Influential Gay Characters in Literature

However, for Banks, a more personal choice was the gay role model and sports figure hero from Patricia Nell Warren’s 1974 gay sports classic. Said Banks, "For me, as a gay man coming out in the ‘70s/'80s, The Front Runner's Coach Harlan Brown broke my ground as a guileless homo who longed for romantic love that fully integrated hot sex."

Added Banks wryly, "Of course it was written by a woman."

Steven Saylor, author of the popular "Gordianus the Finder" mystery series, which is set in ancient Rome, and whose early erotic writings (under the name Aaron Travis) are currently enjoying something of a resurgence with last year's republication of the novel Slaves of the Empire — something of a groundbreaking work in its own right — nominated, "Bagoas, the narrator of Mary Renault's The Persian Boy."

Explained Saylor, "That book was a huge international bestseller when I was young, and it gave us a truly gay Alexander the Great, as seen through the eyes of his eunuch consort. Renault seduced readers around the world into identifying with a gay Persian eunuch bottom . . . now that was a breakthrough!

"You may quote me," he said, with joking assurance.

Poet and author of gay erotic fiction Jeff Mann has written the most tender and gently passionate odes to nature and to man, and he's also written some of the bravest and most bracing bondage erotica.

Mann identified Mr. Benson, in John Preston's novel of the same name as "a groundbreaking leatherman and S/M Top."

Hailing from the Appalachian Mountains, Mann also identified a groundbreaking creation in "Hassel Day, in The Unquiet Earth, Denise Giardina's wonderful novel about the West Virginia coalfields… an Appalachian gay character."

Popular gay writer Michael Thomas Ford, the author of critically acclaimed novels ranging from the comic romp Last Summer, to the panoramic drama Full Circle, to the just-released gay family novel Changing Tides, admitted, "I was never much of a gay lit reader, which is perhaps a little strange considering."

However, Ford did name a few characters that seemed to fit the bill. "The only ones I can really think of are the little boy in Truman Capote's short story "Dazzle," who wants to be a girl and who makes a deal with a woman he thinks can work magic for him, and perhaps Dill from To Kill A Mockingbird, who ironically was based on Capote himself. He wasn't gay in the book, of course, but as a gay reader you can sense something queer in him."

Continued Ford, "The same goes for the girl Frankie in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding."

Gay writer Eliot Schrefer, whose first book drew comparisons to The Nanny Diaries and whose second novel, the just-released The New Kid, parallels episodes of adolescent same-sex experimentation with an older man's pursuit of teenaged boys, told me, "Paul in David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy is the first example of a gay protagonist in a young adult book for whom homosexuality isn't 'the problem.'"

Schrefer described the book, saying, "Gay teens who turn to the book for guidance and solace find a fantasia about a high school where the quarterback is also the homecoming queen, and where the dramas of coming out are secondary to the more mundane dramas of living an ordinary teenage life. As a model for how existence can be in a school with a broad sense of acceptance, it's invaluable for showing teenage readers what to strive for."

Added Schrefer, "I've found well-loved copies on plenty of shelves of twenty-somethings in New York, who still cling to this sweet, slim book about how life could be."

Cuban-American writer Johnny Diaz, who just this year saw the publication of his debut novel Boston Boys Club, cited the creation of another Massachusetts-based writer as his idea of a groundbreaking figure from gay literature.

"The one character that comes to mind in gay fiction is Jeff [from] the William J. Mann trilogy The Men from the Boys, Where The Boys Are, and Men Who Love Men," Diaz said. "The character explored sex in, and outside of the confines of, a relationship, and what it means to set boundaries for yourself and your partner. He was brazen and bold about being passionate with his partner — and others."