In a historical sense, literature as we understand it is a fairly new innovation, and the current concept of homosexuality is even fresher from the cultural oven. It's no great surprise, then, that gay literature ­­­­­­­­— or even gay characters in literature ­­­­— are so relatively new as to still be shiny. Nonetheless, there are gay characters that broke barriers and became cultural touchstones for gay men. To find out which characters have most resonated, we turned to some of our most well-known gay authors for the books and characters that most influenced them.

Matthew Rettenmund, author of the novel Boy Culture in which a male escort learns to adopt his natural take-charge abilities in the service of creating a little family for himself, offered a thoughtful analysis when asked for his favorites.

"There are so many obvious choices, and they're obvious for good reason — the boy of A Boy's Own Story leaps to mind. But I've always been drawn to gay characters with flaws. I appreciate positive portrayals, but realistic characters who illustrate some of the unique ups and downs of being gay are the ones closer to my heart. I remember having a particular affection for the titular character from The Confessions of Danny Slocum by George Whitmore. Far from the sexual athlete gay men are often encouraged to be by the popular culture of our own making, Danny's sexually broken and there is no easy fix.

"I also really liked Eddie from The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Sockett for coming across as very real and not overly sentimentalized," Rettenmund added. "Other than those three, no gay characters really made an impression on me. The narrator in Giovanni's Room is one who is often cited, but I didn't care for that book and couldn't really relate to him. Still, I suppose he was groundbreaking in the sense that it was unusual to have a gay central character at the time the book was written."

E. Lynn Harris identified John Grimes, the lead character in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, as his pick, "because that was one of the first books that I read that resonated with me when I was really young. Here was this character that was so sensitive and had an abusive father. I came from an abusive relationship with a stepfather. I just so identified with him."

Harris added, "One of the things I have come to recognize with gay people is, they feel the need to be overachievers. When I was coming up, I was an overachiever when it came to school and activities; I would do anything to get noticed. I knew then that I was gay and I thought that might cancel out everything, so I was in every activity [and yet] I had no friends, because I was afraid to let anyone know me. People thought they knew me, and in turn I won a lot of awards, because I was always doing something, I was always keeping busy so that I wouldn't have to deal with myself."

Harris offered two other selections as groundbreaking gay characters. "Not to pat myself on the back, but I really think Raymond and Basil, two of my characters [from Invisible Life] have been groundbreaking in so many respects."

Initially a self-published novel, Invisible Life was an early literary look at bisexuality in the black community, and prophetic in dealing with what is now known as gay black men going "on the down low" to fulfill their true sexual desires. The novel was picked up by Doubleday, launching Harris' career as a novelist — a career that includes having brought two sequels to Invisible Life to print, thus completing a trilogy.

That his creations broke new ground became evident to Harris from the reactions of his readers. "What I heard from so many people was, 'I never thought about that; I never thought about the fact that gay people loved, and loved equally, and that they didn't act stereotypical, that they were still our brothers, our sons, our nephews, our fathers, our friends.' That's who I wanted to make Raymond: I wanted to make him ‘Everyman’, [and at the same time] I wanted him to be in touch with his emotions and feelings."

Drew Banks, author of the novel Able Was I, listed the title character from Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray as his choice for groundbreaking gay character, saying, "Dorian Gray was one of the first in a long list of hedonistic fellows whose homosexual tendencies secured a terrible fate."

Continued Banks, "Baldwin's Giovanni fared only slightly better, trading his caliginous room for the guillotine (David, Giovanni's Room's protagonist, only escapes because his homosexual urges were experimental in nature)."