NO ONE TALKS about gay literature anymore. The topic sounds quaint, hardly cutting edge. And indeed its moment may well have passed. Edmund White says that it “has come and gone as a … serious movement.” Yet, I think we need to talk about gay literature again, because the silence may tell us a good deal about how we live now. My approach to the topic, however, may seem a little recherché: I want to discuss gay literature as a minor literature.
For quite some time, the second generation of queer theorists has wanted to shed the “minoritizing” stance they associate with “old” gay culture and assert a “universalizing” attitude that is young and trendy (Sedgwick, 1990). Why go back to explore queer literature as what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983) call a “minor literature”? One answer is “A minor literature is not,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, “the literature of a minor language” or the literature of minor importance; rather it is “the literature a minority makes in a major language.” A minor literature doesn’t start from scratch; it uses the language of its ethnic, racial, religious language communities. A minor literature develops its own language out of the dominant language. It is a way of “signifying,” to use a term from African American culture. And if gay people have stopped signifying, we may well have lost our significance. The language that we make is central to our ability to speak.
One of the characteristics of a minor literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is that it has no “master writers,” because “talents do not abound in a minor literature.” Ironically, of course, they are discussing Franz Kafka as a product of a minor literature. Likewise in the U.S., virtually all of our major writers could be said to have developed within a minor literature. Indeed, we could call American literature a nest of minor literatures. For what is the New England WASP language of Updike and Cheever if not the product of a minority enclave?
What has changed for many writers is that their identification with a minor literature does not hurt their standing in the larger literary community.
At one point in our history, identifying as a Jewish writer would have condemned one to the fringes of literary life. But clearly Philip Roth is not diminished if his work is viewed as situated within that group’s language. Nor is Toni Morrison reduced by viewing her work within the context of black language. However, some would argue that Tennessee Williams is diminished, not when he’s viewed as a Southern writer, but when he’s defined as a gay writer. Hackles rise when such sacred cows as Henry James or Elizabeth Bishop are discussed as gay. Bishop, we should remember, didn’t want her work situated even within the context of a women’s language community for fear that this could hurt her reputation.
In the early pages of Andrew Holleran’s 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance, one of the founding texts of contemporary gay literature, the friend of the author writes: “who, after all, wants to read about sissies? … if you were a family man going home on the 5:43 to Chappaqua, I don’t think you’d want to read about men who suck each other’s wee-wees! Even if people accept fags out of kindness, even if they tolerate the poor dears, they don’t want to know what they do.” It would be nice to believe that today men on the 5:43 are reading about blow jobs; but alas, they aren’t reading fiction at all. I think it is naïve to believe that the prejudices against gay writing have disappeared. Indeed, as Sarah Schulman (2009) has cogently argued, antigay prejudice may be more harmful and clearly formed now than ever before. It’s one thing for people to unthinkingly have no laws to protect gay workers from discrimination, but quite another for groups to mobilize to prevent gay workers from being protected. One is vague, unformed ignorance of the problem; the other is conscious cruelty.
The “Small Pond” Dilemma
Gay writers often resist having their work seen as part of gay literature. At one time this aversion was to avoid the stigma of being identified as gay. Today, however, many writers who resisted being labeled as gay are among the most vocal advocates for GLBT rights. Michael Lowenthal is a case in point. He began by working as a “very in-your-face activist.” Mentored by the master of S/M erotica, John Preston, Lowenthal finished editing Preston’s last book when Preston was too ill to work (see Gambone, 1999). He took up editing Preston’s series Flesh and the Word after Preston died, and edited the fine collection Gay Men at the Millennium. Clearly, Lowenthal has not been running away from the fact that he’s gay. Yet in an interview now a dozen years old—but still one of the most articulate statements on the matter—he expressed the belief that being regarded as a gay writer was limiting. He believes this limit is “a huge generational divide.”
While not quite contradicting himself, Lowenthal creates problems. On the one hand he asserts that he hasn’t read much gay literature: “I hadn’t read [gay authors]when I started writing, and to be totally honest, with the exception of one or two books, I still haven’t.” Yet, on the other hand, he finds this “core curriculum … a very specific and limited thing.” It cannot be the works themselves that are limited, since he hasn’t read them; rather it’s the idea of them that’s limiting. It is limiting to see one’s work as part of a “movement” and to be read in relation to the work of other writers. It is significant that Lowenthal’s latest novel, Charity Girl (2007), has a heterosexual female at its center, a girl who gets a venereal disease and is hurried off to a concentration camp to keep her from infecting others.
