We’ve come a long way since the publication of Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar in 1948, which introduced the idea that gays might inhabit the very foundations of American politics and society – gasp! Since godfather Vidal’s time (and he’s still going strong), gay writing has successfully emerged from the ghetto of gay genre fiction to be a potent mainstream literary force in its own right. Here’s a look at gay literary history, from the radical originators (some of whom you may not have known were gay) to our culture’s most recent literary upstarts. It’s gay Lit. 101, so get out your specs and your library card, and get reading.

James Baldwin lived one of those improbable lives that leave one amazed at the strength, determination and resilience of America’s black heroes – gay or straight. He was born in a Harlem hospital to an unmarried, poor, 20-year-old black woman named Emma Burdis Jones. He had an abusive father, no higher education, and first supported himself by doing odd construction jobs and working as a waiter. He quickly realized that the United States was no place for a talented black man to get ahead easily, so at the age of 24, with $40 in his pocket, he left for France. When he died there 39 years later, he was an internationally recognized author.

Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953), is a coming-of-age story. Its main character, John Grimes, is a 14-year-old African-American trying to forge an individual identity in a society intent on enforcing its prejudices. It contains a homo-erotic subplot in the attraction that John feels for his 17-year-old Sunday School teacher, Elisha. But there is nothing secondary about the homo-eroticism in Giovanni’s Room (1956), the next novel Baldwin wrote. The sexual affair between David, the all-American blond expatriate living in Paris, and Giovanni, the handsome Italian, is at the center of the novel. David has a girlfriend and considers himself an average type of guy, although he is tolerant of queers, whom he finds amusing. One of the queers he knows is Guillame, the owner of a queer bar and a descendant of an aristocratic French family. David finds it typical of French snobbishness that Guillame’s illustrious name protects him from any negative consequences of his tastes and occupation. When David’s girlfriend goes out of town, David stops by the bar and meets Giovanni, who is bartending there. Guillame is hot for Giovanni, but Giovanni, who has no sexual experience with men, strictly refuses to put out – until he sees David, that is. The two men begin an affair, but there is always the mental reservation on David’s part that he is not queer and doesn’t really enjoy sex with men. David leaves Giovanni. Giovanni is forced to crawl to Guillame to beg for his job back. Guillame uses his advantage to force Giovanni to have sex with him, then refuses to rehire him. Giovanni, in a rage, murders Guillame. There is public outrage that the heir to an aristocratic French name should be murdered by an Italian vagabond. Giovanni gets the death penalty.

Giovanni’s Room was strongly criticized for its homosexual content. Baldwin, as a black author, received additional criticism for writing a novel with only white characters, but Baldwin was using his novel to make a point about white America. Baldwin’s position as a black man had sensitized the author to his position as a gay man. He wanted to demonstrate that racism and homophobia both grow from the same roots. His novels with black characters demonstrated that America doesn’t have a “negro problem”; it has a white problem. White America’s repression of black people grows from white America’s racial insecurities, just as its repression of gay people grows from its hidden sexual insecurities. In neither case can mainstream America admit to itself the injustices it has committed out of fear. Giovanni, during his final confrontation with David, tells him that the thing he hates most about David is how he always lies. David has no understanding of what Giovanni has said.

Gore Vidal may in many ways be regarded as the founding godfather of modern gay fiction in America. That’s not to say he was the first, the only, or the best, but the publication of his novel, The City and the Pillar, in 1948, was one of the events that forever changed the way that America looked at itself.

It was not just the novel that so changed America’s self-image. The year 1948 also saw the publication of Sexual Response in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey’s ground-breaking survey of the sexual behavior of average American men. America’s moral watchdogs were shocked to learn that fully one-third of all men admitted to same-sex encounters, and one-fifth of the male population defined itself as exclusively homosexual. America’s image of itself as a sexually-abstinent, God-fearing nation had received a serious blow. World War II had just ended. A large segment of the young male population was displaced and exposed to new influences. The government – as usual after great upheavals – was promising a quick return to normalcy, but suddenly the concept of “normal” was being questioned. If normal was defined by what large numbers of people did, then maybe deviant sex wasn’t so deviant.

