By 1950, two main trends in English-language gay literature had been established: one apologetically addressing a “straight” audience, trying to justify and atone for the fact of being gay; the other unabashedly celebrating another, equally vital sexuality and speaking mainly to an enlightened reader. The City and the Pillar, which follows both trends to some degree, is the first novel to make use of an important device (suggested perhaps by André Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt of 1926) evident in almost all the gay fiction that follows it: the autobiographical voice. Edmund White, himself the author of one of the most influential gay autobiographical fictions in North America, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), has remarked that “since no one is brought up to be gay, the moment [a boy] recognizes the difference he must account for it.” Nongays learn about their sexual mores (mostly from conservative, sexist sources) in hundreds of different places: home, school, workplace, television, film, print. Gays are, by and large, deprived of any such geography. They grow up feeling invisible and must go through the apprenticeship of adolescence almost invariably alone. Gay fiction — especially autobiographical gay fiction — therefore serves as a guide that both reflects and allows comparison with the reader’s own experience.
Much of this factual prose is illuminating and encouraging (something much needed in the age of AIDS) and allows the reader to admit the fact of being gay as part of everyday life. Camille Paglia has commented that most gays, unlike other minority groups, do not reproduce themselves, and therefore, like artists everywhere, “their only continuity is through culture, which they have been instrumental in building.” Authors such as Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man), David Leavitt (The Lost Language of Cranes), and Armistead Maupin (in his soap-opera saga Tales of the City) make this “continuity through culture” explicit: they place their gay characters in the midst of a multifaceted society, so that their reality is not “other” but “another,” part of a historical cultural whole, with no reigning central entity determining what is normal according to his own image.
Because of the instructional use to which gay literature can be put, gay stories that bow to prejudice, implicitly accepting the patriarchal verdict about the wages of sin, commit literary terrorism and deserve to be housed on the same shelf as moralistic Victorian fables. A number of good writers fall into this category: Dennis Cooper, for instance, whose fiction depicts necrohomoerotic longings and explores the aesthetics of sickness and decay, with death as the inevitable end; and at times the timorous Gide, who believed that homosexuality was “an error of biology,” and whose heroes are so terribly ridden by Catholic angst.
Because it needs to instruct, because it needs to bear witness, because it needs to affirm the right to exist of a group that the power-holding majority of society wishes to ignore or eliminate, most gay literature has been staunchly realistic. Lagging behind the rights demanded and partly achieved by other oppressed groups, gay men are depicted in a literature that is still largely at an informative or documentary stage. Women’s literature can produce fantasies, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, black literature can invent ghost stories, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved; with one or two superb exceptions (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers come immediately to mind) gay literature has no fantastic stories, no imaginary worlds. Instead, its strength lies in the subversive possibilities of its language.
Appropriating everyday language, undermining the bureaucratic use of common words, using the guerrilla tactics of the surrealists to fill the commonplace with a sense of danger — these are the things gay literature, like any literature of the oppressed, can do best. Jean Genet, the French poet, playwright, and novelist who died in 1985, created, better than any other gay writer in any language, a literary voice to explore the gay experience. Genet understood that no concession should be made to the oppressor. In a hypocritical society that condemns gay sexuality but condones the exploitation of women, arrests pickpockets but rewards robber barons, hangs murderers but decorates torturers, Genet became a male prostitute and a thief, and then proceeded to describe the outcast’s vision of our world as a sensual hallucination. This vision was so unsettling that when Jean Cocteau showed Paul Valéry the manuscript of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Valéry’s response was “Burn it.” In English, Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, William Burroughs — all forced or voluntary outsiders of society—set social language against its overlords.
Perhaps the literature of all segregated groups goes through similar stages: apologetic, self-descriptive, and instructive; political and testimonial; iconoclastic and outrageous. If that is the case, then the next stage, which I think can be recognized in certain novels by Alan Gurganus or Alan Hollinghurst, introduces characters who happen to be gay but whose circumstances are defined well beyond their sexuality, which is once again seen as part of a complex and omnivorous world.
MARKING THE TREES
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,
More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”
Naked except for a fur-trimmed gauze negligee and waddling about in bare feet, Cary Grant announced to an enquiring May Robson that he was thus attired because he had gone “gay.” With this pronouncement in the 1938 film Bringing Up Baby the word gay, meaning “male homosexual,” publicly entered the English language of North America.
It was not an auspicious beginning. Grant’s usage reflected a stereotype: that being gay somehow involves dressing up in women’s clothing, wishing to be the other sex, and consequently becoming an involuntary parody of a woman. Certainly some gay men dress up in drag, but all transvestites are not homosexual, and all homosexuals are certainly not transvestites. Society, for the majority of Grant’s audience, appeared to be an immutable reality in which men and women fulfilled certain specific roles, dressed in specific ways, and reacted in a specific manner, and the questioning of the necessity of these roles and styles was seen as deviant — and therefore wrong. Today, some of these perceptions have changed, but the changes have been mostly superficial. Beneath the apparently tolerant manners of Grant’s new audiences, the same traditional standards continue to rule and the same old discomfort continues to be felt.
The historical origins of this meaning of the word gay are somewhat dubious. Gai savoir meant “poetry” in thirteenth-century Provençal, and as some troubadour poems were explicitly homosexual, it is possible that the word came to designate this particular aspect of their repertoire. Other inquisitive etymologists have traced its origins to Old English, where one of the meanings of the word gal was “lustful,” as in modern German geil. Whatever the sources, by the early twentieth century gay was commonly used in English homosexual subculture as a password or code, and quickly gay or gai became the usual term for “male homosexual” in French, Dutch, Danish, Japanese, Swedish, and Catalan.