Lowenthal is an author that I admire and, to his enormous credit, is one of the few gay writers to state unequivocally the benefits he has received from gay literature. In an interview with Philip Gambone, he explained that “the ‘small pond’ of the gay writing world gave me some of the confidence to try writing seriously. Because the chances of success—of getting something published—were so much greater in the gay world.” Deleuze and Guattari also see this ‘small pond’ effect as one of the benefits of minor literature. One does not have to be a “master” in order to find a compelling reason to write or an audience ready to hear. The charged atmosphere of the minor literature “produces an active solidarity” and “a collective utterance, missing everywhere else in this milieu.”
In what way is gay writing a “small pond”? I have written about the Violet Quill writers, all of whom were living in New York and felt the need to work together at a critical juncture. At one point they were called the gay lit mafia. But it is important to note that they were not the only gay writers working at that time, even in New York. Among their Gotham contemporaries were Larry Kramer, James Purdy, Coleman Dowell, Boyd McDonald, and Larry Mitchell, five extremely different and demanding writers. I think if Lowenthal had read them, he would be surprised by how radically different these writers are, both stylistically and thematically.
But New York was not the only center for gay writing. San Francisco, which had a long literary tradition of its own, saw the work of Bruce Boone and Robert Glück, to name only fiction writers. Then there were Paul Monette and Christopher Isherwood in Los Angeles. Paul Bowles continued to work in Morocco, and William Burroughs traveled around. The small pond was not a puddle. In fact it was a considerable reservoir of talent. In poetry, it represented a vast sea including John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, Robert Duncan, and Richard Howard, among others. In fiction, none of the gay writers so controlled the waters that anyone had to worry about being torpedoed.
These waters, if not altogether calm, were relatively safe for navigating because gay literature was sufficiently marginalized that it didn’t attract the big guns. It allowed writers like Michael Lowenthal not only to get their feet wet but to take the plunge into serious writing. It allowed writers like Christopher Bram to hone their craft slowly and to take risks. It allowed people to concentrate on art instead of a career, to produce the very best work they could instead of being concerned with what sold. People got published, but they didn’t make enough from it to give up their day jobs.
Still, Lowenthal’s perception of gay writing as relatively small is not mistaken. The number of writers who regarded themselves as out and writing about their experiences as gay men was small enough that people felt that sooner or later they would meet everyone who was working seriously. Writers were aware of each other, and mostly had a sense of working together in something new: a literature of, by, and for gay men. But this intimacy did not produce uniformity.
I think the uniformity that Lowenthal finds in the books has to do with how the books were read rather than what the books actually said. For example, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer was often read as a celebration of the cult of male beauty, and although Holleran is susceptible to the beauty of men—indeed, The Beauty of Men is the title of one of his books—Dancer attacks what Holleran labels in very Catholic terms “the sins of the eye.” Reed Woodhouse (1998), in one of the finest books written about gay literature and one of the most overlooked ones as well, discusses the way he misread Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which was the first gay book he ever read:
Like most readers, I took from Giovanni’s Room what I needed from it and what I understood. What I needed was a coming-out story. I needed to hear that men did sleep together, that there was a world of such men, including places they met, and that one man could love another. I needed to see in print a vindication of the sexual desire that I then felt so intensely myself….
What I saw imperfectly if at all was the moral harshness of the book: for example, Giovanni’s bitter, truthful cry, “You love your purity. You love your mirror.” I forgot until an adult rereading that the story concerns the corruption of an “innocent” heterosexual boy by urban vice. … I completely forgot Baldwin’s assumption of the foregone rightness of heterosexuality.
Woodhouse understands that he read Giovanni’s Room in a very narrow way as a kind of therapy to overcome his sense of isolation. If gay literature felt narrow to Michael Lowenthal, it may well be because he read the few books that he had perused in similarly narrow terms, as coming-out stories, because he was coming out. He did not read the “moral harshness” of those works, nor their complexity. One of the projects open to us now is to examine that literature for what it says rather than for what we need it to say, for the worlds it creates, rather than for the one we wish to see. Deleuze and Guattari understand the narrowness of a minor literature as related to the politics of such works. They write:
The second characteristic of minor literature is that everything in them is political. In “great” literatures … the question of the individual … tends to be connected to other, no less individual questions. … Minor literature is completely different: because it exists in a narrow space, every individual is immediately plugged into the political. Thus the question of the individual becomes even more necessary, indispensable, magnified microscopically, because an entirely different story stirs within it.
