Gay Literature with an impact

[TownsendPLocke]

Well Oz that makes me just a little older than you-I read Tales of the City when it appeared in Serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle!I also read lots of those Trashy Gordon Merrick romance novels like The Lord Won't Mind etc.

In fact I used an excerpt from Armisted Maupins Tales of the City in my coming out proclamation in high school when I was 16.this was during Anita Bryant's 15 minute of infamy.Here is that excerpt-a letter from Michael to his Mother

"Dear Mama,

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write to you and Papa I realize I'm not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be O.K., if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child.

I have friends who think I'm foolish to write this letter. I hope they're wrong. I hope their doubts are based on parents who loved and trusted them less than mine do. I hope especially that you'll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my continuing need to share my life with you.

I wouldn't have written, I guess, if you hadn't told me about your involvement in the Save Our Children campaign. That, more than anything, made it clear that my responsibility was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual, and that I never needed saving from anything except the cruel and ignorant piety of people like Anita Bryant.

I'm sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief—rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes.

No, Mama, I wasn't “recruited.” No seasoned homosexual ever served as my mentor. But you know what? I wish someone had. I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in orlando had taken me aside and said, “You're all right, kid. YOu can grow up to be a doctor or a teacher just like anyone else. You're not crazy or sick or evil. You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends—all kinds of friends—who don't give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it.”

But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay, who don't consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being.

These aren't radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it's all right for you to like me, too.

I know what you must be thinking now. You're asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way?

I can't answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don't care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it's the light and the joy of my life.

I know I can't tell you what it is to be gay. But I can tell you what it's not.

It's not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity. It's not fearing your body, or the pleasures that God made for it. It's not judging your neighbor, except when he's crass or unkind.

Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me the limitless possibilities of living. I has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength.

It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here, I like it.

There's not much else I can say, except that I'm the same Michael you've always known. You just know me better now. I have never consciously done anything to hurt you. I never will.

Please don't feel you have to answer this right away. It's enough for me to know that I no longer have to lie to the people who taught me to value the truth.

Mary Ann sends her love.

Everything is fine at 28 Barbary Lane.

Your loving son,

Michael"

One of the most impactful things i have ever found in literature.

[AdamSmith]

>What got you reading when you were younger?

Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance. Not the greatest literature, but one of the first pieces of gay fiction to be grounded in something more hopeful than the bitchy bitterness epitomized by The Boys in the Band. Important though that work was, in its day.

What is your

>favorite modern gay books?

Andrew Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library. For my money, like the second coming of Vladimir Nabokov.

Speaking of whom, nothing holds a candle to Nabokov's Pale Fire, with its unreliable narrator Charles Kinbote, a lit professor writing an obsessive commentary on a second-rate poet's magnum opus while singing the praises of "lads and youths" under his tutelage.

[Guest PWIT]

I have always liked vampire novels (gay or not). Maybe it is all that sucking vampires do.

There is a gay sub theme or theme in most of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicals. The most outright obvious was 'The Vampire Armand'.

http://www.annerice.com/bs_VampireChronicles.htm

[AdamSmith]

>I have always liked vampire novels (gay or not). Maybe it is

>all that sucking vampires do.

Hear, hear!

>There is a gay sub theme or theme in most of the Anne Rice

>Vampire Chronicals.

To put it mildly! Not to highjack Oz's thread, but which of her vampire characters would you like to be, if any? I pick Marius.

[TownsendPLocke]

Marius seems such a tragic figure.

When I was managing the Century theatre on Larkin in SF(back when it was a gay porno palace)there was a scifi/fantasy bookshop next door.Anne Rice was a very frequent visitor,but she never ventured in the Century(we really hated it when woman would come in-made the regulars leave in droves)and I chatted with her a few times.

I just don;t get into her stuff anymore-she has gone way to Catholic for my taste.

[Guest PWIT]

>To put it mildly! Not to highjack Oz's thread, but which of

>her vampire characters would you like to be, if any? I pick

>Marius.