The appearance of The City and the Pillar in the same year did nothing to calm the waters. The novel begins with a scene quite familiar to American fiction: two average boys, Jim Willard and Bob Ford, are cooling off at the swimming hole on a hot summer’s day. Their horseplay turns sexual. Bob Ford treats it casually, joking that they must be just a couple of faggots. Jim Willard plays along, but in fact he is much more affected by their encounter. He develops from that moment a passion for Bob Ford which, because he cannot act on it and must keep it hidden, becomes a consuming hunger at the center of his emotional life. Bob Ford leaves town to join the merchant marines, while Jim Willard becomes a professional tennis player, and later a tennis teacher. Jim drifts around the country, always looking for an emotional substitute for Bob. Since Jim is a good-looking athlete, he is invited into many exclusive circles. Reading of Jim’s sexual adventures with movie stars, bankers and politicians, many Americans were first exposed to the idea that the pillars of American society were not in reality as straight as they appeared to be.

Gore Vidal could be assumed to know what he was talking about. His grandfather was a U.S. senator, his mother was a society beauty, and his father was a West Point graduate and a founder of the aviation industry. Gore Vidal himself attended an exclusive private school in Washington D.C. together with other sons of the political elite. He joined the Army while in his teens to serve in World War II. The important role that the Army played in his sexual education is recorded in his autobiographical memoir, Palimpsest. Gore Vidal seemed destined from birth to join the power elite as an active member, and, in fact, his grandfather, Senator Gore of Oklahoma, was busy engineering Gore’s election to the Senate as the senator from Arizona when The City and the Pillar was published. The appearance of the book squashed any such plans, much to the elder senator’s bitter disappointment. His grandfather warned Gore that now he could never have a career in politics. Various members of the literary establishment told Gore that he had gone too far, and the publication of his gay-themed novel would destroy any literary career he might have had. The New York Times refused to review the book or to run advertising for it. The novel, in fact, spent several weeks on The New York Times’ bestseller list, and did a great deal towards making Gore Vidal famous. The City and the Pillar begins a new era in gay fiction for a number of reasons. It was, for one thing, firmly situated in middle America. It didn’t take place in a decadent European setting. Its protagonists weren’t sissies or hopeless misfits. They were highly successful men with normal masculine attributes. Their homosexuality did not hang as a black cloud of doom constantly over their heads. However, the novel did reflect many contemporary prejudices about homosexuality, perhaps under pressure from the publisher. An attempt on the part of Jim Willard to renew his affair with Bob Ford ends in violence and rejection. Jim Willard is condemned to a life of rootless wandering. He must continue to seek the emotional fulfillment he will most likely never find. Gore Vidal, in contrast, continues to have a highly successful life as an author and public figure – he recently made a TV appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher – and he continues to delight in defying preconceptions about gay men. Perhaps most importantly, The City and the Pillar proved by its success that a gay novel could appeal to a large readership and become a bestseller. Large publishers needn’t fear books with homosexual characters. The way to “gay fiction” was open.

Alice Walker shares with James Baldwin a disadvantaged start in life and a similar sense of how racial and gender prejudice can deform a personality in America. She was born in Eatonton, Georgia, into a sharecropper family. She attended Spelman College and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965. She lived in Africa after college, where she began to write poetry. Her experiences of Africa are reflected in her most famous book, The Color Purple (1962), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963, and more dramatically in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), a book in which the practice of clitoridectomy plays a central role. The removal of the clitoris and the sewing up of the vagina is described in this book as a physical procedure, but it becomes a metaphor for the ways in which women are mutilated both physically and spiritually to make them more serviceable to male sexual desires.

