After I griped last week about the present state of LGBTQ+ fiction, it occurred to me that I should write about books that I enjoyed. My point was not that there's nothing good out there. I was criticizing people who complain that there's nothing out there and we need some books about People Who Look Like Us. As far as I can tell, there is plenty out there, including books about People Who Look Like You. But I decided to look through my reading log to remind myself of books that keep me reading gay fiction.
Not too surprisingly, authors I've read before and who are still working turned up. Alan Hollinghurst has a new novel, Our Evenings, that I bought but haven't read yet, I'm saving it for later. I don't even know what it's about, but I've been reading his novels since The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and while they don't feature the positive role models that many gay readers want, they are beautifully written and treat something like the real lives of certain, mostly British, gay men. They're also sexually explicit enough to satisfy those gay men who demand hot man 2 man action. While some of the characters are conflicted about being gay, they grow out of it, and in general, self-acceptance is not the main issue Hollinghurst writes about.
Another established writer whose new work I watch for is Patrick Gale, whose first novels, Ease and The Aerodynamics of Pork, appeared in 1985. He's a fine writer, though not the virtuoso Hollinghurst is. Like Armistead Maupin (whose biography Gale published in 1999), he likes to write about gay characters who interact more or less openly with heterosexuals, another selling point for me. He also wrote a BBC drama, Man in an Orange Shirt (2017), set at the end of World War II and in the present day.
Speaking of Maupin, I reread his Tales of the City series (1978-2024) every decade. They were a breakthrough in gay fiction, in showing openly queer characters (including a transsexual) who coexist with heterosexuals and happily take swipes at bigots. That last feature is less common even in more recent gay fiction, for reasons that escape me: it's not like bigots aren't still a worthy and significant target. I have to confess that the Tales don't stand up as well to intensive rereading as I could wish; I don't know if it's me, or him, or both. But I still get more pleasure from them than from many other books, gay or straight. The surprise new installment, Mona of the Manor, published early last year, felt a bit forced to me. It's a flashback to the early 1990s, which wasn't surprising since by now many of the core original characters would be dead or in nursing homes.
Recently I discovered the novels of Michael Carson, as some of them were reissued as ebooks. For of them follow the life of Martin Benson, a conflicted English Catholic, from adolescence in the 1960s to the age of 60 so far. Benson can be a bit of a drag; even at 60 he's deficient in self-esteem, but he's found a partner who's a good match, Carson seems to be smarter and more together than his creation, and all his novels reflect his profession in English as a second language. They're mostly out of print, so I'm tracking them down second-hand on the Internet. Again, Benson's not a role model, but Carson makes him and his world worth visiting.
Last year I read The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle (2022), by Matt Cain, another Brit (yes, there seems to be a pattern here). It's about a closeted 65-year-old mail carrier facing retirement, and learning that England has changed since his youth. He gradually adjusts to new possibilities of openness. It's not my favorite read of the past few decades, but at least about a gay man who's not an adolescent getting over himself.
Back in the USA, the screenwriter, playwright and novelist Paul Rudnick published a semi-autobiographical novel, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, in 2023. Rudnick is a smooth, witty writer, and though I don't find his work entirely satisfying I always watch for what he'll do next.
There's also Christopher Bram, whose work I've read since Surprising Myself was published in 1987. He's solid and intelligent without being brilliant, but he hasn't published a novel since Exiles in America in 2007. I like his nonfiction, but wish for another novel.
It feels strange to say this, but I've finally begun reading Jean Genet's novels; these go back to the 1940s. I've also reread his plays and Edmund White's biography of him. I probably wouldn't have gotten much from them in my 20s: they are about petty criminals, full of fetishistic details that don't stroke my kinks, and the English translations are hampered by the need to render French jail and street slang into English. This probably couldn't be fixed by new translations. But in my old age I found Our Lady of the Flowers and Miracle of the Rose fascinating, as a glimpse of a life and experiences that many gay men fantasize about, including Genet himself. I learned from White's biography that Genet was an outsider even among jailbirds, wanting to be a tough guy and mostly failing. I still have three novels and his memoir Prisoner of Love to go.
So much for the old guys, for now anyway. I recently happened on Passing Strange by Ellen Klages, published in 2017. It's a sort of mystery/fantasy set mostly in 1950s San Francisco, involving a group of women, mostly lesbian, struggling in a city that's not as free as it's fabled to be. Nicely done.
