Out of the Closet and Off the Shelf
By DAVID LEAVITT
.
When I learned that after more than 30 years in business, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York -- which claimed to be the world's first gay and lesbian bookshop -- was supposed to close its doors, the news provoked a pang of nostalgia. In 1983, I worked there for exactly one day. I was six months out of college, wanted to be a writer, had recently come out, and needed a part-time job. The Oscar Wilde seemed like a good fit.
I remember it as a cozy, crowded, rather melancholy place. After giving me a brief tour, its owner, Craig Rodwell, sat me down at the front desk, showed me how to operate the cash register and told me what he considered to be the cardinal rule of the place: to say hello to every customer who came in. There were people in the world for whom just stepping across the threshold of a gay bookstore required courage, and he wanted to make them feel welcome, not intimidated.
That day I was on probation. Depending on how I did, I might be offered a permanent position. So for seven hours I sat behind the cash register, rang up purchases, said, time and again, ''Hello,'' and, when there were no customers, had a look at the stock. What made a book suitable for the Oscar Wilde? In the lesbian fiction section there was Rita Mae Brown's novel ''Rubyfruit Jungle'' (1973), which made sense: Brown's tale of a girl's sexual coming-of-age in the Deep South was the epitome of the lesbian novel. Yet there was not a copy of ''A Compass Error'' (1969), by Sybille Bedford, with its straightforward account of love and betrayal among women during World War II.
Was this, I wondered, because Bedford, unlike Brown, was not openly lesbian? Did a writer have to declare his or her homosexuality publicly to be sold at the Oscar Wilde? If so, this might explain why there were no copies of John Cheever's ''Falconer'' -- in which the hero, after murdering his brother, undergoes a sort of spiritual and carnal reawakening in prison -- in the gay men's fiction section alongside Andrew Holleran's ''Dancer From the Dance'' and Larry Kramer's ''Faggots,'' both by self-identified urban gay authors. Yet there were plenty of copies of Patricia Nell Warren's ''Front Runner'' -- a classic of the era. Warren was not only straight, she was a woman. So why not Cheever?
I didn't get the job -- I suspect because I complained to Craig, too loudly, about books not stocked, delivering a lecture on the dangers of confusing fiction with propaganda. Who wants to be lectured? Or maybe the fatal moment came when he asked about my ''movement experience,'' and I stumbled. I thought he was talking about dance. When dusk fell, he paid me, gave me a don't-call-us-we'll-call-you smile, and showed me to the door. Since then, I've spent a lot of time in gay bookshops -- sometimes as an author giving readings, sometimes as a customer -- and my attitude remains largely what it was the day I worked at one: gratitude giving way to confusion and then annoyance.
Although the Oscar Wilde might have been the first self-proclaimed gay bookshop, the idea dates from as early as 1913, when the expatriate American writer Edward Prime-Stevenson prefaced a volume of stories, ''Her Enemy, Some Friends and Other Personages,'' with this notice: ''The extremely limited edition of this volume will restrict its being obtainable except by addressing certain Continental booksellers: including the 'Librairie Kundig,' No. 11, Corraterie, Geneva, Switzerland; H. Jaffe, No. 54, Briennerstrasse, Munich, Bavaria; Successori B. Seeber, No. 20, Via Tornabuoni, Florence, Italy.'' In ''Out of the Sun,'' one of the stories, Prime-Stevenson described a library of homosexually-themed books ''crowded into a few lower shelves, as if they sought to avoid other literary society, to keep themselves to themselves, to shun all unsympathetic observation.''
Segregation and discretion were likewise the watchwords of the first North American gay bookshops, most of them literal closets, stuffy, dark and designed so that the interiors could not be seen from the street. Though visibility might be the goal of the gay liberation movement (''we're here, we're queer, get used to it''), it ran contrary to the exigencies of the gay bookshop -- chiefly to provide a safe space for people to browse without worrying about ''unsympathetic observation.'' One, in Montreal, blocked its display windows with fabric-covered screens, giving it the look of a porn shop. To some extent it was: porn was the bread and butter of the gay bookshops, with the result that visiting writers like me often ended up giving their readings at lecterns set up in front of racks filled with VHS tapes and bottles of lubricant. Bills had to be paid, and the porn classic ''Like a Horse'' sold better than the literary classic ''A Boy's Own Story.''