The author of a work of minor literature—the gay writer is what concerns us now—may have begun his work in the manner of a “major” literature, but its reception will take over the meaning of the work both by those who need the work for their liberation and by anti-homosexual forces needing a “gay agenda” to condemn. Neither group could bring itself to recognize what Woodhouse calls “Baldwin’s assumption of the foregone rightness of heterosexuality.” Such a reading would assert Baldwin’s prerogative to write as an individual. But the “narrowness” of minor literature has also a strange power to communicate across what would seem impossible lines. If Baldwin, a black New Yorker, could be powerfully misread by Woodhouse, a young WASP from Pittsburgh, so too Edmund White, a WASP from Cincinnati, could be misread by a young black man in Soweto, who wrote White to say that in A Boy’s Own Story he had found the tale of his own life. With its narrative of a posh boarding school and privileged psychoanalysis, A Boy’s Own Story could not seem further away from the material conditions of the black South African reader. Although gay literature may have a smaller readership than the major literature, it has a more devoted following, a more passionate readership, a readership that needs its existence. Because of the intensity of its readership, it can cut across seemingly great cultural boundaries. It is experienced not as a commodity or as an entertainment, but as a personal message, a life-line. Since Lowenthal read so few books by his gay predecessors, it is difficult to know how he read them, but his sense that they had to “narrow” his work suggests that he saw in them a call for liberation that he, as the supposedly liberated, did not feel that he needed.
Gay literature can communicate across geographical and cultural boundaries precisely because it is a minor literature, and one feature of a minor literature is its “deterritorialization.” Such works are not bordered by linguistic or national boundaries, because they are not comfortably located within such boundaries. Minor literatures are never at home, but they can be not-at-home anywhere. The producers of a minor literature are emigrants into the language they use. As Peter Wildeblood observed, “the homosexual is an exile in his own land” (Sherry, 2007). At the same time, it’s surprising how well gay literature communicates across regions. The Algerian poet Jean Sénac, whom I have translated, kept track in his journals of gay events in Europe and North America. Now we are seeing gay works from the Islamic world coming to the West, such as Abdellah Taïa’s autobiographical novel Salvation Army (2009), which is about being gay in Morocco. It seems to me significant that Edmund White wrote the foreword to Taïa’s book, for while Lowenthal distances himself from the minor literature for being too narrow, White, who has embraced his position in gay literature, continues to advocate for works of international scope.
One of the most striking elements of the Violet Quill writers, who formed the first wave of gay writers after Stonewall, is their dialogue with European writers. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for over a decade, has written biographies of Jean Genet and Arthur Rimbaud. Michael Grumley and Robert Ferro lived half of the year in Italy. Andrew Holleran was stationed in Germany and is devoted to Proust. In part the reason for this turn toward European culture and literature was that Mann and Gide, Genet and Proust were the most articulate sources of gay experience. To read the best gay literature, one turned to sources outside the U.S. Gay writers in the U.S. today hardly seem to read anyone, but when they do, they read mostly American writers. The dialogue is narrow and shallow. The European orientation of earlier writers indicated that they aspired not to commercial but to artistic success. One reason we need gay literature, especially in the U.S., is to save American literature from its terrible isolation. Horace Engdahl, secretary general of the Nobel Prize committee, has noted that American literature in general has separated itself from the larger global conversation about literature and literary form.
Do we need a gay literature?
One reason why we needed gay literature in the past is because it helped writers produce better work. One of the more significant accounts of the importance of gay literature is in James Merrill’s 1993 memoir, A Different Person. Merrill became one of the most important poets of the late 20th century and wrote the epic poem—one of the few truly epic American poems—The Changing Light at Sandover. In his memoir, Merrill bemoans the fact that his work of the 1950’s turned its back on its readers by being overly complicated. “I never doubted that almost any poem I wrote owed some of its difficulty to the need to conceal my feelings, and their objects. Genderless as a fig leaf, the pronoun ‘you’ served to protect the latter, but one couldn’t be too careful. Whatever helped to complicate the texture … was all to the good.” Or to the bad. By the end of the memoir, Merrill is impatient with this difficulty and obscurity, for he sees it as an obstacle in his writing. He argues with his mother in a “long conversation [they]never had” about the importance to his art of being open about his homosexuality. His mother would have argued to her son “you’re diminishing yourself,” just as Lowenthal finds gay literature narrowing. Merrill’s answer is that his sexuality is “Too much to keep under wraps! No wonder that in my case, over the years, the forbidden fruit of self-disclosure grew ever more tempting. The spirit of the time ripened it like a kind of sunlight. The very language was changing.” Merrill’s poetry would never become clear and straightforward. He always enjoyed too much the filigree of elaborate structures. Yet he no longer sought to avoid his sexuality, to cover up what he was discussing, invent misleading pronouns or the neutered “you.” The work ripened, and he found in the world of sexual liberation a changed language that would permit expressions that he had long kept under wraps. Gay literature was a way of allowing the language that gay people used with one another—the light, easy, sometimes elaborate, campy tone of voice—to find its place on the page. It found a way to enrich English more broadly, by bringing out into the open a particular kind of sophisticated banter. It is not only gay people who need gay literature; it is straight people as well.
