I couldn't catch up with gay male literature even in the 1970s. This was partly because it was harder to find the older works, which were often out of print, published by small houses, or allowed to slip down the Memory Hole because of their scandalous nature. There were no sections of gay books in bookstores aside from the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City, founded in 1967, which felt too far away to be useful to me. (Other people my age traveled freely around the country, but I was too unadventurous and frankly unimaginative to do that.) A few gay writers wrote about the books that they'd read before Stonewall, which they could cover in one chapter; Roger Austen's Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Bobbs-Merrill) didn't appear until 1977, and I didn't read it until years later. But such proliferating resources, including friends in the field, pointed me to more works than I could read. Much as I was interested, there were other areas I wanted to explore.
By now, LGBTQ+ books are a sizable market niche, and can be found even in small public libraries despite the efforts of bigots to remove them. I've become skeptical of complaints that we aren't represented, though I still see plenty of them. I don't think I'm doing the old "You kids think you have it bad? Hah! In my day..." line. Mainstream publishers are putting out books in every imaginable category, to the point of self-parody: you want stories about disabled transgender Afro-Asian shapeshifters living in small US towns with their gay-sorcerer dads and their telepathic flying cats? They're out there, and probably in your public library. They can also be found on TV and the Internet. Sure, some kids are being held prisoner by their knuckle-dragging fundamentalist parents, and that's a real problem, but it's not because there aren't books about People Who Look Like You. There are even books about People Who Look Like You Being Held Prisoner by Their Knuckle-dragging Fundamentalist Parents. The problem is about finding ways to get access to them.
But back to me. I'm a seventy-four-year old white American gay man. I don't have any difficulty getting access to books or other media about people who look like me. Nor am I interested in reading only about people who look like me; that hasn't been my goal, at least since I first read lives of George Washington Carver and Clara Barton in fifth grade. My problem, insofar as it is one, is finding books that I consider worth reading. Self-publishing, including the self-publishing of ebooks, has produced a flood of works of varying quality ranging from the sublime to the dire. The conglomeratization of publishing has produced almost as many books that can't be faulted for bad writing, only for a boring mediocre professionalism and a focus on catering to market niches. I see this not only in gay writing but in genres such as mysteries and fantasy/sf, which now (happily?) overlap with gay writing.
The strange thing is that this is not really anything new. There have always been too many damned thick square books. Sturgeon's Law has always applied. It's the flip side of the complaint that there aren't enough damned thick square books about people who look like me. I should make it clear that there are plenty of books that I do enjoy reading, far more than I can ever hope to read. I'm just musing on the irony that my (and others') wish for more has been granted. What we hoped for were more good books, and they're out there, lost in the crowd, but it has ever been thus.
What provoked me to write about this is Swimming in the Dark, the first novel by the Polish-German writer Tomasz Jedrowski, published by Morrow in 2020. (He's reportedly working on another, but it's not done yet.) It's a love story about two young Poles in 1980, when Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, and the upheavals by Solidarność were still to come. The narrator, Ludwik, addresses his lost love Janusz in retrospect from the United States where he now lives. They came together at a summer work camp after graduating from university, Ludwik unsure what to do next, Janusz ready to work for the government; after an idyllic month camping out in the countryside they must figure out how, if at all, to go on loving each other. If you've read your share of gay fiction over the past few days, you should be able to predict the obstacles they face. For me there were no surprises, but it might well be different for a younger, less experienced reader, so I hesitate to criticize too much.
What did surprise me is that Jedrowski, born in Germany to Polish parents, wrote the book in English: it's not a translation. The reviews quoted on Amazon overpraise his writing, but he still did quite a good job. As I say, though, I found the story familiar and predictable, except for its setting, which Jedrowski constructed as a historical novel; at most it reflects the world of his parents, not his own experience. Even there, I had problems. Jedrowski's characters must contend with life in a repressive society suffering from economic austerity -- long lines for food, inadequate medical care, censorship of media both artistic and journalistic, police crackdowns on dissent -- though an elite few enjoyed luxury.