OF course, all this changed. Soon the stores themselves started, as it were, to come out of the closet, exposing the books (and customers) inside to the bracing light of day. These were gestures of liberation, but they also signaled the decline of gay bookshops, and though, at the 11th hour, a benefactor stepped in to keep the Oscar Wilde from closing , most of its kind soon went out of business. The Internet assumed whatever functions the shops once had as ''community resources,'' while the advent of the chains meant that the very books that had been mostly available in gay bookshops could now be found anywhere. The chain ethos was to smother by emulation, and so Borders (but not Barnes & Noble), as if in homage to the shops it had helped shut down, set up gay men's fiction areas that often were as striking for what wasn't in them as for what was. On a recent expedition I found my books on the gay men's fiction shelf, along with Edmund White's and Alan Hollinghurst's. But Michael Cunningham's and Colm Toibin's were shelved under general fiction, while James Baldwin's were under African-American fiction. Even ''Giovanni's Room'' -- whose heroes, though gay, are white -- was counted African-American fiction.
There is a larger problem, however. A gay bookshop (or a gay shelf in a general bookshop) implies that there is such a thing as a gay book. When I started writing, a gay novel, at least, was fairly easy to define. In it the hero or heroine's homosexuality stood by necessity at the dramatic center of the plot. More than that, such a novel presumed that any gay person's homosexuality stood at the center of the plot; that in the paper-rock-scissors game of identity, gay was always the rock. According to this definition, E. M. Forster's ''Maurice'' was probably the first gay novel, in that its account of a young man's gradual awakening to his own homosexuality, his initiation into sex and love, and his subsequent decision to live with his lover outside society rather than submit to its orthodoxies, presupposed that his homosexuality was intrinsic to his very being.
To bring out such a novel -- especially in the first half of the 20th century -- required courage Forster lacked; though ''Maurice'' was written in 1914, he did not allow it to be published until after his death in 1970. By then so many gay novels had appeared that critics failed to appreciate its originality and force. Those novels reflected the preoccupations of an era in which, in the Anglo-Saxon world in particular, the idea of homosexuality as an identity was supplanting an older conception of homosexuality as merely a behavior or phase, which a person would eventually have to outgrow or renounce -- if, that is, he didn't kill himself first. In such books, homosexuality was a Very Big Deal, and had to be treated as such if it was to be mentioned at all.
Even before the publication of ''Maurice,'' however, books had started appearing that, though they dealt explicitly with homosexuality, challenged this definition of the gay novel. Bedford's novel, ''A Compass Error,'' was exemplary, insofar as its heroine, though she sleeps with other women, never seems to consider her desire to sleep with other women to be in and of itself worth worrying about. (The trouble is the woman she chooses to sleep with.) Novels and stories by gay writers that didn't fit the mold were tricky to categorize, as were those by straight writers (William Trevor's story ''Torridge,'' for instance) that did. Nor did it help matters that so many gay writers bristled at the label ''gay writer,'' which they feared might lead to their work being relegated to the contemporary equivalent of the lower shelves in Prime-Stevenson's library.
Attitudes were changing faster than habits. As they did, the gay novel, along with the gay bookstore, was becoming obsolete. A digging in of heels almost always heralds imminent obsolescence, and now, thanks in great part to the efforts of the men and women who opened the first gay bookshops, a new generation is coming of age for whom the whole matter of homosexuality is just one of a host of different ways of being. When I was an undergraduate and took fiction workshops, I brought stories with gay characters into class only with the greatest reluctance: I feared the intolerance of my peers -- and lived it. (''Not being a ho-mo-sexual myself, I just can't relate to this.'') Today even my straight students at the University of Florida put gay and lesbian characters into their stories without blinking. Why shouldn't they? After all, when Ellen came out, some of these kids were 10.
