Gay Novels? — Page 2

Great thread, but would you allow me to up the ante?

Some of your faves, please, from the last five years.

Even better, the past three.

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Updated On: 8/1/13 at 10:40 PM

A happy novel?

Sadly I have read very few gay novels in the past 5 years. I haven't given it a second thought until this thread. Shame on me and I am going to get on it right away!

The last one was Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, that was last year.

My Favourites, off the top of my head are

A Boys Own Story - Edmund White
(I bought this from a bookshop because of the cover, didn't know it was a gay novel - I was 14 - first gay novel I read and still have fond memories of the day I found it)

At Swim Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill
(Heartbreaking and a huge book I bought in hardback)

Beautiful People - Simon Doonan
(I read this memoir, after I watched the BBC sitcom)

Faggots - Larry Kramer
(NYC in the 70's - seemed all so exciting to me when I read it, despite how sad it is to think back at what was to come)

If you're interested in LGBT literature, following the LAMBDA Literary Society on Facebook, Twitter, Email-newsletter is a good way to stay in the know. Their website and newsletters have introduced me to so many lgbt themed novels, non-fiction books and poetry collections I otherwise never would have discovered.

Also, a quick shout out for Justin Torres' 'We the Animals'. Torres is quoted in the Salon article which was the genesis of this thread. We The Animals is about Torres' youth growing up the youngest of three boys of a hot tempered Puerto Rican father and a confused (and possibly mentally ill) American mother who were seemingly trapped in a sometimes violent and passionate relationship. It's a slim 128 pages which you could easily finish in a day or two. The chapters are very short vignettes - almost self-contained short stories - of surviving an unsteady upbringing in which your family is constantly teetering on the edge of disaster. It's beautifully written, concentrated prose in which an almost achingly tender moment between a father, mother and their boys can suddenly careen into rage and confusion. This is an odd way to recommend a book, but if you enjoyed Terence Malick's The Tree of Life - specifically the scenes involving the young brothers - I think you'll love this book. It's a dark, ferocious and tenderly observed little book.

In the last few years, I've really only read two LGBT-centric novels. FELLOW TRAVELERS and MARY ANN IN AUTUMN (which, one might argue, is not LGBT-centric). FELLOW TRAVELERS was pretty good. About the Lavender Scare within the government during the 50's. MARY ANN was lovely, until it went off the rails at the end. But even the crazy I loved, cause I love all things Barbary Lane.

As erotica goes, then you can't get more fun -- or bat-**** -- than Dirk Vanden. That guy's the gift that keeps on giving, and not just in his books either. His website at dirkvanden.net is interesting enough, but then there's his blog. Oh God, his blog.

Check it out, if you don't believe me.

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Updated On: 8/6/13 at 12:23 PM

At Swim, Two Boys is about as perfect a novel as I can think of. Stunning. I didn't like the author's earlier novel (whose name I can't even think of--and it's not so specifically "gay") nearly as much, but I hope we see something else from him.

My favorite living author is Alan Hollinghurst--I know some find his novels hard to get through and slow on plot, but I can't think of anyone currently who can craft a more beautiful sentence than he can. I'd recommend all five of his novels, but Swimming Pool Diaries, which has been mentioned is a good place to start.

John Updike did a review of Hollinghurst's The Spell (probably his slightest, but most funny novel) for the New Yorker where he bemoaned how unhappy gay lives must be, that got some attention--and seemed to miss the point completely (some of it can be read here http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2011/10/12/john_updike_homophobia_alan_hollinghurst.html ). But I don't know any other current author whose work I feel so immersed in when I am reading their writing--Line of Beauty is probably his best known work (when it won the Booker one UK newspaper's headline was "Gay sex wins Booker"...sigh) and has a very good BBC adaptation that, while as good as I could possibly see it being, still misses how great the book is.

A Single Man has been mentioned, but it's my favorite of Isherwood's novels, and pretty amazing.

One author who I wish was better known is Paul Russell. All of his novels are worth reading, with The Coming Storm probably being his easiest to find, but Boys of Life being my favorite. His last book was The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, loosely based on the few details we know of Nabokov's brother who was gay and ended up being killed in the concentration camps.

I actually didn't even know it had been published--his work is so hard to find out about--until I read Christopher Bram's brilliant book about gay American novelists, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, which reads like a novel. When the book came out, Bram gave a great interview to Salon about if the term of "gay novelist" was over http://www.salon.com/2012/02/12/is_gay_literature_over/

(Bram of course is a great novelist in his own right. My favorite book by him is Surprising Myself, a really moving coming of age/coming out story set in 1980s New York.)

