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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Big Gay Read

08:57 / 18.08.05

I just read about this in the Guardian - the BBC is going to run a Big Gay Read competition, as a follow up to the Big Read. It aims to find Britain's favourite lesbian/gay novel.

The competition is "intended to cross the sexuality divide and prompt a debate in reading groups, in internet chatrooms, in bars and over dinner tables, anywhere where people like talking about books."

What do people think about this? Is it good to have 'gay' fiction set apart from, you know, just fiction? Is it a genre you enjoy?

I really enjoy Allan Hollinghurst, for instance, but that's not particularly because he writes about gay characters - he just writes well. Your thoughts?

The proposed list (though the winner needn't come from this list) is:

The Long Firm Jake Arnott

Around the Houses Amanda Boulter

A Home at the End of the World Michael Cunningham

Crocodile Soup Julia Darling

Calendar Girl Stella Duffy

Hallucinating Foucault Patricia Duncker

Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides

Rough Music Patrick Gale

Carol Patricia Highsmith

The Line of Beauty Alan Hollingworth

Trumpet Jackie Kay

Tales of the City Armistead Maupin

At Swim, Two Boys Jamie O'Neill

The Monkey's Mask Dorothy Porter

Brokeback Mountain Annie Proulx

Desert of the Heart Jane Rule

Funny Boy Shyam Selvadurai

Story of the Night Colm Tobin

Tipping the Velvet Sarah Waters

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Jeannette Winterson

Submissions have to be in by February, and the winner will be announced at Manchester's Queer Up North festival in May.

The guardian article is here and information from the BBC is ... err, weirdly hard to find! First person to link to an official site gets a prize. Maybe the Guardian's making it all up?

OJ

10:21 / 18.08.05

For your information, this is inspired by The Big Read, but not run by the BBC, which will be why you can't find it on the BBC website.

It's an initiative from Queer Up North.

Quote from their latest email newsletter:

"The Big Gay Read – co-ordinated by queerupnorth, Commonword, Time to Read and Manchester, Salford & Blackpool Libraries in association with BT and Bertram Library Services - is being launched at Manchester Central Library on Friday 26 August, just as Manchester sees its annual Pride celebrations begin. The launch will be hosted by performance poet, Chloe Poems, and will feature celebrities championing their favourite queer books."

The website is www.biggayread.com

10:26 / 18.08.05

I'd add Clive Barker (numerous novels and short stories) to that list purely because he was the gay writer I grew up reading most when I was growing up...

OJ

10:50 / 18.08.05

Looking at the list, it seems to be mostly focussed on pretty current (90s and 00s) literary fiction by gay writers, rather than the classics that The Big Read turned up.

So there's no Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1957) or even queer/feminist explorations like Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness which is a SF genre classic exploring gender on a distant planet.

That being said, I'm a big fan of Sarah Waters, although I think Fingersmith is a better book than Tipping The Velvet. I also love the Geoffrey Eugenides and Alan Hollinghurst - though again I would probably have gone for The Swimming Pool Library as being far more important in the context of its time. And also a bloody good book I should add.

It all depends whether the search is for enduring classics or for titles on the shelves now.

11:09 / 18.08.05

I think the whole enterprise is misconceived. I'm not a fan of "gay fiction" as a discreet genre either. Fine as a marketing tool - buy a book from this section of the bookstore and we'll guarantee that it was written by someone who likes it up the bum. Or writes about people who like it up the bum. Or would like it up the bum if they had ever actually had sex. Or is Andrew Davies' kind of woman.

But perhaps I am just a curmudgeon. I was very glad of the few gay bookstores there were way back in the seventies because they were the only places you could track down the few "gay" books around. Maybe the apparent ubiquity of books by gay people or featuring gay people should still be celebrated. *yawn*

Anyway, Left Hand of Darkness gets my vote too. And always happy to bang the drum for the excellent As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann.

11:30 / 18.08.05

aha! Well done OJ, thank you for that - you win the prize.

*Ariadne pulls out a box of comfits*

I suppose it's useful as an awareness exercise, though most of these books are doing very well, anyway. And not just with a gay audience - they're pretty mainstream.

11:36 / 18.08.05

But it is a different experience finding and reading the book by an author who is queer in a mainstream/genre section and being forced to look of people who 'write queer' (as opposed to people who write who are queer) in a queer-only ghetto - isn't it?

12:57 / 18.08.05

At Swim, Two Boys was absolutely superb. Highly recommended.

13:03 / 18.08.05

I'm not sure what you mean, sleaze - are you saying this is creating a queer-only ghetto and is bad?

Also, I wonder, are all of these writers gay/lesbian themselves? Or was the list made purely based on what they write?

13:49 / 18.08.05

I'm certainly pointing out that a queer ghetto is pretty far from a panacea. I probably would go so far as to say i'd prefer to find the queer in everyday culture rather than see it hived off into a 'special' area.

Which may well be a product of me living in a cosmopolitan metropolis and mark me out as a damned integrationalist.

Is it significant that I came Clive Barker as a horror writer whom I subsequently discovered was queer?

OJ

13:51 / 18.08.05

A question: Is Annie Proulx lesbian identified or is that particular book gay themed?

I'm reading some of her short stories, (Heart Songs) at the moment, and am enjoying them. But I can't say I've identified any sort of queer sensibility there. There's quite an ambivalent misanthropy/pessimistic outlook (am not sure which), but nothing that says queer to me.

Unlike, say, Patricia Highsmith, some of whose "mainstream" fiction has a pronounced outsider sensibility and repressed gay dynamic (I'm thinking most obviously of The Talented Mr Ripley ). I haven't read Carol but it would have to be pretty damn good to beat the aforementioned James Baldwin novel to the list - both were published in the 1950s, hers pseudonymously in semi-confessional mode. That alone might make me suspect that the list-compilers had a canny eye on marketing and publishers.

14:13 / 18.08.05

A question: Is Annie Proulx lesbian identified?

Not that I'm aware of, but yes, the book has ... well, I don't want to include a spoiler here but the content would let it fit the list.

It's more of a novella/ long short story than a novel - nice, but it could have been developed more, I thought.

16:33 / 18.08.05

Loomis;

What's ASTB about?

Interesting that the panel, or whatever, chose Tipping The Velvet for this list though - I'd agree that Fingersmith is the better novel, but it seems to be a book that happens to have gay characters in it, as opposed to a book that's 'about' being gay, if that's not too crass a distinction to make. The plot in Fingersmith wouldn't have worked if the two leads hadn't been a)female and b) lovers, but that aside, I wouldn't have said it has any particular points to make about lesbianism, at least in the same way that Tipping The Velvet does. In a similar vein, I'm not sure I'd consider Clive Barker a 'gay' author, so much as an author who happens to that way inclined in real life. Insofar as his sexuality doesn't seem to have all that much to do with his writing. At least apart from the stuff about bloodplay anyway.

Is Naked Lunch a 'gay' novel, or not? What does anyone think?!!

17:31 / 18.08.05

Because I'm lazy, this is from Amazon:

You may have read the hype. Irishman Jamie O'Neill was working as a London hospital porter when his 10-year labor of love, the 200,000-word manuscript of At Swim, Two Boys, written on a laptop during quiet patches at work, was suddenly snapped up for a hefty six-figure advance. For once, the book fully deserves the hype.

In the spring of 1915, Jim Mack and "the Doyler," two Dublin boys, make a pact to swim to an island in Dublin Bay the following Easter. By the time they do, Dublin has been consumed by the Easter Uprising, and the boys' friendship has blossomed into love--a love that will in time be overtaken by tragedy.

I thought the characters were drawn extremely well, and the blending of the boys' story with the broader issues surrounding the Easter Uprising and Irish republicanism of the time was handled skilfully.

Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown

01:48 / 19.08.05

I'd call the sexuality of Barker's books "queer" in the conventional sense of the word, meaning "odd". Characters in his books seem to very seldomly have normal sex. The sex always seems to be part of a metaphor or a spiritual/psychological development for the character.

Gentle and Pie'o'Pah in "Imajica" is one good example of this (and Pie has possibly one of the most disturbingly described sex organs I've ever read about...).

The two most homoerotic scenes I've read in Barker (or at least remember reading), were the aforementioned scene from "Imajica", and the scene in "Cold Heart Canyon" (or whatever it was called, its been a while) when the movie star has sex with a woman while another man does her from behind (...sorry, I'm tired and my eloquence is flagging...my apologies for that bit of vulgarity).

Now, mind that I haven't read a Barker novel in years. And I don't have them with me to index specific scenes. So its VERY possible that I'm totally wrong here. Please, feel free to point it out of I'm terribly mistaken.

Though...I DO recall that in the preface to one of his books Barker describes how a guy he was seeing at one point went to a Halloween party in this full, red, latex gargoyle/demon outfit. The way Barker describes it makes it sound like one of the coolest Halloween costumes of all time.

Tryphena Absent

02:08 / 19.08.05

I appreciate that there are some good books on the list but the only two that I've actually read are Oranges are not the only fruit and Calendar Girl, neither of which I particularly like. I'll probably vote for something that's not on that list but I might have to do some re-reads first.

Is it good to have 'gay' fiction set apart from, you know, just fiction? Is it a genre you enjoy?

I prefer to have gay fiction set apart and included on the fiction shelves in the same store. Partly because I don't think novels should have a limited readership- so people should be able to happen upon them while browsing the general fiction shelves but set apart because sometimes I might want to buy a coming out story or a novel that focuses on a homosexual character and that can be difficult to find in a shop that only mixes those books in.

It is a genre I enjoy (although the historical stuff gets on my nerves something chronic), I went through a phase of reading romantic lesbian fiction (by that I mean general stories about love affairs, so pretty average fiction centred around gay characters rather than 'romance' novels) and they were generally pretty fun and quite psychological.

06:25 / 19.08.05

I'm a little uncomfortable with the concept of gay fiction on many levels. However, I'd strongly recommend (because I've read it) the Eugenides, Middlesex, from that list, which is fabulous. For those of you who don't know the gist, it's a story about the life of a young girl who essentially isn't; ze's actually a hermaphrodite. Some beautifully written passages, and it uses its length well. Certainly better than The Virgin Suicides.

06:32 / 19.08.05

I prefer to have gay fiction set apart and included on the fiction shelves in the same store.

But we both know this rarely happens. Going back to comics I have frequently seen Maus in the Sci-Fi section at Waterstone's (the default place for comics apparently, a situation evidently decided by people who never read them) but not in the biography/history sections. Jimmy Corrigan often ends up in the main fiction section, probably by virtue of the fact of it winning the Guardian first book award... however, in places where it is shelved under misc. fiction it is not also filed under graphic novels. Most egregious of all however was when I discovered staff in one Waterstone's planning to shelve Marjane Satrapi's Embroidery, a sort of Vagina monologues featuring the tales of Iranian women in the form of a graphic novel, in the Arts and Crafts section based entirely on its title...

OJ

09:57 / 19.08.05

I'm a little uncomfortable with the concept of gay fiction on many levels.

What levels would those be? I was just about to make a couple of points when I read this. Firstly and almost in passing that "queer" and "gay" are not interchangeable terms. But I'm not up enough on my queer theory of late to dash off a few lines about this. Anyone else who'd like to, go ahead.

Secondly, and slightly more simply I think that gay fiction if we want to call it that for now, should and has moved on from a very simplistic "awareness, visibility, liberation" stage. Gay people are all over popular culture like a rash, sometimes reinforcing all sorts of stereotypes (see anyone who's ever been on Big Brother). So I don't think that the fact that a book has gay protagonists, like the Annie Proulx novel, is the great step forward it once was.

By that logic Sugar Rush, (Julie Burchill) is better gay fiction than Hotel World by Ali Smith. Is it?

Tryphena Absent

13:40 / 19.08.05

But we both know this rarely happens

That's ignorance of the book though...

Tryphena Absent

13:41 / 19.08.05

I'm a little uncomfortable with the concept of gay fiction on many levels.

I'd like to know why you're uncomfortable with the concept too.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

14:35 / 19.08.05

"Brokeback Mountain" is actually a short story. Really bloody good story, as well. And I seem to recall that Proulx -is- a lesbian, but I might have misheard that.

I'm up for not being put in the "gay fiction" section (or would it all be stuck together as "queer fiction?" "Middlesex" isn't "gay" so much as "queer"), simply because you're more likely to get different kinds of readers coming to find your books. And, as said above, there is the question of "Is this author LGBT?" versus "Is this book about LGBT?" When one first comes out, unless one finds a particularly comfortable store to go to the queer section, one still might not be (and even while in the closet) comfortable standing around in front of the queer section trying to look like they're not looking. As opposed to maybe researching some queer authors and going to look in Fiction.

I can certainly see a Queer -theory- section, but not neccesarily a seperate fiction section.

And I hated "A Home at the End of the World."

Our Lady Has Left the Building

16:24 / 19.08.05

Middlesex.

Although I can only assume that it's been put on the list by someone who hasn't read it, as there's no gay stuff in it at all, really. I suppose we'll have to wait for the proper website to go up rather than rely on lazy Guardian journos, as it's a Pride related thing maybe it's lesbigay + trans writing...

Otherwise, I can only remember that I read 'Swimming Pool Library' around ten years ago and thought it terribly boring, but I can't remember why and the book went to Oxfam, so that's not much help.

21:47 / 19.08.05

That's ignorance of the book though...

No, I think it is more booksellers' rather dogmatic tendency to put each book in one place only. It would be possible to put, say, Maus in the biography, history and graphic novel sections, but in practice all the copies in the store would end up in just one of those locations. I have a feeling that in most bookshops the same would hold true for Lit of Queer Origin (LiQuOr?)...

Tryphena Absent

23:39 / 19.08.05

Well I'm not sure I agree with you- how many people working in bookstores are actually aware of the content of Maus? You can't look at every book you shelve and what you're describing isn't the policy of every chain bookshop... although most of them do seem to follow the rule. However your description of what happened with Embroideries certainly suggests a complete ignorance of the content of the book.

Calendar Girl is in the general fiction section of Waterstones in Piccadilly by the way. I find this distinctly annoying because it's a thriller. It's like someone said, hmm, lesbian crime, let's stick it (literally) inbetween the two categories in the general fiction area.

--

04:07 / 20.08.05

Dennis Cooper's "The Sluts" and "Frisk"... Maybe "Closer" also.

Anything by Jean Genet. And James Robert Baker.

07:06 / 20.08.05

To an extent, it doesn't really matter if the bookseller knows anything about their book or not (leaving the embroideries example aside for a moment) - even if it has one of those little descriptors on the back of a book saying that it is 'fiction/thriller' the bookseller then picks one of the applicable shelf areas (either fiction or thiller) and then shelves *all* the copies of that book there.

By the by, where would you shelve thillers in lieu of an actual thrillers section? in crime? or general fiction?