Ludwik remembers furtively listening to Radio Free Europe as a child with his mother and grandmother, for example. I immediately thought of something the left-wing British historian wrote in the 1980s, I think in Beyond the Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), about his interaction with Soviet dissidents: they were properly scornful and skeptical of official propaganda, but completely credulous of the Western propaganda they heard on Radio Free Europe. I felt the same way about Jedrowski's two-tiered society. Americans have rarely had to wait in lines for groceries except in wartime before the lifetimes of most of us, but poverty and hunger were serious problems here, and exacerbated by the contemporary Reagan and Thatcher regimes, which wanted to eliminate the social safety nets that alleviated them, how ever inadequately. Those programs, come to think of it, also involved waiting for hours in lines or in grim office waiting rooms, trying to appease grim bureaucrats. As for health care in the US, I don't really need to detail that, do I? Or of police crackdowns in dissent in the land of the free? Young Ludwik couldn't have known about all this in 1980, but older Ludwik doesn't seem aware of it either.
Nor could young Ludwik have known about the long history of antigay repression in the West, though a major prop in Swimming in the Dark is the illicit copy he acquires of James Baldwin's gloom-and-doom gay classic of 1956, Giovanni's Room, over which he and Janusz bond. He's also aware of US racism; the Soviet bloc made sure its citizens were well-educated about it, much to our government's indignation. Older Ludwik doesn't seem to have learned much, and I wonder about Jedrowski himself. Yes, it's difficult to balance all these things in a work of art, and Swimming in the Dark is his first try. Still, the over-familiar features of its love story left me paying more attention to the background, which I think needed work.
And you know, I feel the same way about books by more experienced gay writers, including some of the most acclaimed. I haven't been reporting here on my reading as I should, so let me mention quickly a couple. Andrew Sean Greer's Less (2017) was praised to the skies, but I found it a slog: it relies on a type of protagonist who I believe was introduced by Stephen McCauley but picked up by others, the socially awkward but uncloseted gay nerd, with a close straight woman friend and even some gay male friends. He can't get a date, but he wants a boyfriend, and eventually he stumbles across one -- sometimes literally. Then there was Andrew Holleran's latest, The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022). It features another Holleran doppelganger, enduring gay old age and not enduring it very well. The main thing I got from it was the urgency of finally getting the shingles vaccine, after reading the book's lengthy account of another elderly gay character's suffering from the disease. So that's taken care of. The novel is Holleran's unrelentingly downbeat (but yes, very well-written, as his books always are) take on aging as a single gay man with no evident support network, and he's entitled to it. It's worth comparing the prolific Edmund White's experience as he recounts it in his brand-new The Loves of My Life (Bloomsbury, 2025), which I read just last week. White has plenty of health problems, but he doesn't wallow in self-pity, and though as always his curmudgeon routine can be annoying, he's good company on the page. It's a matter of temperament, I guess.
I could also mention Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers (Vintage, 2007), a historical novel about the relationship between two gay men in McCarthy-era Washington DC, recently adapted as a Showtime miniseries. It has some points of comparison with Swimming in the Dark, come to think of it. It too received higher praise than I would give it, but it was worth reading and I intend to try some of Mallon's other work; again, it's not fair to compare this experienced writer's work to a first-timer's. It's foully depressing, given the situation, but that's okay - I don't demand happy endings. Also there's Colm Tóibín's novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician (Scribner, 2021); it's brilliantly done, but I didn't get the point of doing it. I've liked some of his other writing, including his essays, though, and I mean to read more.
To return to my original point, though, I'm not as impressed as I feel I should be by some of the prestigious gay (or straight) fiction being produced in our supposedly more enlightened times. Maybe it's just me, a consequence of having read too many other books. I'm not sure, in fact, what I'm looking for - but I'll know it if and when I find it.
