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By David Gates
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It's a paradox of Western culture that while gay writers are almost boringly canonical-Whitman, Proust, Forster, Woolf, Auden--explicitly gay writing went underground after the age of Petronius. But at least since Edmund White's best-selling "A Boy's Own Story" in 1982, major American houses have published more and more of such writing; even the staid Book-of-the-Month Club has announced a gay and lesbian reprint series. And the gay community has seen what Arnold Dolin, an editor at NAL/Dutton, calls "an explosion of writing talent." Or at least an explosion of writing: literary novels, trash fiction, serious journalism, fiery polemics, self-help books-in short, the same abundant ephemera and occasional merit we expect from straight writers.
What's unexpected is how little the new gay books from mainstream houses defer to mainstream sensibilities. Literary novels seem obliged to include a pornogothic shockeroo: in Dale Peck's muchpraised Martin and John (228 pages. Farrar Straus, $21), sodomy with a gun barrel; in Gary Indiana's Gone Tomorrow (244 pages. Pantheon. $21), sodomy at Dachau; in James Robert Baker's Tim and Pete (256 pages. Simon & Schuster. $20), an orgy with unsafe sex and needle-sharing. The year's most controversial gay nonfiction book -at least if its ink-hound author has his way-will he Michelangelo Signorile's Queer In America: Sex, The Media, and the Closets of Power (378 pages. Random House. $23). It argues persuasively that "outing" hypocritical gay public figures is just honest reporting, and less persuasively that all gays should be badgered to come out.
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But a mainstream imprint doesn't mean these books are addressed to--or will sell to--straights. Randy Shilts's massive and painstakingly reported Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Guys In the U.S. Military (784 pages, St. Martin's. $27.95) should be a crossover best seller like his 1987 "And the Band Played On'; so should Rita Mae Brown's pansexual romp Venus Envy (355 pages. Bantam. $21.95), godawful prose and all. But gays are a literate and affluent group, with a newly cohesive culture-thanks partly to AIDS-and can support their own writers. The four "Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction" anthologies, for instance, each sold more than 30,000 copies.
New gay writers may even have an edge over straight counterparts. Edmund White calls "Martin and John" "the best book of this year," but says "a novel of comparable value by a straight boy might not have been published. There's a built-in readership for most gay titles." Charles Wilmoth, manager of San Diego's Blue Door Bookstore, whose clientele is about a quarter gay and lesbian, agrees that his fellow gays " hunger for some reflection of our lives. But they're not very critical about what they're getting. Consequently, there's a lot of crap out there."
This doesn't worry White. Only a few good books a year emerge, in any domain," he says. "They're more likely to emerge if more books are published." What does bother him is the notion of a specifically gay literature: another sign that cultural consensus is in decline. " It's kind of a sad phenomenon," he says. "There seems to be a growing acceptance of minority groups that only amounts to allowing them a ghetto. I'm not sure a lot of separate, noncontiguous ghettos is a good idea. Peaceful, yes, but not much intercultural dialogue." No contemporary Proust should be forced to make his Alberts into Albertines to placate a straight readership. But no contemporary Woolf or Auden should be marginalized as a gay writer: immortals belong to us all.
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