A Reader on Reading

Claude J. Summers, in his collection of essays Gay Fictions, defines his subject as “the fictional representation of male homosexuals by gay male and lesbian writers.” This leaves out a fair number of works by nongay writers, which are thus excluded simply by reason of their authors’ sexuality. A writer’s sexual preferences probably color the text, but a reader does not require careful study of the National Enquirer to be able to read literature. Being told that D. H. Lawrence was attracted to older women may or may not inform the enjoyment of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but it is in no way essential for reading that too-famous novel. A study of Melville’s life might shed light on homoerotic elements in Moby-Dick, but is such a study essential in order to discover those same elements? And is a short story by William Faulkner on a gay subject readable only if we have proof of his experience in this field? Doesn’t the word fiction imply the creation of an imagined rather than a physically experienced world? And if knowledge of the author’s inclinations is essential to the understanding of a text, wouldn’t reading anonymous literature (and so much erotic literature is anonymous) be ultimately impossible?

PATHS THROUGH THE FOREST

The fairy way of writing which depends only upon the force of imagination.

John Dryden, King Arthur

Every genre creates its own prehistory. Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, and in doing so allowed us to include in the definition tales as old as the Bible. The label “gay literature” is a recent creation, probably no older than the founding of the gay magazine Christopher Street in 1975, but it now includes much earlier work. An anthology of English-language gay poetry would feature many names from the traditional canon, from Shakespeare to Lord Byron; examples of English-language gay fiction are not as venerably old, perhaps because poetry lends itself more readily to an ambiguous reading and (as is the case in many spurious explanations of Shakespeare’s homoerotic sonnets) to a bigoted interpretation, while prose can be less easily subverted for the sake of social decorum. Thomas Hardy suggested that a writer could “get away with things in verse that would have a hundred Mrs. Grundys on your back if said in prose.”

A chronological list of gay fiction in English might begin with obscure novels such as Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend (1871) or Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreme (1876), or with better-known works such as Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (a short story written circa 1890); it might continue with Henry James’s almost too subtle depiction of a gay infatuation, “The Pupil” (1891), E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice (finished in 1914), D. H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer” (also 1914), and Ronald Fir-bank’s Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), up to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest mainstream fictional accounts of gay life, published in 1948 — the year that also saw the publication of two other gay classics: Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and Tennessee Williams’s collection One Arm and Other Stories. Similar lists could be made in the literature of other languages.

By 1950, two main trends in English-language gay literature had been established: one apologetically addressing a “straight” audience, trying to justify and atone for the fact of being gay; the other unabashedly celebrating another, equally vital sexuality and speaking mainly to an enlightened reader. The City and the Pillar, which follows both trends to some degree, is the first novel to make use of an important device (suggested perhaps by André Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt of 1926) evident in almost all the gay fiction that follows it: the autobiographical voice. Edmund White, himself the author of one of the most influential gay autobiographical fictions in North America, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), has remarked that “since no one is brought up to be gay, the moment [a boy] recognizes the difference he must account for it.” Nongays learn about their sexual mores (mostly from conservative, sexist sources) in hundreds of different places: home, school, workplace, television, film, print. Gays are, by and large, deprived of any such geography. They grow up feeling invisible and must go through the apprenticeship of adolescence almost invariably alone. Gay fiction — especially autobiographical gay fiction — therefore serves as a guide that both reflects and allows comparison with the reader’s own experience.