LARB: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing
The most famous gay male novels published before 1960 remain Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948, E. P. Dutton) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956, Dial Press). Their authors’ later eminence kept the books in print and available to generations of gay boys furtively searching the stacks of their local libraries for anything about homosexuals. There were, however, a few other books by gay writers, albeit closeted, published between 1940 and 1950 in which homosexuality was either a central theme or which featured major homosexual characters. Most prominent were The Fall of Valor (Rhinehart, 1946) by Charles Jackson, best known as the author of The Lost Weekend; The Gallery (Harper & Brothers, 1947) and Lucifer with a Book (Harper & Brothers, 1949) by John Horne Burns; and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (Greenberg, 1950).
In these midcentury novels, the protagonist awakens to his homosexuality, engages in hopeless and/or unrequited love affairs that serve mostly to emphasize the depravity of his desire, and comes to a bitter end. In The Fall of Valor, the protagonist ends up drenched in his own blood and crawling across the floor after having been beaten by the straight man with whom he has fallen in love; in Quatrefoil, the protagonist survives but his lover dies in a plane crash. The Gallery is a collection of short stories, one of which is set in a gay bar in Italy during the American occupation after the war. The story is little more than a sympathetic vignette Burns snuck in perhaps to test the waters for his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, which catalogs the gay goings-on at a private boy’s school. It was roundly condemned; Catholic World alleged that it was “filled with cynical obscenities.” And, of course, famously the protagonist in The City and the Pillar ends up murdering his boyhood crush after being rejected by him, while the gay affair in Giovanni’s Room terminates with the eponymous Giovanni on the executioner’s scaffold.
What gay men related to in these depressing novels were the glimmers of humanity the gay writers were able to slip into their lead characters, whom they depicted as ordinary men rather than as stereotypes of either the screaming queen or sociopathic fag variety. Also, by identifying gay spaces in the books’ settings they signaled to a couple of generations of lonely, isolated men that such spaces existed. Finally, they recognized that gay men were driven not by simple or predatory lust but by the need to love and to be loved. That they were not allowed to find such fulfillment was, the books hinted, not entirely their fault; perhaps, they tentatively suggested, society, too, must bear some responsibility for these ruined lives because of its treatment of homosexuals.
More than a decade later, the publication of two important novels by gay writers showed marginal progress. The protagonist of John Rechy’s City of Night (Grove Press, 1963) was a moody hustler in the mold of James Dean who roamed the gay underworld of late ’50s and early ’60s America. The single man of Christopher Isherwood’s eponymous novel A Single Man (Simon & Schuster, 1964), was a middle-aged English teacher at a Southern California community college whose younger lover of many years has been killed in a car accident while visiting his family to whom he had remained closeted. Both novels were apparently based on autobiographical material, which seems to be a frequent occurrence in early gay literature as the writers were working in a literary void and so were compelled to draw heavily upon their own experiences.
Publication of these two books presaged a shift in attitude about homosexuality, if not by society, then by gay men themselves who would, within a decade, abandon the role of pathetic victim they played in midcentury gay novels and take up the banner of liberationists. This change would also change how they wrote about themselves.
It was in the ’70s that interest in gay writers (and they were mostly gay men) really picked up steam. The most consequential literary developments of the era took place on the coasts. In San Francisco, Armistead Maupin launched a serialized novel published as Tales of the City (1978, Harper & Row), the first of an enormously popular series that chronicled gay and straight San Francisco with equal sympathy and cheerfulness. A little later in the decade, a group of New York writers that dubbed itself the Violet Quill was much more strenuously literary than Maupin. Its members included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran who achieved mainstream publication of novels, including White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978, St. Martin’s Press) and Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978, William Morrow & Co.). The house organ of the New York gay writers was Christopher Street (1976–1995), a magazine that covered both politics and culture and featured both nonfiction and fiction. Its co-founder, Michael Denneny, would become the best-known and perhaps most influential gay editor of the 1980s and 1990s. That era would become the Golden Age of gay and lesbian publishing was on the horizon. And the terrible and awesome fuse that lit that fire was AIDS, which left, amid losses we still feel acutely today in the absence of nearly an entire generation of gay men, a wealth of fiction, poetry, and prose that made possible the many forking paths through which we would come to contemporary queer literature.
The phenomenal surge of gay and lesbian literature in the 1980s and 1990s, at small presses and big ones, would not have been possible without a reading audience and distribution channels that brought the books to those readers. Lesbian presses benefited from the existence of women’s bookstores and newspapers that started up in the 1970s. They were joined in the 1980s by a chain of independent gay and lesbian bookstores and the explosive growth of the gay and lesbian presses.
In both large and small cities, these gay and lesbian bookstores functioned not simply as retailers but as informal community centers. They provided forums for readings and meetings, and they kept books on their shelves for much longer than other independent bookstores. Gay editor David Groff noted in a 1993 essay in Poets & Writers that the rate of return from bookstores for lesbian and gay trade paperbacks “can be lower than five percent whereas nongay trade paperbacks have return rates of up to seventy percent.”
As with bookstores, there was also an explosive proliferation of gay and lesbian newspapers across the country and, again, this growth was not limited to major coastal cities. In practical terms, that meant that, while a straight, first-time novelist might receive a handful of reviews, a gay or lesbian debut might get dozens from newspapers across the nation that spoke specifically and directly to the writer’s potential audience.
In his Poets & Writers essay, Groff was upbeat about the gay and lesbian boom among New York publishers during that time, attributing it to the emergence of “an ever-growing audience out there eager for the facts, entertainment, stories, education, and self-definition that gay and lesbian books can provide.” Groff pointed out the unique and crucial role books played in a community that otherwise had few or no representations of itself in other cultural platforms: “We don’t really have movies, television, or music to call our own,” he said. “[M]ostly what we have is books. Gay and lesbian books sell so consistently because we need them so urgently.”