It's as if fatigue has set in where the gay novel is concerned, with the result that even Edmund White, as close to a doyen as the American gay novel has ever had, two years ago published a book (''Fanny: A Fiction'') in which there are virtually no gay characters, and is now writing a novel about Stephen Crane.
More and more, gay fiction is giving way to post-gay fiction: novels and stories whose authors, rather than making a character's homosexuality the fulcrum on which the plot turns, either take it for granted, look at it as part of something larger or ignore it altogether. Good examples of post-gay fiction include the stories of Allan Gurganus, Adam Haslett, J. T. LeRoy and Brian Leung. Then there is the work of A. M. Homes, a woman who writes brilliantly about gay adolescents, and the novels of Sarah Waters, in which lesbian protagonists thrive in drawing rooms and back alleys of a Victorian England in which they were not supposed even to exist. In most of these works being gay is not central; these are just people living their lives.
The difference between gay and post-gay might best be epitomized by two of the five finalists for this year's Booker Prize, "The Master", by Colm Toibin, and "The line of Beauty", by Alan Hollinghurst, which won. ''The Master'' is very much an old-fashioned gay novel, consisting, as a friend put it, of ''chapter after chapter in which Henry James doesn't know what we all already know he doesn't know.'' The hero of ''The Line of Beauty'' knows very well that he is gay, but the story focuses more on his experiences than on his struggles to define himself. To its credit, ''The Line of Beauty'' is about much more than being gay in London in the 1980's; it is about the world of that time, its political and moral geography, and therefore about history and what it means to be human, and to live in that world.
Once it was revolutionary to publish a gay novel, or open a gay bookshop, but now the time may be upon us when the revolutionary thing to do is to retire the category altogether. I'm for stepping into the post-gay future -- which is why, every time I go into a Borders, I move a few books from the gay fiction shelf to the general fiction section, restoring them to their rightful place in the alphabetical and promiscuous flow of literature
By DAVID LEAVITT
.
When I learned that after more than 30 years in business, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York -- which claimed to be the world's first gay and lesbian bookshop -- was supposed to close its doors, the news provoked a pang of nostalgia. In 1983, I worked there for exactly one day. I was six months out of college, wanted to be a writer, had recently come out, and needed a part-time job. The Oscar Wilde seemed like a good fit.
I remember it as a cozy, crowded, rather melancholy place. After giving me a brief tour, its owner, Craig Rodwell, sat me down at the front desk, showed me how to operate the cash register and told me what he considered to be the cardinal rule of the place: to say hello to every customer who came in. There were people in the world for whom just stepping across the threshold of a gay bookstore required courage, and he wanted to make them feel welcome, not intimidated.
That day I was on probation. Depending on how I did, I might be offered a permanent position. So for seven hours I sat behind the cash register, rang up purchases, said, time and again, ''Hello,'' and, when there were no customers, had a look at the stock. What made a book suitable for the Oscar Wilde? In the lesbian fiction section there was Rita Mae Brown's novel ''Rubyfruit Jungle'' (1973), which made sense: Brown's tale of a girl's sexual coming-of-age in the Deep South was the epitome of the lesbian novel. Yet there was not a copy of ''A Compass Error'' (1969), by Sybille Bedford, with its straightforward account of love and betrayal among women during World War II.
Was this, I wondered, because Bedford, unlike Brown, was not openly lesbian? Did a writer have to declare his or her homosexuality publicly to be sold at the Oscar Wilde? If so, this might explain why there were no copies of John Cheever's ''Falconer'' -- in which the hero, after murdering his brother, undergoes a sort of spiritual and carnal reawakening in prison -- in the gay men's fiction section alongside Andrew Holleran's ''Dancer From the Dance'' and Larry Kramer's ''Faggots,'' both by self-identified urban gay authors. Yet there were plenty of copies of Patricia Nell Warren's ''Front Runner'' -- a classic of the era. Warren was not only straight, she was a woman. So why not Cheever?
