Novel Ideas in a Static Landscape
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This acceleration of change marks the present, too. When I read in Les Brookes’ introduction that “literature has been almost the only place where one could learn about homosexuality,” I thought: well, this is true of the 1950’s; pretty much of the 60’s; in lots of places in the 70’s. But in the 80’s and beyond? I remember a half-hour music program on British TV in the 80’s featuring Boy George, the Smiths, Marc Almond, the Communards, and the Pet Shop Boys, and I began to feel sorry for straight men (it soon passed). They felt like a protected species (till U2 came along, that is). Elsewhere, Brookes quotes Allen Sinfield’s account of a shift in the cultural perception of gay men and women around this time: “The idea was that we were doing better with the sex-and-love questions” (The Wilde Century). In the context of AIDS and—in several Western contexts—a markedly homophobic political culture, this claim seems risible. But one doesn’t need to agree with Sinfield entirely that homosexuality was becoming “quite fashionable” by the 80’s to accept that values were indeed continuing to change in the liberal direction, if in some places much faster than in others.

Brookes argues, however, that the “situation has not much changed” since the 60’s, when literature was one’s only recourse. Surely this isn’t so. I’m not suggesting that popular cultural representations of gay sexuality are progressive, but certainly they are prevalent in soap operas, film, music, and the press. Nowhere are we in Kansas anymore, including in Kansas: the Internet has seen to that. I suspect that such thinking may be generational, and—ungallant as it may seem—I took the trouble to learn that, while this is Brookes’ first book on the subject, he comes to it at the relatively advanced age of 65.

Brookes’ main premise is that gay fiction has been characterized since 1969 (the year of Stonewall) as a complex debate between assimilation and radicalism. This idea appears to have emerged from a comment made by Edmund White in a 1996 interview with Brookes and in several of his essays in The Burning Library. Brookes doesn’t oversimplify the concept, however, noting that most gay people are a mixture of both impulses. Novels follow suit. Still, I wish that Brookes had developed this thesis further with respect to aspects of literary style. At times, his readings seem only concerned with overtly political and thematic questions concerning representation.

Having made the case for Stonewall dividing us from a less open or weighty past, Brookes risks losing ground—first, by offering thirty dense pages of “contextual framework.” This chapter rather deftly maps out the chief arguments in the world of theory but might cause lay readers to ask “So what?” He then gives over another thirty pages to the pre-liberationist period (“Wilde to Stonewall”). Here the sources are apt—Forster, Vidal, Isherwood. However, by neglecting James Baldwin, Brookes leaves unasked the many relevant questions about the relationship between minority ethnic representations and minority sexual ones. He rightly points out that no single study can tackle everything but concedes that in Baldwin’s case, “a novel … might seem to cry out for inclusion.” I was just as sorry that John Rechy’s significant contributions to the gay male canon receive just a couple of passing references. James Purdy isn’t here either, and with the passing over of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City—which “deserves more attention here than space allows”—one begins to wonder about a regional bias toward New York and the East.

When I read of Oscar Wilde as “enraged iconoclast and satirist,” I wanted to add “as well as bourgeois moralist and assimilationist”—this, in the spirit of Neil Bartlett’s study Who Was That Man? For if there’s any single figure for whom the struggle between assimilation and rebellion might have been designed, it was Wilde. At other times, though, Brookes is very much aware of paradox and duality: regarding Burroughs, he writes that the “rehearsal and repetition of particular sexual fantasies is both a defiant gorging on forbidden fruit and an attempt to cure the craving through surfeit.” You couldn’t put it better.

Given the writers who are missing, it’s a pity that Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall sees fit to consider a couple of unconvincing genre books by Clive Barker and Poppy Z. Brite alongside worthy recent volumes by Alan Hollinghurst and Dennis Cooper. On another judgment—that “gay male fiction is predominantly American—although why this is so is not entirely clear”—I have no quibbles. Naturally, one can cite non-American authors that hardly get a glance here—Neil Bartlett, Patrick Gale, Shyam Selvadurai, Colm Tóibín—but the substance of Brookes’ argument is correct. American writers, for whatever reason, have published most of the gay fiction of the past decades that has had both a sizable impact and critical acclaim outside the U.S. (However, to call Colm Tóibín a “British writer” is a very odd mistake for a British critic to make.)

