Mid-Century Male

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 16 · 30 August 2012

From Stan Persky

Christopher Glazek asks how we can account for ‘one of the more puzzling features of the postwar literary era … the collapse of the gay novelist’ (LRB, 19 July). That’s like asking about the ‘collapse’ of the Eastern and Central European dissident novelist. Just as the collapse of communism diminished the need for ‘dissident’ novels, the success of the gay movement in North America and much of Europe diminished the need for ‘gay’ novels.

Gay novels may no longer be necessary in the way they once were, but representations of same-sex relations remain open to writers who can figure out their relevance to present conditions. When books like Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982), Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978) and even Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978) appeared, they had, for their mainly gay readership, the function of newspapers, dispatches from the front. Indeed, Maupin’s book was first published in serialised form in the San Francisco Chronicle. Their merits as realist novels were inseparable from their political function. Glazek asks where the significant contemporary gay writers can be found. He should look in places (and there is no shortage of them) where homosexuality is still a contested issue. The Hungarian writer Péter Nádas is one example, Poland’s Michal Witkowski (Lovetown, 2005) another.

Glazek’s brief history of contemporary gay writing and writers who were homosexual doesn’t mention the ‘new narrative’ group of mostly gay writers, active from about 1985 to the mid-1990s, who were explicitly interested in modernist and postmodernist prose. The best known of these is Dennis Cooper, whose cycle of half a dozen novels from Closer (1989) to Guide (1997) explores the queer punk scene; other examples include Robert Gluck’s Jack the Modernist (1985), Kevin Killian’s various books and my own Buddy’s (1991).

Stan Persky
Vancouver