I didn't get the job -- I suspect because I complained to Craig, too loudly, about books not stocked, delivering a lecture on the dangers of confusing fiction with propaganda. Who wants to be lectured? Or maybe the fatal moment came when he asked about my ''movement experience,'' and I stumbled. I thought he was talking about dance. When dusk fell, he paid me, gave me a don't-call-us-we'll-call-you smile, and showed me to the door. Since then, I've spent a lot of time in gay bookshops -- sometimes as an author giving readings, sometimes as a customer -- and my attitude remains largely what it was the day I worked at one: gratitude giving way to confusion and then annoyance.
Although the Oscar Wilde might have been the first self-proclaimed gay bookshop, the idea dates from as early as 1913, when the expatriate American writer Edward Prime-Stevenson prefaced a volume of stories, ''Her Enemy, Some Friends and Other Personages,'' with this notice: ''The extremely limited edition of this volume will restrict its being obtainable except by addressing certain Continental booksellers: including the 'Librairie Kundig,' No. 11, Corraterie, Geneva, Switzerland; H. Jaffe, No. 54, Briennerstrasse, Munich, Bavaria; Successori B. Seeber, No. 20, Via Tornabuoni, Florence, Italy.'' In ''Out of the Sun,'' one of the stories, Prime-Stevenson described a library of homosexually-themed books ''crowded into a few lower shelves, as if they sought to avoid other literary society, to keep themselves to themselves, to shun all unsympathetic observation.''
Segregation and discretion were likewise the watchwords of the first North American gay bookshops, most of them literal closets, stuffy, dark and designed so that the interiors could not be seen from the street. Though visibility might be the goal of the gay liberation movement (''we're here, we're queer, get used to it''), it ran contrary to the exigencies of the gay bookshop -- chiefly to provide a safe space for people to browse without worrying about ''unsympathetic observation.'' One, in Montreal, blocked its display windows with fabric-covered screens, giving it the look of a porn shop. To some extent it was: porn was the bread and butter of the gay bookshops, with the result that visiting writers like me often ended up giving their readings at lecterns set up in front of racks filled with VHS tapes and bottles of lubricant. Bills had to be paid, and the porn classic ''Like a Horse'' sold better than the literary classic ''A Boy's Own Story.''
OF course, all this changed. Soon the stores themselves started, as it were, to come out of the closet, exposing the books (and customers) inside to the bracing light of day. These were gestures of liberation, but they also signaled the decline of gay bookshops, and though, at the 11th hour, a benefactor stepped in to keep the Oscar Wilde from closing , most of its kind soon went out of business. The Internet assumed whatever functions the shops once had as ''community resources,'' while the advent of the chains meant that the very books that had been mostly available in gay bookshops could now be found anywhere. The chain ethos was to smother by emulation, and so Borders (but not Barnes & Noble), as if in homage to the shops it had helped shut down, set up gay men's fiction areas that often were as striking for what wasn't in them as for what was. On a recent expedition I found my books on the gay men's fiction shelf, along with Edmund White's and Alan Hollinghurst's. But Michael Cunningham's and Colm Toibin's were shelved under general fiction, while James Baldwin's were under African-American fiction. Even ''Giovanni's Room'' -- whose heroes, though gay, are white -- was counted African-American fiction.
There is a larger problem, however. A gay bookshop (or a gay shelf in a general bookshop) implies that there is such a thing as a gay book. When I started writing, a gay novel, at least, was fairly easy to define. In it the hero or heroine's homosexuality stood by necessity at the dramatic center of the plot. More than that, such a novel presumed that any gay person's homosexuality stood at the center of the plot; that in the paper-rock-scissors game of identity, gay was always the rock. According to this definition, E. M. Forster's ''Maurice'' was probably the first gay novel, in that its account of a young man's gradual awakening to his own homosexuality, his initiation into sex and love, and his subsequent decision to live with his lover outside society rather than submit to its orthodoxies, presupposed that his homosexuality was intrinsic to his very being.