Also set in 1950s San Francisco is Frank W. Butterfield's The Unexpected Heiress (2016), the first in a series of murder mysteries featuring a gay private investigator with an independent income so he feels free to slap around (verbally) an antigay bigot who stumbles into his office in this book's first chapter. That's a good start, but I haven't decided whether to continue the series. Butterfield is one of a number of gay writers taking advantage of the ease of self-publishing these days, and he's one of the better ones I've sampled.
Then there's Lev AC Rosen's Lavender House (2022), about a secret LGBTQ mutual-support society in early 1950s San Francisco. I haven't yet read Malinda Lo's Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021), set in San Francisco in 1954, but hope to get to it soon. Lo has mostly written YA fantasy fiction with lesbian content; I've only read her Ash but I hear great things about this one.
One more area I've found very fruitful to explore is graphic fiction and nonfiction. The success of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which I loved, opened the door to a lot of more queer content. The only American example I've read so far is Bloom (2019) by Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau. It's a story of barely post-high school young gay love, nicely done but what has really gotten my attention is Japanese shonen ai manga, a well-established genre with multiple subgenres and a welter of role categories. Just a few years ago few of these books were available in English, usually on the Internet, but that has changed.
Three that stand out for me include My Brother's Husband by Gengoroh Tagame, an artist mostly known for his, um, erotica. I was pointed to it by a gay Arab friend I was visiting in San Francisco. My Brother's Husband is about a single straight Japanese dad who is visited by the widowed Canadian husband of his estranged twin brother. Lots of tension and stress there, but common humanity mostly wins out even in Japan. It's very moving and the story is well-developed; I'd seen some of Gengoroh's erotic work, and it did not prepare me for the character development and sensitivity of My Brother's Husband.
My Brother's Husband is intended for a gay male readership, though it's accessible to straights. Shonen ai manga are mostly for and by heterosexual women, and my next examples come from that genre. Restart After Coming Back Home by cocomi is about a troubled 25-year-old who reluctantly moves back home to his rural village after losing his latest job in the big city. He doesn't know what to do next, and his parents don't know either; they have no reason to expect direction or stability from him. He's taken in hand by another fellow, a boisterously friendly guy who's not fazed by his sulkiness and for some reason remembers him fondly from their younger days. He's an orphan, living with his adoptive grandfather, and the two gradually get closer until (as the blurbs have it) they Develop Deeper Feelings for each other. The second book, Restart After Growing Hungry, follows the progress of their couplehood. The characterization is beautifully done, and I've already read these books twice.
The third interesting example is I'm Kinda Chubby and I'm Your Hero by Nore, in two volumes. The main character is a big-boned young actor in a small theater company, insecure and unsure of his chances of success. A young apprentice baker becomes his fan and they work toward a mutually supportive friendship. Unlike Restart, no erotic / sexual component is declared in their relationship, but it is loving and important to them. Neither one is shown to have any heterosexual interest. Are they going to be boyfriends? You can decide for yourself. For me it doesn't matter; I've also read this diptych twice. I'm bemused by people who want cartoon characters to whip out their cartoon genitalia. For me what fiction and comics can do is show the progress of relationships, and many manga do this very well. I could mention others I've liked in the genre, ambiguous or overtly erotic, but I've run on long enough for now. The notable thing for me about these books is that even when they're working familiar tropes of young men discovering that they love other men, I often find them much more moving than their US counterparts.
Since most Americans don't read much anyway, I don't believe that they've exhausted all the books that exist. Probably they don't know about them, which raises the question of how people find about books they might like. Reading reviews has always helped me, and browsing independent bookstores whose proprietors knew me did too. Nowadays the Amazon algorithms point me to a wide range of books; they're not perfect, of course, but nothing is. I also find recommendations on social media, by people I either know personally or follow closely enough to take what they mention seriously.
And if all else fails there are always public libraries. If you're under eighteen, librarians nowadays might well prefer not to recommend gay books to you lest they be accused of "grooming," but that won't hurt adults, and there's nothing to stop younger patrons from looking at what's on the shelves. (Yet. I expect that bigots, emboldened by Trump in the White House, will try harder to purge library collections. They can be and have been resisted successfully, and had better continue to be.)
What I wanted to show here is that there is a lot of LGBTQ fiction that works for me, whether the characters look like me or not. I can't take very seriously those people who say there isn't. What works for me may not work for you, and vice versa. But there are simply too many books out there to pretend that there aren't.