The acceptance of gay people is not as deep and widespread as some believe. People turn to the success of the gay marriage movement as evidence of widespread acceptance. I beg to differ. Gay sexuality is not accepted; gay domesticity is. In art, it is not the truly queer, genre-bending work that has found acceptance, but the low mimetic form of the domestic comedy and melodrama. Anything that challenges domesticity—in either art or life—is condemned. The single gay man is still an anathema. Of course I can understand why gay men—especially younger gay men—are attracted to gay domesticity. The movement grew out of the horrors of AIDS, in which the anarchic forces of erotic desire were rejected for something safer. Safe sex became monogamy, which was a step away from domesticity. Gay people were so happy not to be subject to sodomy laws that they did not read Justice Kennedy’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas very carefully. The principle justification in his decision—the highest official expression of heterosexual acceptance of gay people—is that gay sex must be tolerated as a way to foster loving relations between two people. Critics of Kennedy are right to see his decision as paving the way for gay marriage, because it was not a decision about sexual acts but about pair bonding.
If gay fiction has seemed rather tame recently, it is because so much of it has been dominated by the boyfriend book, a romance leading to domestic happiness—Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind (1970), without the raunchy sex. The boyfriend book is an entertainment, a commodity—television in words. But if the boyfriend novel were a commercial success, taking flight off the shelves in airport bookstores, I might be more friendly to it. But it hasn’t been terribly successful, which may be due to the way publishers mishandle gay literature.
From a practical point of view, it is impossible still to write about gay characters and not be marginalized. The crossover novel is essentially a myth. Despite its success in England, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty was mostly a bust in the U.S. Colm Tóibín is a case in point. An Irishman with an international reputation, the book of his that finally got substantially promoted was Brooklyn, which I found among his weakest offerings, but the first of his mature novels without any gay characters at all. I do not believe that the promotional zeal of his publishers and the absence of gay characters is just a coincidence. If Eilis Lacey, the heroine of the novel, who comes to Brooklyn to save her family, had discovered that she was a lesbian, the book would not have made it to an Oprah magazine review (although it would have been a lot more interesting). Clearly, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is an exception, but it is a novel in which there’s no sex, and in which the gay man commits suicide, a very retro plot device. In the movie, the gay man is clearly a minor figure, and the central character is his mother. So much for the exception.
Perhaps you might argue that we don’t need gay literature the way we once did. Fifteen years ago, in what had been the boom in gay literature, there were still few gay characters on television and in film. Roseanne and Ellen hadn’t given their first kisses on TV; Brokeback Mountain hadn’t ruptured the idea of cowboys in the popular mind. (Although those who had read Gay American History knew that life around the campfire wasn’t as chaste as Gunsmoke suggested.) Sure, this proliferation of gay images can be called progress, but these representations of gay lives have squeezed out everything but the most desexed characters, or the most clichéd. Take, for example, how The Sopranos, that violent and sex-filled series, deals with Vito Spatafore’s homosexuality. Although Vito is supposed to be into leather, when he has to flee the mob he doesn’t go underground into the leather scene. No, he develops a romance with a short-order cook in small-town America. The series domesticates Vito as much as possible. It is as if homosexuality brought out all the tenderness of the writers, and they could only deal with it by making it a pastoral interlude in an otherwise frighteningly suburban tale of corruption. They had obviously not read any Jean Genet or even James Baldwin. The leather scene had been dropped for L.L. Bean. We will not find images that are disturbing to straight audiences on television or in the movies because these media are too expensive. It is the cheapness of books that make it a space for the unpalatable and the experimental.
And we do have extraordinary writers working in ways that challenge realism: Scott Heim, Matthew Stadler (who seems to have given up fiction), Tom Spanbauer, Robert Glück, and Kevin Killian. These names may mean nothing to you perhaps, and that is my point. We do not lack extraordinary writers, we lack a readership that will go the lengths needed to find them.
What Went Wrong?
