AmosL
08-27-2006, 08:15 AM
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN GAY LITERATURE
Literary Pride
It has been a while since Gay literature filled the shelves of bookstores but this summer gay authors provide us with plenty to read. I can remember when reviewing for a major gay magazine that I could not keep up with the number of books that were published and then there was a lull--with the exception of The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty there was not a lot to write about. Now it appears that we have a bit of a renaissance and again there is quality fiction for us to enjoy. Starting with the nonfiction autobiography by Edmund White (previously reviewed here) and the spectacular short novel Grief by Andrew Holloran (also reviewed here), my summer reading list seems to keep growing everyday.
In the 70s and 80s there was a demand for gay fiction but the market did not respond. Other minorities (African- and Asian- and Latin American) present the reader with interesting variations of their straight lives by dealing with the themes like parenthood, marriage, divorce, adultery and conflict between generations while the literature of the gay ghetto was swept to the side. With the fall of the gay market and the closing down of gay literary magazines like "Christopher Street" as well as the demise of the independent gay bookstore, gay fiction became almost nonexistent. Gay studies curricula on the university level was also drying up. And power house bookstores shelved our literature in a section unto itself and thus placed a wall around that few straight people would want to read.
What makes these even "curiouser" is that in the last five or six years some of the best fiction we have had has been written by gay and lesbian writers. Recently published was an extraordinary book by John Weir, What I Did Wrong. With only one other book to his credit which fared highly with critics, Weir brought us a new story--that of Tom, a middle aged English teacher ( I resemble that) at a university in New York who has lost his lover--a dirty mouthed, impossible but lovable author--to AIDS. After the death Tom channels all of his need for love into his best friend from high school, a straight guy who is drifting on the highway of life and to one of his students--an oppressed, apologetic disenfranchised youth who plays in a rock band. (Do I hear disaster yet?) In reality this book is about how ordinary New Yorkers live now. Students work in the service industry and save their salaries to blow in the casinos of Atlantic City. Tom's students are almost uniformly heterosexuals and Tom studies them as if they are extraterrestials. He says, ":The defining crisis for them is their disbelief in other people, while mine is disbelief in myself. Straight guys are conspiracy theorists, wrecked by the knowledge that they can't control the world. Yet I learned early on that I can't control, well, me. I am what I want. Straight people aren't asked to justify their yearning. They don't have to boil themselves down to an impulse or an act. Unlike me, they think, 'I am because I want.'" (To me this is an old approach to looking at the gay psyche--just never has it been stated so bluntly before).
Also new on the scene are several recent novels and collections of short stories which reach out to the world at large. Send Me by Patrick Ryan tells of a middle class family living near Cape Canaveral, Florida--two of the sons are gay, the older in the closet and the younger completely free of the constraints of society. The book is a study of careful social observation, Keith McDermott in Acqua Calda relates the adventure of an older actor's trip to Sicily where he is to participate in an avant garde theatrical experience. He falls victim to severe illness but decides to play the role as the show must go on. He achieves quiet herosim amid envy and condesencion from those around him.
You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre is a collection of urban tales about young gay men interacting with their straight colleagues with friends or at the office. Mack Friedman's Setting the Lawn on Fire is a series of stories that bring a young man through a repressed boyhood to a summer of work in Alaska and onto a career as a hustler. Yhe writing here is original and elegant, perhaps even beautiful, something rare on so tawdry a subject.
An Irish orn professor at Yale, Barry McCrea has written a love song to Ireland in his premier novel, The First Verse. A young gay student at Trinity is used and abused by a group of heterosexual males through erotic powers and is inducted into satanic worship. Late and Soon by Robert J. Hughes is a first novel about the art auction business, told by a woman whose husband has left her for another man. Years later she becomes friendly with her one time rival who has left her ex-husband for a hot young fireman. The beautiful language and the ironies of the book made it a delightful read.
What we have this summer is a whole new school of young gay writers. They are unknown to most gay men but they are signs that the gay literary movement is quietly adding new names to the canon of gay literature which unfortunately is known to very few. If I can get some of you to read one new book by a gay author objectively and with seriousness, I have then done one of the things I keep on my to do list---offer someone a book and wait till he tells me that he liked it.
