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The
Current and Future State of Gay Fiction, Part 1
by Sarah Warn, February 24,
2005
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Partners
and novelists Brent Hartinger and Michael Jensen are veterans
of gay fiction. Hartinger writes young adult fiction with gay
characters (Geography
Club and the forthcoming The
Order of the Poison Oak) and Jensen has written two gay
historical novels (Frontiers
and its sequel, Firelands).
Between them, they've experienced just about everything the world
of gay fiction has to dish out over the last decade.
In
this first installment of a two-part interview on the current
and future state of gay fiction, Hartinger and Jensen talk about
the rise of the gay romance genre, the death of literary fiction,
and why it's now possible to make a career out of writing gay
fiction.
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AfterElton.com:
Where do you see gay fiction headed?
Brent
Hartinger: In the 1990s there was this notion that gay
fiction was going to be huge, and in three or four cases, publishers
spent huge sums of money--hundreds of thousands--on advances for
books that they thought were going to be really big. And then they
all flopped. We were hot for like five minutes, and then all the
books failed and suddenly the genre was absolutely dead. Since then--this
is like the mid 1990s--the industry has been slowly coming back.
It’s just like in Hollywood, it’s like boom or bust--we
either give you $150,000 for a book or we don't give you anything.
Its frustrating because books that are gay and phenomenal successes,
like David Sedaris's or Augusten Burroughs's books, are not considered
"gay."
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Michael
Jensen: Literary books have moved into the mainstream, they're
just considered books now. They're not talked about as "gay books,"
they're just popular books.
BH: Right. We don't get any credit for their books, because
that is considered mainstream. But literary fiction in general is dying.
AE:
How do you define literary fiction?
MJ:
Anything that isn't genre, anything that doesn't fall into a genre.
BH:
It takes itself very seriously. It is about ideas.
MJ: You hear the numbers on some of these literary books--even
books that millions of people have heard of--you get the actual sales
figures and you realize they are selling peanuts.
BH: Literary fiction, it can really suck. But gay genre fiction...some
of it is doing really well, but I don't see any signs of it moving into
the mainstream. The romance stuff, like the Kensington books, they've
done really well, with their frothy light-hearted, Jackie Collins-type
books.
AE:
And these are gay romance novels?
MJ: Not hardcore romance, they're like Jackie Collins, more like
gay chick-lit, with really clever covers. All the publishers were doing
the literary fiction, but then Kensington, which is an independent publisher,
started doing these frothy beach reads, like six or seven years ago, like
Bourbon Street Blues, and He's the One. The quality of
the books themselves are a hit and miss, but some of them are good. They
have sold very well, especially for gay fiction--very, very respectably,
so that's the one bright spot
BH:
I think that's a big market frankly. That is one genre that is
really doing well. The gay teen thing is also really huge, I think because
it was completely underserved.
There
are crossover markets, and then you have the public library market, the
school library market, the gay teen market, the straight teenage girl market,
and you've got the adult gay men market. But all of the gay teen books,
at least the male ones, have done really, really well. I think that the
lesbian ones have done well too; I know Keeping You a Secret did
well. Lesbian romance has done pretty well and lesbian mysteries are big
time.
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