Miss Celie, the protagonist of The Color Purple, never faces such a drastic physical mutilation, but she is exposed to physical and sexual violence from an early age, and kept in ignorance. No one is interested in her as a person; she is merely expected to perform her role as a housewife and mother. Same-sex relationships in Walker’s fiction are treated less as an integral part of a character’s personality (i.e. no character is exclusively lesbian or gay) than as a way of exploring personal potentials and nurturing wholeness. Any social convention that limits a character’s development is there to be broken. It is only when a personality is perfectly free to explore all its potential that it can achieve a complete and satisfying development. Alice Walker in her writing, like James Baldwin, teaches us that there is no fragmented struggle for racial or female equality, or for freedom of sexual orientation. There is only the struggle to become wholly who you are, the freedom to develop all your potential, and anything which inhibits that must be resisted.

Jewelle Gomez described herself as an African-American, loway, Bostonian, lesbian, welfare-raised, artist-activist. She was born in Boston and grew up in a South End tenement. She shares with James Baldwin and Alice Walker the impoverished childhoods too often inflicted on black children. She describes her coming of age in the book of autobiographical essays Forty-three Septembers (1993), where she lays special emphasis on the differences she observed between the worlds of men and women, blacks and whites. She displays a special affection in her essays for the long line of black matriarchs, mothers and grandmothers, who made her existence possible. She, like Alice Walker, recognizes the danger of fragmentation that could result from multiple identities as a woman, an African-American, a lesbian and a left-wing radical. She insists on her right to steer her own course and achieve a manner of life that makes integration possible.

Gomez’ best-known book is probably The Gilda Stories (1991). In it she employs the conventions of the vampire novel to enable herself to give an eyewitness account of 200 years of American history, and some of the future. The stories begin as a slave narrative. The Girl escapes from a Louisiana plantation, but is forced to kill to defend her freedom and sexual integrity. She is taken in by the vampire Gilda, and merges with her to assume Gilda’s name and powers. Gomez’ vampires are not malevolent beings. They do not take blood from victims, but merge blood and personality. Their manner of existence becomes a metaphor for the erotic and interpersonal exchange that Gomez sees as possible between women. Similar to Alice Walker, Gomez treats sexuality as a means of exploration and integration. Like many black authors, she is sensitive to oppression as such: she is not concerned with whether she is more oppressed as a woman, a lesbian or an African-American. She is all of those, and is bound to fight all forms of oppression.

As in politics and life-style, the post-Stonewall era shows a marked change in the way literature is produced by and for gay men. Gay literature after Stonewall is much more self-referential. It is not written to titillate a straight audience. It does not keep a wary eye on the conventions and expectations of mainstream society. It is often written from within a gay ghetto. An author may have only gay friends, eat only in gay restaurants, go to gays-only clubs and live in a gay neighborhood. He and his readers share a common language and experiences, and an author does not feel compelled to constantly translate for outsiders. Nonetheless, it has been a post-Stonewall phenomenon that some books written by gays for gays have become mainstream bestsellers, proving that the broad American audience is more tolerant, curious and accepting than many publishers or media moguls are even today willing to admit. The Stonewall Riots do not seem to have been equally important for the production of lesbian literature. The strongest new impulses for lesbian fiction seem to have come earlier than Stonewall, from the feminist movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. It was then that women in general and lesbians in particular formulated their demands to be able to define themselves without regard to the uses male-dominated society makes of them, or the roles traditionally forced on them by a patriarchal society.

A cornerstone in the foundation of the post-Stonewall literary edifice was the establishment of the Violet Quill, a group of writers acquainted with each other who met informally from 1980-81 in New York to read to each other from their works in progress. The writers, Christopher Cox, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, did not form a school of literature with a set theory. Each was merely seeking a group of like-minded peers to whom they could read their texts, knowing that the texts would be understood with a minimum of explanation and distortion. As a group, they showed a preference for fiction with a strong dash of autobiographical confession. All of them wanted to place their experiences as gay men at the center of their writing.

