Influential Gay Characters in Literature

for someone like me who spends most of my down time reading as opposed to watching TV. I was surprised that Andrew Holleran was not mentioned by any of the authors, his "Dancer From The Dance" is a classic novel of the NY gay scene in the 70's.

For young gays David Levithan's "Boy Meets Boy" is pretty amazing, a world where sexual orientation is not an issue for most people. Sounds like a fantasy (and it is) but maybe not so much as it was 20 years ago. In Toronto I have been noticing more and more men holding hands outside the gay neighbourhood of Church Street, very refreshing.

My personal favourite characters that I have come across this year are Frankie from Patrick Ryan's "Send Me" and Noah from Bart Yates "Leaving Myself Behind". I also really enjoyed Brent Hartinger's Russell from "The Geography Club" trilogy and his best friend Gunnar (who is the hetero version of me as a teenager). Another great series was the Rainbow trilogy by Alex Sanchez.

Finally for gays who want to read more literature that they can relate personal experiences to, I would strongly recommend short story collections. It is a lot of fun reading them because of the wide variety of stories and themes (you never know what you are going to get in the next story). The "Men on Men" series is very good, as were the three "His" series. The two Fresh Men collections are also top-notch.

Cheers

JBE

I've read many of the books mentioned so I can understand why the writer's picked them. I want to mention a few books that haven't been mentioned that I love.

Billy from The Boys on the Rocks by John Fox

Jacob Cullen and Chistopher Ferris from As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann

Oliver from The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide

Hadrien from Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

I really liked Chris in Jay Quinn's Back Where He Started. It was nice for a change to read about a gay man who's in his forties, raising children, going to church, etc. Not an ounce of bitchiness, sarcasm, club hopping or self-loathing in sight. Really refreshing.

Thanks to Kilian Meloy and AfterElton for another great piece on gay literature. More, please!

-Salvatore Sapienza, author of Seventy Times Seven

www.70x7book.com

Michael Tolliver in Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" series has always been my favorite character.

- Kirby, moviedearest.blogspot.com

...from 'The Dreyfus Affair' by Peter Lefcourt are two of my favorite gay fictional characters. I absolutely love this book; I read it at least once a year. The satire of America's reaction to gays in sports is sharp, witty and biting; and the romance between Randy and D. J. is funny and sweet.

If the studio bigwigs in Hollywood had any sense the script based on this book (that has been languishing in turn-around hell for a good ten years) would be picked up and rushed into production.

As a totally geeky gay adolescent some books really spoke to me, years before I found actual "gay" fiction. Ursula K LeGuin, her book, Left Hand of Darkness, was a hugely popular novel about a planet where everyone is literally Transgender and "Perverts" are people who are permanently Male or Female. Her other books typically featured gay characters in minor roles that were accepted as average folks. Robert Heinlien, his Stranger in a Strange Land, a counter culture classic by a guy who was a bit of a macho jerk, but whose main character is bisexual, and the Lazarus Long series, in which some characters are either Bi or switch gender. And the one that spoke to me most, Samual R Delaney, whose Dahlgren featured a US city that was destroyed in a natural disaster (Shades of Katrina?) that is left to rot because it is off the news grid. The main character has homo sex, and there is an out gay character.

 On a truly weird side note, we got weekly book lists in school that we could order from Scholastic Books. For reasons I've never been able to fathom, one of the titles I got in High School, in the 70s mind you, was a book called The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies. Couched in counter culture lingo, this book was amazingly about some effiminate gay men and their lesbian friend who have some minor adventures together. It was presented as all very matter of fact, and all very silly. But, set in US and the present, it introduced a country kid (me) to some of the basics of urban gay culture on the edge of liberation. The stereotypes were atrocious but very self aware, at a time when gays in publicly available lit were non existent.

PS Anyone remember Gordon Merrick? First books specifically about openly Gay characters to reach the local mall. Potboilers full of angst and right on the shelf next to Sidney Sheldon.

Nous Sommes Tous Sauvages.