Interesting choice. Wheels are spinning in my head as I try to analyze your choice. Do you like the power of his character? His love for the youthful (some say pedophile but Anne Rice vampires don't actually have sex)? His role as mentor? We know the character with all the knowledge and power he has acquired over the years. Would you pick him in his early years?

If I had to pick one it would probably be David...though relatively new to the vampire world, he is going in to it with more knowledge than most did.

[Guest ScottAdler]

>What got you reading when you were younger? What is your

>favorite modern gay books?

My university is one of the few in the country with an actual accredited Minor in LGBT Studies. Part of the core for the minor was at least one of the following Gay Lit Classes ... Gay Literature Before or After Stonewall.

The City and the Pillar by Vidal is a favorite of mine along with City of Night by Rechy.

If you really want a great young gay love story that will take you about as long to read as it will to interpret its gaelic prose, check out At Swim Two Boys

[TotallyOz]

No message

[TotallyOz]

I am much more of a day person that a night guy so I don't really think being a vampire would work for me. I was once married to one and loved it.

However, my favorite character was Marius.

Have you read any of Rice's son's books? I read the first one and enjoyed it.

[TotallyOz]

>If you really want a great young gay love story that will take

>you about as long to read as it will to interpret its gaelic

>prose, check out At Swim Two Boys

I haven't read it but James Joyce is my favorite author and many critics compared this to him. I have ordered it and can't wait to read it. Thanks.

[TotallyOz]

When I was younger, I read the Tales of the City. I remember sneaking to bed each night and reading them when my family was asleep as I didn’t want to be caught with the books. I have no idea where I even got them or found them. There was no google back then and I think one of the covers appealed to me and I purchased the book and was instantly addicted. After that, I had always dreamed of living in San Francisco and having a group of gay men as close to me as that group was.

The other book that I could not put down was Maurice. I just loved it from cover to cover and must have read it 10 times. I do remember that my English teach had mentioned it in class and there were snickers about a gay book. That was one of the few moments that she really had my attention all year.

What got you reading when you were younger? What is your favorite modern gay books?

[Guest epigonos]

Though I certainly was not a kid when I first read it I think "The Front Runner" by Patricia Nell Warren was something of an epiphany for me. Damn did that novel rock my world!!!!! Believe it or not I still have my original copy of the April 1974 paper back edition.

[Buddy2]

Too bad the deeply closet Thomas Mann did not write his own "Maurice"-type book to be publish after his death. We do have Mann's "Death in Venice,"

hardly a gay liberation work. After Oscar Wilde's troubles, it was daring on Mann's part to publish a novella on homosexuality in 1912. Further, "Death in Venice" has prospered as a film by Luchino Visconti (1971), an opera by Benjamin Britten (1973) and 2.5 hour dance by the Hamburg Ballet (see provocative photo in New York Times' review of February 9. 2007). It's difficult to imagine that the novella will ever be out of print, especially with new translations being published.

Agree about "At Swim Two Boys" and "The Swimming-Pool Library."

Vidal's book is wonderful.

I am not a fan of Armistead Maupin, but to each his own.

[AdamSmith]

Thanks for the pointer to Rice's son's books. I have the first one on my (6-foot-high) bedside stack. Now I know to dig it out and get going.

[AdamSmith]

This week I've seen, here and elsewhere, a blizzard of recommendations for At Swim Two Boys. Thanks.

Agree with you about Rechy. His books are valuable and painfully authentic documents of their era. They make me thank heaven we have moved beyond that time.

[AdamSmith]

>I just don;t get into her stuff anymore-she has gone way to

>Catholic for my taste.

Same here. I liked her a lot more as a secular humanist.

[AdamSmith]

>Interesting choice. Wheels are spinning in my head as I try

>to analyze your choice.

I think the thing about Marius is how he retains so much of the cosmopolitan Roman mortal even while being one of the older and strongest immortals. Scene in The Vampire Lestat of Marius's library strewn about with the world's newspapers, read just before he goes out for the drink.

Of course having to lug the damned Mother & Father around could get old!

>If I had to pick one it would probably be David...

Right! He'd be my other choice.