No doubt I am open to the charge of elitism. To this I must admit guilt. I want the best for gay people, and I lament our assimilation into the cultural mainstream, which, like any stream, is all down hill. But elitism is not snobbery—pre-judging what is good by attending only to origins. Remarkable work can come from anywhere. Lee Williams worked in a Dairy Queen in Eugene, Oregon, and lived in a trailer home with his mother, yet his novel After Nirvana about street kids in the Northwest finds the most incredible poetry in their language and poignancy in their survival. It is a novel that twenty years from now will be rediscovered, and someone will ask, “How did this book escape attention? Where is the author now?” I hope Lee is alive and well. Like many gay writers who came up in the 90’s, he has slipped out of sight.
Why don’t we know about the good novels that are being written? Why can’t there be reprints of the fine novels of the past? Two things have happened: American publishing has failed and gay marketing has failed.
One of the important dates in gay history was the opening by Craig Rodwell of the Oscar Wilde Bookstore in New York in 1967, two years before Stonewall. It was the first legal business (i.e. not a bar) opened explicitly for gay people. After the opening of the Oscar Wilde, chains of gay bookstores sprang up: Lambda Rising in Washington, Baltimore, Rehobeth Beach, and Richmond; A Different Light in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. These chains, if not completely dead now, are drastically reduced in size. With those bookstores there were gay magazines—even mainstream ones, such as The Advocate, that gave over a significant portion of their pages to covering books. At its height, The Advocate gave forty pages a week to covering the gay arts. Up through the 90’s, it was relatively easy (and cheap) for publishers to pinpoint their market and sell to it. The result is that gay books did reasonably well. One could make money from them—not lots of money, but some.
Several things happened. Many magazines went under, and those that survived devoted fewer and fewer pages to books. Their advertising costs went up. Publishers couldn’t market their books as easily and conveniently. On top of this, publishers became both greedy and stupid. They were no longer interested in books that did reasonably well. They wanted blockbusters. This made it hard for gay books. Moreover, they thought if they promoted some books (a handful) they could make lots of money. They gave out a few big advances to authors like Dale Peck and Urvashi Vaid, and they lost their shirts. I was checking whether the gay book chains have started Web pages, and A Different Light has. But it is one of the worst websites I have encountered, and it lacks what made going to gay book stores especially wonderful. Beyond the fact that they were very cruisy, they did four things that Barnes & Noble or even a good privately owned (but straight) bookstore doesn’t do. First, they put the new gay books up front so that you could see them. I discovered plenty of writers that way. Second, they would keep books on their shelves longer than the six weeks or so that B&N retains books before returning them. Third, they got hard-to-find books, those from small publishers, imported books from England and beyond, ephemeral journals like Diseased Pariah, anything that would be of interest to their gay readers. Fourth, they often had out-of-print books. I have written about the importance of 60’s pulp fiction, and my collection of 60’s pulp came from the used books that appeared in Lambda Rising, often for 50¢. If we need a gay literature, we also need gay bookstores or their equivalent on the net.
And I don’t want to let academics off the hook. Just as gay literature was producing some of its best and most interesting works, queer academics turned their back on anything so “elite” and old-fashioned as literary scholarship. “Theory” became the major product of the academy—theories as intricate and flimsy as a spider’s web. Ads for underwear were ripe topics of analysis, but Edmund White’s novels weren’t. Twenty years of critical theory have not brought us closer to a distinctively queer world, because the purveyors of theory have been interested in no movement as much as the movement of their careers. For a while, a galaxy of queer stars sparkled: groupies circled like planets around Judy (Judith Butler) and Eve (the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), hoping to catch some of the reflected glory. Academia, instead of helping to build a minor literature, was determined to advance itself. It succeeded in developing a Mandarin language more elite than any of the works it criticized for elitism.
Do we need a gay literature? Yes we do. For only in such a minor literature will we find work that aspires to being more than a commodity sold to a specialized privileged niche, works that will celebrate sexuality even as it explores romance. We need a gay literature so we can reach beyond our national borders and engage in a global discussion, move beyond our feeble realism, and seek a more truthful and revealing mode of representation. We need a gay literature so that we can have works that are more challenging and original. Will we be able to continue such a literature? I do not know. But we are entering a much less glitzy, far less self-satisfied era. Poverty is not the enemy of art, especially a minor literature whose most fertile ground is adversity. Dig in. Let us see what we can plant.
References
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Mississippi Review 11.3 (Winter/Spring 1983).
Gambone, Philip. Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
Merrill, James. A Different Person. Knopf, 1993.
Schulman, Sarah. Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. New Press, 2009.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Univ. of California Press, 1990.
Sherry, Michael S. Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Woodhouse, Reed. Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995. Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
David Bergman, whose most recent book is Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris
