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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

"The Line of Beauty" - is it "gay fiction" or beyond labels?

00:55 / 26.02.06

As I was reading The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, I was noticing that quite often, this novel is not about being homosexual, in that it could be considered gay fiction. The main character, Nick Guest, an eternal houseguest in the home of a Tory MP, is homosexual, but it's very - how shall I say it? - matter of fact. It's just simply a fact of the character; it's not a "OMG, I'm gay and you should notice this".

I read somewhere that Hollinghurst wanted to write about gay people without the novel being labelled "gay fiction". I think he is tremendously successful with The Line of Beauty. I'm also fairly certain Hollinghurst is one of the best phrase-turners to put fingers to keyboard.

Anybody else read this 2004 winner of the Man Booker Prize? Or any of his other novels (which I have not)?

06:39 / 26.02.06

You may find this previous The Line of Beauty thread interesting.

06:48 / 26.02.06

And this thread on the utility of the "Gay Fiction" epithet, while I'm at it.

09:15 / 26.02.06

matthesis, I'd like you to consider amending your thread title, please - while I realise that your use of 'teh gays' was not intended to be taken as straight, I don't think it's appropriate for it to be used in this context - particularly in a thread title. Hope that's OK.

15:51 / 26.02.06

I guess we're put in the position of having to define 'gay fiction' here, because I'd say that a fair amount of writing which has acquired this label also isn't saying, "OMG, I'm gay, and you should notice this". In fact, I think I'd be hard pushed to think of a piece of fiction whose primary message is "I'm gay, look at me". Does such a novel exist?

Isn't it an artefact of an author being of a minority subset within the mainstream that if he writes straightforwardly, drawing upon his own experiences, he runs the risk of being pigeonholed as 'gay fiction' or 'black fiction' or 'Asian fiction' or whatever - the inference being, it's either attention-seeking on the author's part (because, by failing to write about straight white people, he's saying, "look at meee") and/or of interest only to the minority group in question?

There are, for example, plenty of 'classic' novels featuring murder, but they're generally not sequestered under some sort of 'murder fiction' label or considered to be of interest only to those who've experienced murder.

What's 'gay fiction' in this context, and how does it necessarily differ from 'classic fiction'?

15:54 / 26.02.06

I suppose one might pose the question: is Romeo and Juliet or Madame Bovary or Lady Chatterley's Lover 'straight fiction', about 'being heterosexual'? Does the fact that they're rarely, if ever, been labelled 'straight fiction' tell us anything, in and of itself?

23:44 / 26.02.06

That's what I was trying to say, I suppose. I'm going to hunt for it, but I think I read an interview with Hollinghurst that said as much. He found it frustrating that any novel featuring a cast of gay characters was pigeonholed and labeled "gay fiction".

00:10 / 27.02.06

Here's something I "dug" up in my search:

"When my first book came out, it was credited with breaking out of the ghetto of gay fiction and appealing to a wider readership. I had hoped that the question of The Line of Beauty being a gay novel would become less important."
(Amazon interview here)

Here's something else. I was thinking about this idea of "gay fiction" and while I was searching for Hollinghurst on Amazon, this came up:

Those were the Listmania results on the side of the screen when searching for Alan Hollinghurst.
(I don't represent this as "evidence"; it's simply an observation on Amazon)

All Acting Regiment

03:40 / 27.02.06

I think the fact that gay writers are now allowed to write as honestly and openly as they wish to about the sexuality, or at least, more so than in the past, should be celebrated. Granted there's still some way to go, but at one time books like this just wouldn't have been published, be it through official censorship or through the more insiduous network of prejudices in the industry. I dunno how that plays on whether or not "gay fiction" is a useful term, though.

06:01 / 27.02.06

I've read that Hollinghurst interview, and I'm aware that Amazon (as well as many bookshops generally) have a 'gay fiction' section. I imagine it must be somewhat frustrating for an author to find his work confined to such a narrow subset. What makes (Amazon, etc. label something as) 'gay fiction'? The fact that some or all of the characters are gay? The (perceived) sexuality of the author?

Whisky Priestess

15:12 / 27.02.06

It seems to me that the best solution to this vexed genre question would be to ensure that those books which (are perceived to) cross over genre divides are always stocked both in the relevant genre section and under General Fiction, so that nobody misses out on their creamy goodness. Thus 4 copies of TLOB in Gay Fiction, 8 in General, or whatever.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, for example, would therefore be stocked under Science Fiction (and possibly Historical Fiction, if such a section exists) as well as General - but of course because it's a literary bestseller, it's always under General - it can't possibly be SF! Grr.

02:08 / 02.03.06

My local Chapters, a book megastore, has no gay fiction section whatsoever. It has an erotica section, a womyn's studies section, an African-American studius section, a New Age section, and a sports section the size of most used bookstores, but NO gay fiction section. It pisses me off.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

14:22 / 02.03.06

The Chapters over where I live has a queer theory/studies section, but no gay fiction section. Mostly everything along those lines is in General Fiction. But from my understanding, there's no womyn's et al. either, so that's fine with me. The only delinations are mostly in the theory and philosophy sections.