Literary Pride
It has been a while since Gay literature filled the shelves of bookstores but this summer gay authors provide us with plenty to read. I can remember when reviewing for a major gay magazine that I could not keep up with the number of books that were published and then there was a lull--with the exception of The Hours by Michael Cunningham and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty there was not a lot to write about. Now it appears that we have a bit of a renaissance and again there is quality fiction for us to enjoy. Starting with the nonfiction autobiography by Edmund White (previously reviewed here) and the spectacular short novel Grief by Andrew Holloran (also reviewed here), my summer reading list seems to keep growing everyday.
In the 70s and 80s there was a demand for gay fiction but the market did not respond. Other minorities (African- and Asian- and Latin American) present the reader with interesting variations of their straight lives by dealing with the themes like parenthood, marriage, divorce, adultery and conflict between generations while the literature of the gay ghetto was swept to the side. With the fall of the gay market and the closing down of gay literary magazines like "Christopher Street" as well as the demise of the independent gay bookstore, gay fiction became almost nonexistent. Gay studies curricula on the university level was also drying up. And power house bookstores shelved our literature in a section unto itself and thus placed a wall around that few straight people would want to read.
What makes these even "curiouser" is that in the last five or six years some of the best fiction we have had has been written by gay and lesbian writers. Recently published was an extraordinary book by John Weir, What I Did Wrong. With only one other book to his credit which fared highly with critics, Weir brought us a new story--that of Tom, a middle aged English teacher ( I resemble that) at a university in New York who has lost his lover--a dirty mouthed, impossible but lovable author--to AIDS. After the death Tom channels all of his need for love into his best friend from high school, a straight guy who is drifting on the highway of life and to one of his students--an oppressed, apologetic disenfranchised youth who plays in a rock band. (Do I hear disaster yet?) In reality this book is about how ordinary New Yorkers live now. Students work in the service industry and save their salaries to blow in the casinos of Atlantic City. Tom's students are almost uniformly heterosexuals and Tom studies them as if they are extraterrestials. He says, ":The defining crisis for them is their disbelief in other people, while mine is disbelief in myself. Straight guys are conspiracy theorists, wrecked by the knowledge that they can't control the world. Yet I learned early on that I can't control, well, me. I am what I want. Straight people aren't asked to justify their yearning. They don't have to boil themselves down to an impulse or an act. Unlike me, they think, 'I am because I want.'" (To me this is an old approach to looking at the gay psyche--just never has it been stated so bluntly before).
Also new on the scene are several recent novels and collections of short stories which reach out to the world at large. Send Me by Patrick Ryan tells of a middle class family living near Cape Canaveral, Florida--two of the sons are gay, the older in the closet and the younger completely free of the constraints of society. The book is a study of careful social observation, Keith McDermott in Acqua Calda relates the adventure of an older actor's trip to Sicily where he is to participate in an avant garde theatrical experience. He falls victim to severe illness but decides to play the role as the show must go on. He achieves quiet herosim amid envy and condesencion from those around him.
You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre is a collection of urban tales about young gay men interacting with their straight colleagues with friends or at the office. Mack Friedman's Setting the Lawn on Fire is a series of stories that bring a young man through a repressed boyhood to a summer of work in Alaska and onto a career as a hustler. Yhe writing here is original and elegant, perhaps even beautiful, something rare on so tawdry a subject.
An Irish orn professor at Yale, Barry McCrea has written a love song to Ireland in his premier novel, The First Verse. A young gay student at Trinity is used and abused by a group of heterosexual males through erotic powers and is inducted into satanic worship. Late and Soon by Robert J. Hughes is a first novel about the art auction business, told by a woman whose husband has left her for another man. Years later she becomes friendly with her one time rival who has left her ex-husband for a hot young fireman. The beautiful language and the ironies of the book made it a delightful read.
What we have this summer is a whole new school of young gay writers. They are unknown to most gay men but they are signs that the gay literary movement is quietly adding new names to the canon of gay literature which unfortunately is known to very few. If I can get some of you to read one new book by a gay author objectively and with seriousness, I have then done one of the things I keep on my to do list---offer someone a book and wait till he tells me that he liked it.