Unfortunately, four of the group have been lost to AIDS. The best known of the group are Andrew Holleran, for Dancer from the Dance (1978), Robert Ferro for The Family of Max Desir (1983) and Edmund White, who has written numerous novels and biographical works. The name Andrew Holleran is a pseudonym. Little is known about the author hidden behind it. He admits to having grown up in the same affluent, privileged background that Edmund White comes from. Both of them attended elite private schools. Holleran chronicles the lives of ultra-gay New Yorkers with summer houses on Fire Island, who spend their lives in gay clubs and discos consuming the newest party drugs. Robert Ferro, who died of AIDS in 1988, is, when compared to Holleran, a study in contrast. Like Holleran, he depends on autobiographical material as the basis of his fiction. However, family plays a central role in Ferro’s novels. He typically describes the problems of integration when a son discovers his homosexuality, then returns with his lover to demand a place within the family. The other male members of the family, steeped in Latin machismo, generally have the more difficult time adapting to the situation, but the Italian-Americans described in Ferro’s novels have too much sense of family to abandon a son or a brother. His novels conclude with a consensus that allows family life to continue.

Edmund White continues to be a force in gay literature. His novels, A Boy’s Own Life (1982) and The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) are strongly autobiographical, chronicling the teen years and young adulthood of a man who would seem to be White’s literary alter ego. Many have criticized the joyless, mechanical promiscuity that reigns in White’s books. It would at the least seem to be misleading. White has achieved considerable prominence in the literary world, having held teaching positions at Yale and published critical biographies of Marcel Proust and Jean Genet in addition to his several novels. Books don’t write themselves and careers in literature don’t fall from heaven. White must have invested considerable time and disciplined, determined effort to get to where he is today, but there’s no ambition to be found in his supposedly autobiographical fiction. Instead, his protagonist stumbles from one crisis to the next in a haze of depression.

Larry Kramer has been a consistent critic of Edmund White and much of gay culture in general. He comes from an equally privileged background as White, having been born into an upper-middle-class family and attended Yale. His novel Faggots appeared in 1978, and was much criticized by both gay and straight reviewers. His material comes from the same Manhattan-to-Fire-Island club and disco party circuit written about by many other gay New York authors. Kramer, however, made no secret of his disapproval of the gay scene’s promiscuity and irresponsible drug use. As the AIDS epidemic grew, Kramer became increasingly vocal in his criticism of the style of life that promoted the spread of the disease. He publicly advocated sexual abstinence in his 1986 play, The Normal Heart, which some interpreted as an attack on the fiber of the gay community. Kramer was a founding member of ACT UP, an organization dedicated to shaking up the AIDS bureaucracy, in 1988. He now concentrates on short fiction and political writings.

Where does gay fiction stand now? Where it has always stood: at the center of American culture. Gay fiction is not a separate genre; it has always been right on the fault line of American culture. The problems facing American culture – racism, sexism, ageism, imperialism – have found their most extreme formulation and most articulated criticism among gay authors. A look at gay literature also makes it clear how devastating the AIDS epidemic has been. So many authors who should have been in their prime now have already been cut down.

Nonetheless, new voices continue to appear on the scene. Melvin Dixon died of of AIDS, but Randall Kenan continues the tradition of black gay poetry and magical narration of black history in A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. Dennis Cooper is a Los Angeles-based author who consistently puts out haunting, confessional novels to an international cult following. Cooper is the author of The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997) and Period (2000), all published by Grove Press. He is currently curating a series of innovative North American fiction by new writers for the independent press Akashic Books. Dark angel Clive Barker continues to have a huge presence on the mainstream literary scene, having authored more than a dozen books and being the creative force behind 13 major motion pictures. Allan Gurganus does not write about gay characters, but appeals to a mainstream audience by gently criticizing the excessive greed, corporate and otherwise, of American culture in White People and The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Michael Cunningham has continued the tradition of the AIDS narrative in Home At the End of the World. Brent Hartinger (interviewed in this issue, see page 49) is providing imaginative fiction in the increasingly vibrant young adult category. Christopher Bran already has an impressive body of work, but his The Notorious Dr. August shows him moving in a new direction in recreating cultural history along the lines of E.L. Doctorow. He is matched in his historic imagination by Ethan Mordden whose Landscape: Memory is a re-creation of turn-of-the-century San Francisco.

There will always be plenty of new gay voices on the cutting edge of literature. It’s up to us to make sure they will always have an audience.