Would you consider Jeanette Winterson as gay fiction? She certainly foregrounds the "lesbian content" in many of her books, but at other times completely transcends it (thinking of Written on the Body, where the narrator's gender is irrelevant).

I tend to find the whole question a bit strange, not because you asked it, but because - I don't know. The Gay Ghetto exists and I certainly don't want my stuff to be ghettoized like that (recently I showed a friend of mine one of my latest stories and he declared it my awakening into heterosexual fiction, which confused me because of all those other stories I've written with straight characters - apparently I was writing "gay fiction" even when everyone in the cast of certain stories were straight / sexually-irrelevant)

Incidentally, perhaps "queer fiction" is more apropros? And where do you put Michael Chabon's stuff - he's a straight man who writes very well developed homosexual characters.

20:27 / 02.03.06

Or Capote's In Cold Blood: gay writer, not-gay-ghettoised novel? Or, for that matter, every writer whose sexuality is not a matter of public record? Again, we're forced to scrabble around in an attempt to define 'gay fiction' or even 'queer fiction'.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

00:25 / 03.03.06

Especially given you could argue that all fiction should be queer in some way, even if it's not likes-it-up-the-bum queer.

04:46 / 03.03.06

Ganesh, you seem dismissive of this discussion.... Is it because you have tread this ground before in another thread, or are you just dismissive of any discussion of "niche" fiction?

05:37 / 03.03.06

Neither. I don't think I'm being especially dismissive; rather, I'm questioning what I see as a central (flawed) assumption underpinning the idea of 'gay fiction', that it's somehow sufficiently different from the rest of fiction to merit a specific subgrouping/labelling.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

21:59 / 03.03.06

The only suitable reason I can imagine to actually split things off into "queer fiction" would be for young queer kids having difficulty locking onto something specifically geared towards them when they're still trying to organize / construct / discover their identities. But even then I'm not sure if it's a positive thing to encourage them to ghettoize themselves. Although the ghetto issue seems to occur rather naturally, but that might be a fallacy.

Marketing is such a big factor in this - if you market it as gay fiction you're opening yourself up to a niche of the population and (in my opinion, sadly) going to increase their chances of buying it. But I'd argue you always close yourself off from the (to generalize) middle-class, middle-aged book club set (an example of which once said, "Oh, but I don't think we'd like that at all," when I tried to communicate to her why Middlesex would be a really good book for discussion). I like to think marketing without the label encourages more people to read books which are still "queer" but maybe escape some of the ghetto stigma.

23:20 / 03.03.06

In the seventies and even eighties, it could be hard for queers to get their work published. Before that, such as Radclyffe Hall and Forster and Woolf and others had to fight to write honestly about their experience of love and sex. We're not quite somewhere over the rainbow yet but if someone can see how to make a quid from selling it, they would sell The Sex Diaries of Ganesh and Xoc (Illustrated) in Borders nowadays. It would be a slim volume but a real page turner.

That's why I have a problem with a Gay / Queer Fiction niche. It is a symptom of our success in colonising the mainstream that we don't need the special treatment any more. Maybe the same will come true in other areas in time. Gay theatre, gay cinema, gay gyms, gay sitcom, gay zoos will all be just like the duller, workaday ones.

I think it's time all those shelves devoted to copies of stuff you can find in other places in the bookstore anyway were devoted to books in other languages. English bookstores are the most monoglot in the world. Well, after American ones.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

14:31 / 07.03.06

I'm not sure that heavy petting in leopard print constitutes a gay zoo.

Canadian bookstores generally have a French section but I can't think off the top of my head about other languages as well, mostly because I don't really go looking them.

Library's got a fairly expansive collection in other languages, actually, but it tends to be spread out between all the branches; you go to one if you want books in Chinese but all the Arabic stuff's somewhere else. This is mostly due to the general local populace around a branch and also the buying habits of the branch head librarians...

15:33 / 07.03.06

I don't if there are any official guidelines at say Waterstones about this (I'd prefer to think not actually) but gay fiction seems to require both gay themes and characters and an openly gay author to qualify. So, for example, you'd be hard-pressed to find something like Brett Easton Ellis' 'The Rules Of Attraction' in a gay fiction section, presumably because a)Ellis is usually pretty vague about his sexuality in interviews, and b)perhaps more importantly, he's not generally perceived as a gay writer, even though the central relationship in 'The Rules Of Atraction' is, arguably anyway, a homosexual one. And on the other hand, Oscar Wilde never usually qualifies either, because even though he's pretty much universally considered to be a gay icon, his work presumably doesn't deal, at least overtly anyway, with sufficiently gay themes.

It's not the end of the world certainly, but it does look a bit silly when it's written down like that.

Also, competition for bookshop space being what it is, it seems a bit much for authors like Alan Hollinghust and Sarah Waters to be enjoying their current dual status, whereby you can often find their work in both gay and general sections - I don't know if gay fiction as a classification should be abandoned altogether, but it seems slightly unsatisfactory as administered at the moment.