Gay Fiction

Gay Fiction

The Gay and Lesbian Category

It’s a freezing day in December and I’m in a large Waterstones bookshop in Birmingham. On the top floor, at the back of the store, as far away from the steel drum rendition of “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’ wafting from the street below I find a small section devoted to “Gay and Lesbian”. It will be another thirty minutes until my dining companion arrives, so I decide to engage myself in discovering the answer to one of the most pressing questions of our age; “what are gays reading?”

           

Amazon bestseller lists, endless Radio 4 programmes, puff piece news stories, stacked displays in bookstores and supermarkets, seem to have answered the question “what are women reading?” with the resounding cry of “Twilight fan-fiction!”  On my train journey up to the second city I sat across from a grey-haired woman engrossed in EL James’ second book with her eyes slightly glazed over, her tongue slightly protruding from her open mouth, reminding me of a friend’s Chocolate Labrador.  Despite the lack of great critical acclaim, and despite being too late to win a coveted Man Booker Prize which this year was to be awarded to Hillary Mantel for her far less popular Bring Up the Bodies, I fully expect Ms James to be regarded as the great literary figure of 2012, for impact if nothing else; Time Magazine have already ranked her in “the 100 most influential people in the world”.

           

Yet I’m not aware of such a “ground-breaking” or “transformative” work yet published in the canon of gay and lesbian fiction. Perhaps I simply overlooked something, in the next half hour I am to redress this oversight.

           

“Gay and Lesbian”, for those who have yet to find this most hallowed section of their local Waterstones, is generally located next to “Sexuality”; while on the surface this seems perfectly logical it puts the category past about five rows of “Self Help” rather than alongside “Romance” and “Erotica” which is probably where the majority of books (mostly with cursory inspection seem fiction or semi-autobiographical) belong.

           

Owing to having so little time I have to resort to a primary school level faux pas and judge the few hundred books that make up “Gay and Lesbian” by their covers. From this all I can deduce is that they’re crap. When I take blurbs into account it occurs that not all of these books are strictly speaking gay or lesbian; several of them have protagonists or core relationships outside of gender binaries – transgendered or transsexual – one blurb tells the story of a man who discovered his homosexuality at the age of forty despite having a wife and one son, while I can’t claim to be an expert on human sexuality wouldn’t this make him bisexual? So wouldn’t this section be more appropriately named “LGBT Fiction”?

           

Popular cover illustrations include builders, policemen, and men in suits with open shirts and gleaming torsos. Like a 21^st Century Village People if the Village People included a sexy stockbroker in their line up. If the tasteful cover was part of Fifty Shades of Gray’s appeal then I have to report that Gay Fiction has not yet moved beyond the Harlequin or Mills and Boon stage of publishing design.

He's right, the title font is gauche.

The Lesbian contingent is not treated with any more subtlety. Here we are treated to heaving bodices, stockings and suspenders, black lace, and titles like “Hot and Bothered”. I turned one of the books over in my hand; it detailed the story of a “bull dyke” who found love in the 70’s punk scene, looking at the cover again it depicted a Megan Fox lookalike in a black lace bra and knickers lying on satin sheets while an equally gorgeous woman bit her shoulder. I wasn’t entirely sure that the illustrator had got the gist of the story; it seemed a photograph that was more likely to appeal to heterosexual men than the book’s core audience. Wondering whether this disconnect between cover images and readership was the same in the male gay fiction I pulled one again at random from the shelf and sent a photo of the cover of Wolfsbane to a gay friend of mine, he texted back two minutes later to tell me “the title font is gauche”, I assume that’s a yes.

       

What Constitutes Gay and Lesbian Fiction?

While there was a decent selection of genres loosely covered by Gay and Lesbian; a little modern gothic fiction, a few thrillers, some comedy, and even a little crime (including a serial killer novel about a drag queen who killed with her stiletto heels, a book I regret not buying); the vast majority of Gay and Lesbian is devoted to two basic plot-types, Romance and “Coming Out”.

A “Coming Out” story is basically a bildungsroman in which the protagonist struggles and eventually comes to terms with their homosexuality, think Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit or Hollinghurst’s The Spell.

