Gay novel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The gay novel deals with homosexual love between men. Novels that deal with homosexual love between women are usually referred to as lesbian novels. Some of the great works of Western literature were written by gay writers or by authors who are sympathetic to gay life and its concerns. Some of the more celebrated authors and works that touch on homosexual relationships, whether directly or indirectly, include:
- James Baldwin - Giovanni’s Room, Another Country
- William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
- Truman Capote - Other Voices, Other Rooms
- E. M. Forster - Maurice
- Jean Genet - Our Lady of the Flowers, The Thief‘s Journal
- Andre Gide - The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters
- Andrew Holleran - Dancer from the Dance
- Christopher Isherwood - A Single Man, The Berlin Stories
- Henry James - The Bostonians, The Turn of the Screw
- Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
- Herman Melville - Billy Budd, Moby Dick
- Yukio Mishima - Confessions of a Mask
- Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
- Petronius - Satyricon
- Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
- Manuel Puig - Kiss of the Spider Woman
- John Rechy - City of Night
- Mary Renault - The Charioteer
- Gore Vidal - The City and the Pillar, Myra Breckinridge
- Edmund White - A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty
- Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
- John Knowles - A Separate Peace
To provide a general sense of the themes of gay novels, a brief description of the plots of several of the more celebrated books are included below:
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
- In Death in Venice, middle-aged Gustav von Aschenbach, experiencing writer’s block, travels to Venice, where he becomes infatuated with a young Polish boy named Tadzio, seeking to persuade the youth that there is no need to flee the city because the news of an encroaching cholera epidemic are false.
- In Giovanni’s Room, a man struggles with his sexual identity and the hidden desires that threaten his dream of living a conventional life. He proposes to a beautiful young woman only to find himself torn between his love for her and a newfound passion for another man.
- A Boy’s Own Story is a coming-of-age story in which, during the 1950s, a teenage boy comes to terms with his homosexuality, learning that the love of other men gives his life meaning and value.
- In his search for love among the gay hot spots of New York, Malone, the protagonist of Dancer From the Dance, visits Manhattan's Everard Baths, Fire Island's deserted parks, and sumptuous orgies. In Sutherland, a campy queen, he finds an enduring relationship with a well-traveled companion.
- After the adolescent protagonist of Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask discovers his homosexuality, he must adopt a proper persona, or mask, in the gracious society of post-war Japan.
- In the ancient tale of the Satyricon, an early picaresque novel, two scholars travel the southern Mediterranean world during the reign of Emperor Nero, encountering a number of targets for the author’s satirical censure: a professor, a lustful priest, a vulgar freedman turned millionaire, a poet, a superstitious sea-captain, and a femme fatale. The pair are attracted to the same youth, a boy with more wiles and peccadilloes than either of his would-be suitors.
