelist named Gustav von Aschenbach as he travels to Venice for a vacation. There he encounters a beautiful young boy named Tadzio whose family is staying in the same hotel. As a Cholera epidemic breaks out in the city, Aschenbach falls in love with the boy and follows him and his family around Venice. They never speak or touch. Aschenbach contracts the disease and dies while lying on the beach in rapt adoration of Tadzio’s male beauty. The novel is about more than just that; it also meditates on art, philosophy even mythology, and is rich with symbolism and metaphor. Mann was the 1929 winner for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Life to Come by E. M. Forster (1879–1970). Most gay readers are probably familiar with Forester’s posthumously published gay novel Maurice, about a middle-class businessman falling in love with a lower class game keeper, after being rejected by an aristocratic lover who spurns Maurice for marriage and respectability. Although written early in his career, that Forster went on to have a long time relationship with a police officer shows that he was faithful to his vision. However, I prefer Forster’s gay stories, also published after his death, collected in this volume. The title story “The Life to Come” is considered by many critics to be a masterpiece itself, and there is also significant praise for the gay stories “Dr. Woolacott,” “Arthur Snatchfold,” and “The Other Boat.” Also included are Forster’s few surviving “sexy stories” that were written to tease and tantalize such as: “The Obelisk” and “The Torque.” The story “The Classical Annex” is a silly little story with a naughty twist at the end.
“Paul’s Case” and “The Sculptor’s Funeral” by Willa Cather (1873–1947). Cather is the only lesbian woman on this list and whose writing I find to be exquisite. These two stories come from her first collection of short stories The Troll Garden. Early in her career, she often wrote about artistic figures, who are also stand-ins for gay men, who have to flee their coarse and hostile environments that threaten the crush their artistic (and romantic) lives. The sculptor goes on to become a world-renowned artist but is misunderstood and disrespected when his body is returned home for burial. Young Paul never had a chance and his short experience of freedom ends tragically.
Collected Poems by Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Cavafy spent most of this adult life living and working for the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works in Alexandra Egypt. He was born of a Greek family and wrote poetry in the Greek language, most of it after the age of 40. His collected poems all fit into one book. Despite his small number of poems, he is considered to be one of the most important poets in Modern Greek literature. His poems take up subjects from early Christian history and homoerotic sexual desire between men.
The Poetry of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). Pessoa was a prolific writer of poetry under several interrelate pseudonyms, which he called heteronym because he considered each of them as having their own intellectual lives separate from the poet. The four most important heteronyms are Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Fernando Pessoa himself. When writing as the sensual poet Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa often takes up homoerotic and sexual themes. Pessoa was influenced by the American poet Walt Whitman, who he saw as liberating for Pessoa’s own poetry.
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986). Isherwood wrote the stories that became the basis of the musical Cabaret. As a gay novelist, his most prominent work is A Single Man, which follows one day in the life of George, a university professor, after the recent death of his longtime lover in a car crash, and Georges’s feelings of anger, frustration, alienation and loss over all the careless swipes and dismissals of his grief for the loss of his gay lover. Isherwood’s own long time lover was an artist named Don Bachardy who was a generation younger than Christopher.
Live from Golgotha by Gore Vidal (1925–2012)). Vidal was the quintessential pompous, erudite gay man known for his works of history and satire. As a gay writer, he is most well known for his early novel The City and the Pillar. I prefer his religious satirical novel Live from Golgotha. The satire is rather hostile at times, so I’m guessing that Vidal was not a fan of the Catholic Church. The story paints Saint Paul as a gay pederast with his boy companion Timothy who is tasked with writing and preserving the gospel story of Jesus, which is lost in the future. It’s a crazy and amusing time travel story with a surprising ending. If you want more gay satire, read Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, a gay classic itself, for a transsexual romp through the modeling industry.
Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1910–1986). Genet is one of the so-called monsters of modern French literature. He idolized and eroticized criminals, hustlers, murders and drag queens. Our Lady of the Flowers tells the story of Darling, Divine, and Our Lady: a pimp, a transvestite and a male prostitute guilty of murder. Genet was also a playwright who created a theater of ritual and role-play, particularly demonstrated in the open act of his play The Balcony. I keep thinking that I should really like Genet, but his writing is sometimes difficult, and he can be hard to take.
“Hands” from Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) Anderson gave up a career in journalism to become a novelist later in his life. He is not known as a gay writer, by the short story “Hands” that opens his collection of stories about the people in a small town in Ohio is a gay masterpiece. It tells the story of Wing Biddlebaum and his flighty hands that leads to tragedy. The story never says Wing is gay, or even guilty of the accusations against him, but we can read between the lines and feel the unfairness and disappointment of his life in the face of violent and judgmental people around him.
The Immoralist by Andre Gide (1869–1951). By today’s standards, the French writer Andre Gide would probably be considered pedophile. He seemed to have affection for Arab boys, which is reflected in his early novel The Immoralist that follows the narrator’s confession of his abandonment of his sick and dying wife for a life of homoerotic exile in North Africa. His other writing on the subject of homosexuality is his novel The Counterfeiters and his book-length essay Corydon. Although, not a specifically gay work, I am fond of his short story “The Prodigal Son” that retells Jesus’ parable and introduces a third son. Gide won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.
Collected Stories of Paul Bowles (1910–1999). Bowles was an American writer and composer who settled in Morocco, North Africa with his wife Jane Bowles, where they became central figures of the expatriate gay culture in Arab North Africa with each carrying on their own same-sex romantic relationships. He is most famous for his novel The Sheltering Sky with its homoerotic themes, but I prefer his short stories. Most of his short fiction is not openly gay, although there are a few hints. My favorite stories include: “The Delicate Prey,” “The Circular Valley,” “A Distant Episode,” and “Allal.”
Young gay people will have different experiences of the world than gay people my age and older.
The gay world (and even my continued use of the word Gay, when many young people today prefer Queer) is much different after 2000 than before it. I am happy for them; their world is much more open and accepting than when I was a teen and young adult in the 1980s, during the outbreak of AIDS and the rise of the religious right-wing. Gay literature today looks a lot different than it did back then.
Gay and lesbian fiction was a block, a genre, and some would say, a ghetto of its own, telling its stories of struggles and hardships for gay folks (mostly men) about cheating boyfriend and dying lovers (bi folks were a punchline bi-now-gay-later), and trans-people were basically relegated to the role of the sassy/bitchy drag queen. Today, gay and lesbian characters, and bi and trans ones too, can have any adventure they want in fiction, and if the story doesn’t exist, they can write and publish their own. The publishing gates are open and the censors are out of business. The pages belong to everyone now.
Originally published at http://ceh3167.wordpress.com on June 14, 2019.