Curiously Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was not anywhere to be found in Gay and Lesbian, nor was anything written by Alan Hollinghurst, nor Baudelaire, nor Forster’s Maurice, nor Sarah Waters, nor Quentin Crisp, nor Christopher Isherwood, there was no Sapphic poetry, Chuck Palahniuk was not acknowledged as a gay author, even Wilde was missing in action.  It’s not that Waterstones did not carry any of these books; it’s just that anything of any literary value was stored with the bulk of the “heterosexual” collection.

In fact, despite being quite well read and abreast of literary news, I only recognised one book: Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg. I can’t claim to have read it but I vaguely remembered Germaine Greer discussing it on a book review show. That it’s still here is probably an oversight by whoever it is who Waterstones employs to rescue books from Gay and Lesbian.

Seeing the works that are included in Gay and Lesbian I can understand why Hollinghurst bristles at the term “gay author”, Waterstones have managed to curate an insult. But the truth is that there really shouldn’t be a Gay and Lesbian section at all.

 Gay Is Not a Genre

Quick! You’re stacking shelves in a DVD store; you have twenty Pedro Almodóvar films, where do they go? You answered World Cinema didn’t you? Of course you did, it’s where they go. You looked at a collection of films whose shared themes are transvestism, transexuality, homosexuality and drug abuse and decided that the most important aspect of the films is that they’re in Spanish with English subtitles. You have a box set of Queer as Folk, where does that go? It goes with box sets of TV series. Naturally. There’s still a Gay and Lesbian section in your store, what goes in that? DVDs whose only distinctive factor is that they’re Gay and Lesbian.

What does that even mean? Typically that the protagonist and key characters mostly gay or lesbian, if you can find any other key attribute to them you’ll put them elsewhere. If anyone’s likely to want to buy them you’ll still put them elsewhere even if they have no redeeming qualities. Brokeback Mountain has a gay protagonist, a gay antagonist, is both a “coming out” story and a gay romance; it’s also not that good. It’s a perfect fit for Gay and Lesbian, but due to being inexplicably popular it has escaped that fate.

The same goes with books. Hollinghurst had all of his books rescued from Gay and Lesbian when he won the Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. Bookstores were already duplicating his work, keeping some copies in Gay and Lesbian and most in Fiction, owing to his Booker nomination for and popularity of The Swimming Pool Library. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice never had to face the ignominy of being Gay and Lesbian, Forster was already renowned long before it was published (and he’d been reviled for his heterosexuality a mere decade before). Wilde never belonged there, or Isherwood, despite the homoeroticism implicit in Palahniuk’s writing and the author’s own sexuality Fight Club was popular and straight enough to make it to the front of the store. Since the decline of Feminist bookshops and subsequently Feminist sections in bookshops Angela Carter has joined the rest of the competent writers discussing human sexuality in Fiction.

Gay and Lesbian is selection of books that are badly written, unpopular, and have no mainstream appeal or literary merit. It is an unnecessary section. It is an unnecessary section, worst of all it is dishonest.  While it may be true that the Gay and Lesbian section of Waterstones represents about 4% of the books the store stocks and this translates reasonably well into demographics it is not a true representation of the number of gay or lesbian authors or books the store stocks. The truth is that if every non-heterosexual author had his or her books in the Gay and Lesbian section Gay and Lesbian would account for about a third of the store.  It would include a massive number of classics, such a section could even arguably include Shakespeare.

I can’t give any reason for the disproportionate creative achievements of LGBT persons but I think we would all agree that such a division of our bookstores would be insane; it would be akin to having different sections for male and female authors.

I propose scrapping the section.

There would still be a place for the multitude of builder, soldier, sailor and businessman books. They could go with their trashy heterosexual kin in Romance, a section that could then be subdivided by sexuality and interest. Everything else could sink or swim in general fiction. It could be argued that “coming out” is a special interest sub-genre but as has already been discussed the great examples of this story are already selling well outside of the Gay and Lesbian ghettoised books.

I left Waterstones with the distinct impression that gays with any taste are already picking from the front of the store. At any rate during my time there, in a packed store, in the run up to Christmas, I didn’t see another human wander down those aisles.