A Reader on Reading

Much of this factual prose is illuminating and encouraging (something much needed in the age of AIDS) and allows the reader to admit the fact of being gay as part of everyday life. Camille Paglia has commented that most gays, unlike other minority groups, do not reproduce themselves, and therefore, like artists everywhere, “their only continuity is through culture, which they have been instrumental in building.” Authors such as Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man), David Leavitt (The Lost Language of Cranes), and Armistead Maupin (in his soap-opera saga Tales of the City) make this “continuity through culture” explicit: they place their gay characters in the midst of a multifaceted society, so that their reality is not “other” but “another,” part of a historical cultural whole, with no reigning central entity determining what is normal according to his own image.

Because of the instructional use to which gay literature can be put, gay stories that bow to prejudice, implicitly accepting the patriarchal verdict about the wages of sin, commit literary terrorism and deserve to be housed on the same shelf as moralistic Victorian fables. A number of good writers fall into this category: Dennis Cooper, for instance, whose fiction depicts necrohomoerotic longings and explores the aesthetics of sickness and decay, with death as the inevitable end; and at times the timorous Gide, who believed that homosexuality was “an error of biology,” and whose heroes are so terribly ridden by Catholic angst.

Because it needs to instruct, because it needs to bear witness, because it needs to affirm the right to exist of a group that the power-holding majority of society wishes to ignore or eliminate, most gay literature has been staunchly realistic. Lagging behind the rights demanded and partly achieved by other oppressed groups, gay men are depicted in a literature that is still largely at an informative or documentary stage. Women’s literature can produce fantasies, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, black literature can invent ghost stories, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved; with one or two superb exceptions (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers come immediately to mind) gay literature has no fantastic stories, no imaginary worlds. Instead, its strength lies in the subversive possibilities of its language.

Appropriating everyday language, undermining the bureaucratic use of common words, using the guerrilla tactics of the surrealists to fill the commonplace with a sense of danger — these are the things gay literature, like any literature of the oppressed, can do best. Jean Genet, the French poet, playwright, and novelist who died in 1985, created, better than any other gay writer in any language, a literary voice to explore the gay experience. Genet understood that no concession should be made to the oppressor. In a hypocritical society that condemns gay sexuality but condones the exploitation of women, arrests pickpockets but rewards robber barons, hangs murderers but decorates torturers, Genet became a male prostitute and a thief, and then proceeded to describe the outcast’s vision of our world as a sensual hallucination. This vision was so unsettling that when Jean Cocteau showed Paul Valéry the manuscript of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Valéry’s response was “Burn it.” In English, Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, William Burroughs — all forced or voluntary outsiders of society—set social language against its overlords.

Perhaps the literature of all segregated groups goes through similar stages: apologetic, self-descriptive, and instructive; political and testimonial; iconoclastic and outrageous. If that is the case, then the next stage, which I think can be recognized in certain novels by Alan Gurganus or Alan Hollinghurst, introduces characters who happen to be gay but whose circumstances are defined well beyond their sexuality, which is once again seen as part of a complex and omnivorous world.

MARKING THE TREES

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,

More fortunate, alas! than we,

Which without hardness will be sage,

And gay without frivolity.

Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”

Naked except for a fur-trimmed gauze negligee and waddling about in bare feet, Cary Grant announced to an enquiring May Robson that he was thus attired because he had gone “gay.” With this pronouncement in the 1938 film Bringing Up Baby the word gay, meaning “male homosexual,” publicly entered the English language of North America.