To bring out such a novel -- especially in the first half of the 20th century -- required courage Forster lacked; though ''Maurice'' was written in 1914, he did not allow it to be published until after his death in 1970. By then so many gay novels had appeared that critics failed to appreciate its originality and force. Those novels reflected the preoccupations of an era in which, in the Anglo-Saxon world in particular, the idea of homosexuality as an identity was supplanting an older conception of homosexuality as merely a behavior or phase, which a person would eventually have to outgrow or renounce -- if, that is, he didn't kill himself first. In such books, homosexuality was a Very Big Deal, and had to be treated as such if it was to be mentioned at all.
Even before the publication of ''Maurice,'' however, books had started appearing that, though they dealt explicitly with homosexuality, challenged this definition of the gay novel. Bedford's novel, ''A Compass Error,'' was exemplary, insofar as its heroine, though she sleeps with other women, never seems to consider her desire to sleep with other women to be in and of itself worth worrying about. (The trouble is the woman she chooses to sleep with.) Novels and stories by gay writers that didn't fit the mold were tricky to categorize, as were those by straight writers (William Trevor's story ''Torridge,'' for instance) that did. Nor did it help matters that so many gay writers bristled at the label ''gay writer,'' which they feared might lead to their work being relegated to the contemporary equivalent of the lower shelves in Prime-Stevenson's library.
Attitudes were changing faster than habits. As they did, the gay novel, along with the gay bookstore, was becoming obsolete. A digging in of heels almost always heralds imminent obsolescence, and now, thanks in great part to the efforts of the men and women who opened the first gay bookshops, a new generation is coming of age for whom the whole matter of homosexuality is just one of a host of different ways of being. When I was an undergraduate and took fiction workshops, I brought stories with gay characters into class only with the greatest reluctance: I feared the intolerance of my peers -- and lived it. (''Not being a ho-mo-sexual myself, I just can't relate to this.'') Today even my straight students at the University of Florida put gay and lesbian characters into their stories without blinking. Why shouldn't they? After all, when Ellen came out, some of these kids were 10.
It's as if fatigue has set in where the gay novel is concerned, with the result that even Edmund White, as close to a doyen as the American gay novel has ever had, two years ago published a book (''Fanny: A Fiction'') in which there are virtually no gay characters, and is now writing a novel about Stephen Crane.
More and more, gay fiction is giving way to post-gay fiction: novels and stories whose authors, rather than making a character's homosexuality the fulcrum on which the plot turns, either take it for granted, look at it as part of something larger or ignore it altogether. Good examples of post-gay fiction include the stories of Allan Gurganus, Adam Haslett, J. T. LeRoy and Brian Leung. Then there is the work of A. M. Homes, a woman who writes brilliantly about gay adolescents, and the novels of Sarah Waters, in which lesbian protagonists thrive in drawing rooms and back alleys of a Victorian England in which they were not supposed even to exist. In most of these works being gay is not central; these are just people living their lives.
The difference between gay and post-gay might best be epitomized by two of the five finalists for this year's Booker Prize, "The Master", by Colm Toibin, and "The line of Beauty", by Alan Hollinghurst, which won. ''The Master'' is very much an old-fashioned gay novel, consisting, as a friend put it, of ''chapter after chapter in which Henry James doesn't know what we all already know he doesn't know.'' The hero of ''The Line of Beauty'' knows very well that he is gay, but the story focuses more on his experiences than on his struggles to define himself. To its credit, ''The Line of Beauty'' is about much more than being gay in London in the 1980's; it is about the world of that time, its political and moral geography, and therefore about history and what it means to be human, and to live in that world.
Once it was revolutionary to publish a gay novel, or open a gay bookshop, but now the time may be upon us when the revolutionary thing to do is to retire the category altogether. I'm for stepping into the post-gay future -- which is why, every time I go into a Borders, I move a few books from the gay fiction shelf to the general fiction section, restoring them to their rightful place in the alphabetical and promiscuous flow of literature
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