The big gay boom did not last. The big publishers were the first to bail out when gay and lesbian books failed to meet their economic expectations. As early as 1993, Groff was firing warning shots. “For all the brouhaha over lesbian and gay book-publishing triumphs, there is still a low ceiling on that success,” he cautioned. “Few hardcovers can exceed sales of 20,000 copies and few promise to assemble a large enough audience to be a lead title for a mainstream publisher, with the attendant publicity and promotion that could attract new queer and straight readers alike.” In a 2020 email, he parted the curtains and showed what had been going on behind the scenes at the big houses. “At the New York houses we were under great pressure: every single book we published that succeeded or failed became an immediate and weighty metric indicating the viability or futility of the entire LGBTQ category,” he explained. “No other genre of book endured that same reflex of dubiousness and dauntedness.”
Denneny was less circumspect. In a conversation after he’d left publishing, he said that as soon as the New York houses realized queer books weren’t the Golden Calf they’d imagined, publishers, many of whom had held their noses as they published these titles, couldn’t dump them fast enough. By the mid-1990s, contracts were being canceled and, more grimly, writers were dying of AIDS. By 2000, the Golden Age was over.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the big publishers and the literary establishment virtually abandoned books by queer writers after the great outpouring of gay and lesbian literature between 1980 and 1995 failed to deliver bottom-line balloons. This queer equivalent of the Harlem Renaissance owed its existence to a robust network of gay and lesbian media and bookstores as well as the tectonic social and cultural shifts ushered in by the AIDS epidemic, which dramatically brought the gay and lesbian community and its stories of suffering and heroism into public consciousness. By the late 1990s, a new generation of drugs had transformed HIV infection from a death sentence to a chronic, but manageable illness (though not for everyone, of course). Simultaneously, the networks of gay and lesbian media and bookstores began to collapse, displaced by the internet, on the one hand, and by big chain bookstores and Amazon on the other. Many of the most important small presses that had been the backbone of queer publishing also disappeared. The result was that fewer queer books were being published.
The advent of easy self-publication and online distribution via platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, the emergence of new small queer presses, and a renewed if tokenistic interest in queer writers by the remaining big publishers has opened the floodgates to a fresh stream of LGBTQ books. But more books means greater competition for the attention of an LGBTQ community that also finds itself increasingly represented across other cultural platforms — TV, movies, and most significantly, social media — that to some extent have displaced literature as the community’s main source of self-validation and self-identification. Then, too, there has been a rather striking change in the tone of much queer literature. Historically, queer literature was the literature of the Outsider, a sphere inherently engaged in the political and social questions distinctly associated with homosexuality. Now, with the apparently greater acceptance of queer people, much of the literature being produced — especially by Big Publishing — tends toward the introspective, apolitical, and non-ideological.
As such, the past decade has been both the best and the worst of times for LGBTQ publishing and writers. Authors can now bypass the gatekeeping publishing apparatus completely by producing and marketing professional-looking print copies or ebooks through the self-publishing options available to them on the internet. Many queer writers have taken this option, even as it comes with a number of significant challenges, not least of which is finding a way to stand out amid a crowded marketplace. Between self-publication, publication by the remaining LGBTQ small presses, and publication by the Big Five publishers, it’s probably safe to say there are more LGBTQ books in print at this moment than at any other time in publishing history. This includes a growing body of transgender fiction that encompasses every genre from speculative fiction, literary novels, romance, erotica, and crime fiction.
The sheer volume of all new titles released every year — hundreds of thousands — and the simultaneous balkanization of the reading public to smaller and smaller niches makes it more difficult for queer writers to preach beyond the choir. Preaching to the choir has its advantages of course; it means there is a market of sympathetic and engaged readers. But most writers like to think that, at whatever corner of human experience they begin, there is some universal aspect to their work. In a world of niche markets and marketing, constantly flooded by new titles clamoring for attention, it is harder and harder to break through the noise and reach those readers outside the ambit of a writer’s specific community.
The future of queer publishing, whether from the independent presses or the mainstream publishers, is tied in part to the future of books — are we, as is sometimes said, entering a post-literary world? More crucially, however, the future of queer publishing is inextricably tied to the future of queer self-conception itself. Older gays and lesbians experienced themselves as part of an embattled minority, alternately ignored and demonized by society at large; this was no academic argument — they often bore the stripes to prove it, as well. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were so few cultural accounts of our lives that when we stumbled across a book that provided one, even if it was marred by the obligatory tragic ending, queer readers seized upon it like a Holy Grail, proof that they existed and were not alone. Even later, in the 1980s and 1990s, this enormous need for validation drove gay and lesbian publishing: we needed to tell and to hear stories about and by ourselves, particularly during the AIDS epidemic. Books were not mere escapes, they were manifestos, and writing our lives and experiences was an act of political activism, even if your subject was a gay vampire.
Is this still true? Do younger generations of LGBTQ folk experience themselves as threatened and erased and in need of self-validation? And if they do, will they look for themselves and a better future in books? Or will they find it on their smartphone screens? Or some revolutionary, bio-integrated technology yet to be devised? Or in a shift of cultural consciousness in which gender identity and sexual orientation truly become private and morally neutral aspects of personality? Will writers no longer feel the need to write books with the same polemical passion that drove the writers who created the LGBTQ vast literary culture? Whatever the future brings, one thing is certain: the compulsion to tell stories that arise from the deepest sense of ourselves, however those stories may be told, will not disappear, and foremost among those storytellers will be our queer voices.
Full article: (Part 1) · (Part 2) · (Part 3)
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