In an interview, Christopher Bram, a novelist and author of Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, describes the tension that animates much of his work:
One theme that appears again and again is the conflict between big love and little love. The phrase was coined by my friend Mary Gentile, who went to college with me and has been one of my best readers and toughest critics. Mary recognized early that my characters are often torn between their love for something personal and immediate and love for something larger and more difficult. In Surprising Myself, Joel finds himself divided between love of sex and self and his love of his partner, Corey. In Gossip, Ralph is torn between political loyalties and his affection for a closeted Republican. And so on. Sometimes the larger love is just plain wrong, as in Hold Tight, where Hank Fayette, a white sailor from Texas, has no trouble accepting his homosexuality but is angrily confused when he falls in love with a black man, the smart-mouthed Juke. He feels his very identity as a white man is being thrown into doubt.
I’m not sure where this pattern originated in my work. It might come from my experience as a gay person: all of us must learn to choose between what we were taught to feel and what we really feel. Or maybe I just read too much George Eliot in college.
How he writes about sex:
Sex is as important as laughter for me in storytelling. Well, it’s another part of my realism. Sex is not just a sensuous act, but an expressive act, a dramatic act. People reveal a lot about themselves in bed. Or they can anyway. When it’s just sex, I usually skip over the act and say something like, “Afterwards they smoked cigarettes.” But when something in addition to lust is being expressed or worked out, I write a scene. For example, the first real sex scene in Surprising Myself isn’t until fifty or so pages in, when Joel and Corey have been together for three years. They have all these other bonds and memories and emotions, which crowd into bed with them. And Joel finds himself fantasizing about all the guys he didn’t sleep with. He is both confused and excited.
You’re right; people rarely talk about the sex in my novels, but I suspect that’s because so much else is going on. The sex is blended with the rest of life. In novels by, say, Edmund White or Alan Hollinghurst, there’s often not much else going on except sex, so readers really notice it.
The Dish 