The New Gay Fiction

After years of neglect from the mainstream, queer lit undergoes a renaissance

Comments (0) By Edmund White Tuesday, Jun 13 2006

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Vestal McIntyre's stories in You Are Not the One are edgy urban tales about young gay men interacting with their straight colleagues at the office or with friends. In one story a young woman decides she needs a gay man in her life (a Will to her Grace, perhaps), but she chooses one who is slippery and ultimately not too friendly. Mack Friedman's Setting the Lawn on Fire is again linked stories that take a young man through a horny, repressed boyhood, up to a summer of canning fish in Alaska and onto a seriocomic career as a hustler. Such a summary does no justice to the elegance and originality of the writing.

Barry McCrea, a young Irish-born Yale professor, has written a rapturous ode to Dublin in his first novel, The First Verse. A gay student at Trinity is manipulated by a strange cult of heterosexuals who use their erotic power over him to induct him into rites and practices of a satanic intensity. More traditional pleasure is provided by Robert J. Hughes's closely woven first novel, Late and Soon, about the art auction business in New York today. It is told from the point of view of a woman whose husband has left her for another man. Now, years later, she becomes friendly with her erstwhile rival, who has in turn been abandoned for a hotter, younger fireman. There are Jamesian delights in the beautiful language and ironies and nuanced psychological observations that Hughes has devised.

Shane Harrison

Details

See also

Beyond Gay Marriage
A circle of friends point toward the next battle for acceptance.
by Corina Zappia

"A Week of Debauchery"
Slideshow by Tina Zimmer

Bliss or Miss
Getting over the gay-wedding jitters.
by Danial Adkison

Split Decision
Lured by competing games, queer athletes find they can't go both ways.
by Joseph McCombs

Where's the Party?
The girls get ready to turn it out for Pride.
by Keisha Franklin

Pride Party Roundup
Before�and after�the parade passes by.
by John Russell

More About

I think there is a real phenomenon here, the arrival of a whole new generation of gay writers who've come along to fill the shoes of their predecessors who died too young in the 1980s and '90s. These newcomers are unknown even to most gay men, who are too busy going to the gym and cruising on the Net to read. Whereas being cultured was once the entrance fee for being gay, now the gay community has dumbed down like the rest of the population. But just as the underappreciated American poetry scene is the most vigorous in the world and includes a dozen major figures, everyone from C.K. Williams to John Ashbery, from Louise Glück to Yusef Komunyakaa, in the same way the current gay literary moment is quietly, almost invisibly adding brilliant new names to a canon that is unknown except to the happy few.

Edmund White teaches writing at Princeton and is the author of nearly 20 books, including the recent autobiographyMy Lives.