Michael Cunningham is famous for The Hours, but I don't think he's ever topped Home at the Top of the World (he seems to be a terrible screenwriter though--the movie version is a huge disappointment, and his screenplay for Evening is a melodramatic mess.) Flesh and Bone comes close, and seems to be one of his least read novels. However, frustratingly, my personal favorite is his first novel, Golden States. He's disowned the book and rarely talks about it--I think his reasoning being he was young and inexperienced when he wrote it, but I suspect he might also find it too personal--I found a used copy on Amazon for $20 bucks and have lent it to most of my friends who have all taken to it. It's another coming of age novel (and semi coming out) set in LA and San Fran in the 70s but I found it insanely moving.

So many other "gay novels" to list (Dancer from the Dance is one of my faves,) but one collection I recently bought and really enjoyed is Pulp Friction, which has long excerpts--and provides context--of the more significant gay pulp novels of the 40s to 70s.

I really have to read Object of My Affection--it's long been on my list (...I liked the movie when it came out and I was a teen, but...)

PJ said: "Even better, the past three. "

Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child.

Cunningham's By Nightfall is pretty great too, I think, though I know some in the gay press had issue with it being about--sorta--a straight man being tempted by a gay man, though I think it's much more complex than that.

Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov.

OK, that's only three, but I'd rank all of them as great reads.

Here's one of the articles, for anyone interested, about By Nightfall and if there's a problem with novels about "straight" guys falling for "gay" guys (they also discuss Death in Venice, and The Art of Fielding--a novel I loved, but I'm not sure I'd classify as a gay novel.) http://www.themillions.com/2011/10/the-gay-question-death-in-venice-by-nightfall-and-the-art-of-fielding.html

"Not to mention the perennial conundrum: What IS a "gay novel" anyway?"

At some point Michael Chabon was outed by the press as gay. And, I while I can't keep all the subsequent info straight (so to speak) I believe he said at one time that he was bi--but at any rate he's long been in a happy (straight) marriage. But Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a pretty great novel that I think would speak to any gay reader--or straight reader. I do think of it as a gay novel, simply because it meant a lot to me as a confused teenager and the main character is gay. (And it has a ridiculously awful movie--one of those movies that any fan of the novel really owes themselves to see just to laugh at--much like Myra Breckinridge.)

Speaking of gay teenager novels that have completely misguided movie versions, I really liked Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You. He also wrote a novel, Leap Year, which is kinda an East Coast Tales of the City (and was, like Tales, initially serialized) and is worth checking out.

The film may be awful, but the book MYRA BRECKINRIDGE is divine! Oh, my that sex scene!

A great bisexual thriller is NO NIGHT IS TOO LONG by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell). Lots of twists. Would make a great movie.

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The book of Myra is an all-time favorite. I think Myron, the sequel, is even better, though I understand it flopped sales wise (and, I think this has been discussed on here before, I hate how Vidal changed all the "shock" words to names of American politicans he disliked--I get his point, but reading it as a teen in the '90s it just made a great novel harder going than it should have been.)

Vidal's City and the Pillar is a favorite of mine too, though I get why many find it heavy handed--at the least it's historically important. The easier to find version was heavily re-written in the 60s, I believe, not just changing the shock ending (for the better) but also much of the style of the prose (for the worse, I think.) But for anyone who liked the novel, I recommend Vidal's Judgement of Paris which, in a sort of cameo, updates you on some of the characters (sorta how like how Isherwood's Down There on a Visit revisits some of his characters from The Berlin Stories.)

Borstal, I'll have to check out No Night is Too Long. I actually prefer Rendell's books as Vine--as creepy as they are--to her work under her own name.

SonofRobbie, I didn't even think anyone else had seen the movie of Pittsburgh. I think it came out direct to DVD--but I remember just before it came out I read an interview with the director who went on about how it was a labour of love (I believe he wrote the film as well,) and how huge an impact the novel had on him. I find Sarsgaard very hot, but to be honest, aside from just finding the film awful (and I think I would have felt that way even if I didn't know the novel) I remember that they completely removed the main gay character and sorta combined some of his stuff with Sarsgaard's. Which, I suppose would have been fine, if it had worked...

*SINGLE MAN SPOILERS*


I actually liked A Single Man (as a movie in its own right) though watching the making of segments on the DVD made me feel a bit bad for that. Tom Ford made, I thought, a *good* movie, but not a good adaptation, though he is very self congratulatory about how adding the whole suicide/gun element somehow made the story better.

The novel is so different, at least IMHO. Ford's movie is so completely slick and magazine ad beautiful--it makes me think that's the only way he really can relate to gay relationships. On the other hand, the novel is so honest about how messy relationships can be--and I mean messy literally, down to details about body fluids. I also (and maybe this is just the way I want to read the novel) don't see the ending as even saying that the main character died, I saw it as more an argument for the protagonist coming to terms with the death of his lover. So making that ending so literal in the movie, felt over the top to me.

For more on Achilles and Patroclus, see Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. "Why, his masculine whore. Now, the rotten diseases
of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs,..."