TNG Flashback: Gay Fiction Shame?
The work day is almost over. We hope you use your last ounce of concentration to revisit this year-old TNG article. Originally published by Ben on 1/28/2008
I recently found this article entitled My Gay Fiction Shame, in which the author discusses his boredom/loathing of gay themed fiction.
He caught my attention when he described contemporary gay fiction as "reading about loads of really horrible men stranded bored on a desert island: or, in other words, it was too true to life."
While I find that statement a bit unfair, and I disagree with his assertion that people don't want to read tales that reflect their own lives, I agree with his assesment that "the truth is that most gay men are not the tragic martyrs of coming-out tales, nor the rampant airheads of sex or scene-based tales." While there is certainly a place for stereoptyically gay literature, if I never read another tale that involves HIV/AIDS, coming out, the circuit, or prostitution, I could live with that because 1) my life as a gay man isn't defined by those experiences, and 2) the market is oversaturated with this stuff. Unfortunately, I recognize very little of my actual life in what flushes down the contemporary gay pipeline, whether it be in film or literature.
I disagree with him about the lack of relevancy in our elder generation of gay writers because it's important to know our history and how we came to be here, even if our 21st century identities are evolving with a new gay culture, or as some claim, apart from our sexuality. Andrew Holleran's latest book, enitled "Grief", about an older man's return to DC after the death of his mother, is an interesting meditation on being an older gay man, and it opened my eyes to the DC AIDS epidemic in the 80s, and how it wiped out our city's gay community. While it's yet another AIDS book in sea of them, I don't see how a young DC gay-lit reader would find books like this irrelevant.
I'm curious what our readers think about the assertion that there are no great gay authors in the younger generation. I can think of several who are exceptional, but their subject matter isn't specifically gay, which sort of supports the author's point. One of the commenters on the writer's post even went so far as to say, "could the great gay writers of tomorrow put down their bottles of amyl nitrate, step out of the club, go home, log off from Gaydar and write something good?"
What are your thoughts on gay fiction? Can you recommend any great gay books?
3 comments:
I am sure they are out there. The question isn't whether or not they exist, but whether or not they are getting the exposer they should as the second generation of gay authors.
I feel as if the genre has sadly become boxed in a corner commercially, saturated with coming-out stories, AIDS stories, and erotic stories; and I feel authors who might have a different muse trying to find their proper place.
And those topics are not bad, they just need to be re-approached; coming out for many is just not what it used to be, and every gay book does not have to be a history lesson.
I've read great lesbian work. Bechdel's book "Fun Home" was amazing, and I have been looking for its gay counter, which I am sure is out there. I just probably have to go through the first 10 pages on Amazon before I find it.
I highly recommend Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman. Beautifully written novel about a gay relationship, and the plot has nothing to do with AIDS, coming out, or overcoming homophobia. Admittedly, some of Aciman's passages do get overly flowery and pretentious, but I really enjoyed it.
Oh, my, where to start?
1) Just because it's a gay novel about AIDS, coming out, the circuit/club scene, or prostitution, doesn't mean it's not a good novel. Examples, respectively: Christopher Coe's Such Times, Joey Manley's The Death of Donna-May Dean, Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance, and...um...well, to tell you the truth, I can't think of any gay novels with prostitution as the central subject, good or bad. Are you sure this topic is such an epidemic in gay fiction? Maybe I'm just not reading the right (the wrong?) stuff...
2) The author of the piece Ben links to doesn't actually cite much gay fiction in his article rejecting the genre. The Picture of Dorian Gray is only a crypto-gay novel, anyway; a person's level of enjoyment of it is going to have everything to do with Wilde's lush style and little or nothing to do with its gay content. He mentions Edmund White, but I read and despised White's work when I was in high school, too (A Boy's Own Story enraged me and I still think Nocturnes for the King of Naples is pretentious junk); that didn't stop me from seeking out other, better gay fiction.
3) There are so many writers to recommend. As a start, among lesbian authors, I'll read anything by Emma Donoghue or Sarah Waters. Among living gay authors, I'll never pass up an opportunity to read new work by Christopher Bram, Paul Russell, Neil Bartlett, or Andrew Holleran (although I was immensely frustrated and ultimately unsatisfied with Holleran's Grief; it was beautifully written, though). Among gay novelists lost to AIDS: both of the aforementioned Christopher Coe's books (his other novel was I Look Divine) are devastating; George Whitmore was a vastly underrated writer; Sam D'Allesandro's fiction has recently been collected in a book titled Wild Creatures; and David Feinberg's two novels, Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion are both hilarious novels about the AIDS epidemic (yep, funny AIDS novels--you have to read Feinberg to believe him). All of these writers, using gay or lesbian characters, explore the range of the human condition and destroy any argument that gay fiction as a genre is narrowly focused.
4) That's not even considering one-off novels, novels by long-dead writers, writers I haven't read, and people who didn't come to mind off the top of my head as I sit here and type this. There's a ton of great gay books out there.
5) I'll take this opportunity to plug a book I'm going to have essays in. If you need further ideas for gay novels to read, there will be a book called The Lost Library coming out later this year. In it, a few dozen gay novelists and writers contribute personal essays about out-of-print gay novels that should never be forgotten.
6) Like J. Clarence says in the first comment, it's all about exposure. Just because you haven't read it doesn't mean it isn't out there.
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