Were Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein and James Baldwin writing today, they'd be hard-pressed to land a mainstream publisher. The work of these luminaries of American literature is just too queer. Full of overt descriptions of same-sex love (and, more importantly, lust), devoid of kitsch, camp, celebrity dish, anti-sex polemics or expressions of religious conviction, their work lies at a radical remove from current publishing trends.
And yet, gay and lesbian books have never been more popular - or more numerous. A perusal of one's local bookstore finds a plethora of gay and lesbian books,."Queer" is trendy. But while this explosion of books may seem to be the long-delayed embracing of lesbian and gay writers by mainstream publishers, it is instead an insidious form of homophobic censorship.
Lesbian and gay books may abound, but the subject matter has been narrowly defined by straight publishers to books with either a self-loathing subtext or little literary substance. Inherent in much of this literature is a strong anti-sex message. Two books, "Sexual Ecology" by Gabriel Rotello (Random House, $24.95) and "Life Outside" by New York columnist Michaelangelo Signorile (HarperPerennial, $13) exemplify this trend. Both men were once agents provocateurs of gay politics, promoting the proud use of the term "queer" and advocating in-your-face gay activism. Rotello was editor of the groundbreaking New York magazine OutWeek and Signorile invented one of the most controversial political tactics of recent times: outing.
Yet both writers now sound a neo-conservative call-to-arms with their arguments against gay male sexual behavior that has more than a hint of self-loathing at its core.
Other books preach a sugary "we're-just-like-straight-folks" assimilationist philosophy. One such is "The Lesbian & Gay Book of Love & Marriage: Creating the Stories of Our Lives" by Paula Martinac (Doubleday, $18).
This book, only the most recent of similar titles, is a how-to for lesbian and gay relationships with emphasis on committed, long-term, heterosexual-style couplings.
Determined religious conviction also abounds, as this too mitigates sexuality. "Stealing Jesus" by Bruce Bawer (Crown, $26), despite its provocative/offensive title, is a ponderous academic-style polemic that might well have been titled "Will the Real Christ Stand Up?" A more subtle plea for acceptance than some books, Bawer's argument can nevertheless be reduced to whether his loving, laid-back, gay-accepting Episcopalian Jesus or the mean-spirited anti-gay hellfire-and-brimstone Jesus of Chrisitian Coalition fundamentalism is the real Christ.
The cache of celebrity biographies of nouvelle gay icons like Ellen DeGeneres, Candace Gingrich and Greg Louganis also plead for acceptance while downplaying actual sexuality. Witty mysteries written by lesbian cats (Rita Mae Brown's Sneaky Pete series) or former tennis stars (Martina Navratilova's sports mystery series) avoid polemic altogether.
These are the gay and lesbian books mainstream publishers promote to the exclusion of nearly anything else. More than a hint of irony attends the fact that a literary canon defined by the writer's sexual orientation is now almost totally devoid of sexual expression. Contrast that with Whitman's erotic depictions of young men in "Leaves of Grass," Stein's evocations of her lovers' Tender Buttons" and Baldwin's steamy sex scenes in "Giovanni's Room."
Many of America's most influential writers have been lesbian or gay, among them Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Whitman, Willa Cather, Stein, Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara and Truman Capote. Some of these were originally published by independent presses, because homosexuality was taboo.
No longer taboo, lesbian and gay books now subscribe to a wholly different canon, one based not on literary excellence but on marketability. The "new" lesbian and gay book doesn't declaim innovative American culture; it adheres to a rigidly conservative perspective in which lesbians and gays may declare their love as long as they deflect or defame their sexuality.
Starved for depictions of lesbian and gay culture for generations, queers have yearned to access books about themselves. That fact, coupled with high income levels, has resulted in a cynical attempt to cash in on a lucrative trend.
Imagine books targeting an African-American audience which focused solely on soul food, rap, fashion and sports or which extolled the virtues of acting white. They would be denounced as racist.
The queer book boom evolved from the outgrowth of identity politics as well as from a gradual awakening by mainstream houses that gays and lesbians are book- buyers hungry for same-sex themed books.
But do people actually construct personal identity from drivel?
The new books also imply an ahistoricity. Having ignored the queer reader for decades, having once demanded a far higher level of literary merit from gay and lesbian writers, publishers now play to the lowest common denominator: books of lists of all things queer ("Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia" by Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson, Henry Holt, $50); books on being queer ("Born that Way" by William Wright, Knopf, $27.50); books for parents of queers ("Now that You Know: A Parents' Guide to Understanding Their Gay and Lesbian Children" by Betty Fairchild and Nancy Hayward (Harcourt Brace, $13) or queers who want to become parents ("Families of Value: Gay and Lesbian Parents & Their Children Speak Out" by Jane Drucker, Ph.D. (Insight Books, $27.95). One only need put "queer," "gay" or "lesbian" in the title to shill the lesbian and gay market.
However, should these books not sell as well as their straight publishers expected, the result will be a further narrowing of the field, good and bad.
In this theme-park version of lesbian and gay culture, when sexuality does appear in queer books it is almost always connnected with death. Sex-laden novels by gay men most often end in the death from AIDS of one or more party. While AIDS is certainly an important issue, it is difficult to recall novels by gay men in recent years in which AIDS does not play a vital role.
Similarly, lesbian sexuality tends to occur off the page in books published by mainstream houses. A lesbian writer familiar to mainstream audiences is Dorothy Allison, whose novel "Bastard Out of Carolina" (Dutton, $22) was a National Book Award finalist. But "Bastard" and Allison's latest book, "Cavedweller" (Dutton, $24.95), had none of the ribald lesbian sexuality inherent in Allison's award-winning earlier work published by the prestigious independent lesbian press, Firebrand Books.
Some publishers, rather than tackle provocative novels by lesbian and gay writers that might address sexual questions, choose to revive long out-of-print titles from a cozier, closeted, more encoded era: E.M. Forster-style novels like "The Scapegoat" by Jocelyn Brooke (Turtle Point Press, $12.95) and "Bertram Cope's Year" by Henry Blake Fuller (Turtle Point Press, $14.95); or compendia of gay writing from earlier eras, like Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt's "Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914" (Houghton Mifflin, $30).
Call it the Ellenization of lesbian and gay literature - the end result is a chilling effect on queer culture. With few exceptions, mainstream publishers lend approbation only to books that are BTC non-threatening to heterosexual society or in which self-loathing - conscious or unconscious - is implicit.
Good books are elemental to any culture or society and most especially to establishing an inclusive literary canon. Commodification is, ultimately, killing lesbian and gay literature. And that is, undeniably, a homophobic act.
Victoria A. Brownworth is author and editor of several books most recently "Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors" (Seal Press), co-authored with Judith Redding. She received the 1997 Myers Center Award for Human Rights in North America. Her writing on lesbian and gay issues has appeared in Ms., the Village Voice and the Nation and Spin. Her weekly column "The Lavendar Tube" appears in lesbian and gay publications.
Pub Date: 5/24/98