Caleb Crain ponders the reasons why, after gay literary figures broke into the mainstream in the 1980s, their work has been a harder sell of late:
Gay novels do sell, and gay people do buy novels. But capitalism is a numbers game. Self-identifying homosexuals are not an enormous population, and, in general, they don’t buy literary fiction about themselves at a rate that would compensate for their small numbers. It can’t have helped that AIDS decimated the generation of gay men who, in the nineties, would have been in their forties, fifties, and sixties—prime ages for reading and buying books. It might also be the case that AIDS brought the attention of straights to gay voices in the eighties and early nineties, according to the principle that John of Gaunt set forth in “Richard II”—“O, but they say the tongues of dying men / Enforce attention like deep harmony”—and that interest in the gay novel faded in tandem with journalistic coverage of the AIDS crisis.
Whatever the cause or perceived cause, I suspect that, nowadays, a mainstream publishing house rarely takes on a gay novel unless an editor believes that the book will find straight readers, too. Because some straights still find homosexuality disgusting (cf. comment trolls across the Internet) and a larger number fail to find gay characters “relatable,” a gay novel faces steeper odds from the start. “It’s a non-homosexual world, and the majority of those who are buying, selling, and reading literature are non-homosexual,” the journalist Tyler Coates wrote for Flavorwire last summer, in an article that riveted my attention because it happened to appear the week before the release of my own novel, “Necessary Errors,” whose main character is gay. Or, as Cunningham put it, even more trenchantly, in 2000, while reflecting on the success of his novel “The Hours,” “I can’t help but notice that when I finally write a book in which there are no men sucking each other’s dicks, I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”
Previous Dish on gay literature here and Crain’s own novel, Necessary Errors, here.
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