One small irritant in Brookes’ approach is the fact that he often puts words in others’ mouths: “no doubt … they would admit exceptions to this overview”; “No doubt he [Bruce Bawer] would retort that…”; “These are novels … that [Leo] Bersani, to judge from his antiqueer polemicism, must deplore.” Well, since there’s no evidence that Bersani has actually read these books, which he has never written on, we’d better leave this sort of conjecture alone.

Brookes is strongest on evaluating character development and the use of language in fictional texts; less so when it comes to spelling out the fundamental difference between allusive or imaginary references to gay sexuality and those occurring in realist narration. There’s a reference to “the degree to which [his chosen authors]incline toward realism or fantasy,” but this momentary stress on literary modality is not sustained. You might think, for instance, from the substantial section on Edmund White’s Forgetting Elena, that it strictly and straightforwardly documented the subculture of the Fire Island Pines—a precursor to Larry Kramer’s novel Faggots, published five years later. In fact, while it can be read as a sort of surrogate or subliminal gay novel—as David Bergman has done in The Violet Hour—Forgetting Elena isn’t definitively gay at all. When Brookes calls it “a covert investigation of the Fire Island gay scene,” he does little to explain why such covertness exists or how it functions. Likewise, he does not sufficiently distinguish between White’s fabulist fiction—including also 1978’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples, misleadingly described as “self-avowedly autobiographical,” and Caracole—and his auto-fiction, which began with A Boy’s Own Story. There’s also White’s nonfiction, which does so much more than merely support the representations of gay life in the novels. (Forgetting Elena is unfairly described as “a dramatization of ideas explored non-fictionally in White’s journalism and in his States of Desire.”)

There’s some rather prominent reliance on authorial intention, though Brookes may simply be conflating authors and narrators at times, as in this comment on an act of lovemaking and wrestling in The City and the Pillar: “But what exactly is Vidal’s attitude to this episode?” On at least one occasion the tendency to equate all of a text with its author backfires. Brookes describes Andrew Holleran as “deeply ambivalent” about Fire Island hedonism. But the quotation provided—“I was too smart, I built a wall around myself,” etc.—comes from an exchange of fictional letters at the end of Dancer from the Dance. Holleran’s own view isn’t in evidence—and, to be fair, somewhat frustratingly, Brookes does go on to note precisely that. (But he also later equates Robert Ferro with his narrator.) Some other claims seem hard to substantiate: that Larry Kramer’s Faggots constitutes a “rhetorical call for action, directed exclusively at gay men.” Exclusively? How could one know?

Other sections are, I think, richer and more original, such as that on David Leavitt’s Lost Language of Cranes, which teases out the radical morality inherent in the book’s literary assimilative qualities. Others are rather bizarre—for instance, to think of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library as a vampire story, and likewise to compare it to Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites. On AIDS, I felt that Brookes succumbed to a rather narrow, utilitarian view: “fiction about AIDS that is socially responsible” is preferred. But responsible to which social priority? And who is to judge on this?

Gay Male Fiction Since Stonewall is, for all my reservations, a worthwhile book, all too clearly worth arguing with. To quibble a little further: a copyeditor should have put a stop to the usage “pre-echo”; Larry Kramer’s volume is not called Notes from the Holocaust but Reports from…; “David Wojnarovich” should be David Wojnarowicz; and so on. Surely this sort of mistake is indefensible in the Internet age. Routledge should blush on two further important accounts. This book is far too pricey to be affordable to anybody except reviewers and librarians. Also, this is a book about gay culture: the book cover—no jacket, just hardcover blue—is the least conspicuous design you’ll ever come across. But maybe that’s their point: that, like this book on a university library shelf, we no longer stand out at all.

Richard Canning’s most recent book is Brief Lives: Oscar Wilde, from London’s Hesperus Press. He teaches at Sheffield University, England, where he can be contacted.