I have an idea for a story I want to write. I’m calling it ‘The Time-Traveler’s Boyfriend.’ It will be my first stab at LGBT genre fiction. It was inspired by ‘The Time-Traveler’s Wife‘ which is a book that won oodles of awards and I was actually excited to read until I actually read it and it turned out to be a mawkish, ham-fisted soap opera.
“I can do better than this,” I thought, and I came up with an idea for countering the “Time-Travelers Wife’ with something that would be cheeky and fun, rather than cruel and tragic.
I also realized that a lot of the book would be set in 1970’s San Francisco. Knowing not much about the city (been there maybe a half-dozen times) and little about the era, I began looking for source material, and came upon recommendations for Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, which I was told was The Seminal Work of gay literature in that period. I Kindled a copy.
It sucked.
The barrier for classic gay literature is even lower than the bar for Feminist Scifi.
There’s barely any plot, just a series of cliches. Most of the book is just snatches of dialog, often without attribution so you can’t tell which character is talking. The Michael Tolliver character who is supposed to be one of the greatest gay characters in literature does nothing but make catty chatter and sleep around. The rest of the characters are ciphers that Ayn Rand would have found shallow and monodimensional.
So, the upshot is… I read one book that I was told was great but actually sucked. This led me to read another book I was told was great but actually sucked.
Sad puppies, I totally get it now.
1970’s gay fiction was always more about the author being titillated while writing that the substance thereof. An author would have been just as vacuous as his characters & topic – & so much, still, of “gay culture” (a shadow community) has been facile & was never meant to be anything more than recreational. People have always lived in the mainstream whether they admit it or not. For a young man feeling his oats finding something on a shelf that he could relate to, was a good thing. The mindless always get excited about something they can relate to. The reason Tales of the City is branded in the gay psyche is because PBS produced a series in the 90’s & it was fun for some people to watch during all the doom & gloom of the gay plague.
Catholic writer Melinda Selmys wrote that a lot of art produced by gays lacks broad appeal because it is crafted to appeal to the sensibilities of a particular audience, so while a gay audience may love it, a general audience will be left scratching their heads. Those few that find mass appeal usually filter a more universal motif through a homoerotic lens: Brokeback Mountain, whether you think it’s any good or not, was, at it’s core, was a tragedy about a relationship rendered taboo by social mores; the homoerotic nature of the relationship was more incidental than anything. Compare that to something like the Eating Out Trilogy, which is nothing but tawdry fan service for gays and softcore sex.
From my observation, general audiences seem more receptive to gay relationships in media when 1) The relationship is not the primary focus of the story, and 2) The characters play a role in the plot above and beyond being fodder for a gay Aesop.
Most “gay fiction” sucks. The non-fiction is even worse….
Admittedly, it’s been many years since I saw it, but I remember Ang Lee’s 1993 gay-themed comedy The Wedding Banquet as being not only more enjoyable than his 2005 Brokeback Mountain, but in many ways more “mainstream accessible.”
It’s true, as Sean points out, that Tragic Star-Crossed Love is a universal theme. But Brokeback undercut its own universality, IMHO, by making the hot-button issue of Homophobic Murder so central to the story. (I would note that this was the decision of short-story author Annie Proulx, not the fault of Ang Lee’s faithful adaptation.)
In contrast, The Wedding Banquet is primarily about cultural and generational clashes between Old World parents from Taiwan and a highly Americanized son “who happens to be gay.” (And as things turn out, ACTUAL homophobia is less of a complicating factor than gay PARANOIA about homophobia — it’s not a lugubrious exercise in political consciousness-raising, like Brokeback.)
@ Throbert: I don’t see the fears about gaybashing in Brokeback as necessarily undercutting the universality of the Forbidden Love plot. Fear of violent reprisal from society if the star-crossed lovers are revealed is often a part of such stories, or else the “forbidden” part of the relationship loses some of its weight; heck, it goes all the way back to Romeo and Juliet.
That said, I do prefer “comedic culture-clash” relationships to “potentially-fatal taboo” relationships.
As to Tales from the City, I’ve only read the first book all the way through, but I thought it was apparent enough that Maupin intended it as, to some degree, an intentional spoof of soap-operas (and its original publication was roughly contemporaneous with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Soap). Also, it’s not clear to me that Maupin planned it as a coherent novel from the very beginning, or if he set out just to do some self-contained short stories (linked by recurring characters) and later decided to stretch certain plot arcs to novel length, after the stories got favorable response from readers.
None of these potential mitigating factors necessarily weaken V the K’s argument that the book sucks — after all, Right Ho, Jeeves is also a “novel” that reads more like episodes linked by recurring characters who are relatively monodimensional and spend a great deal of time making catty chatter, but it’ll live for the ages.
But Maupin is no Wodehouse, to put it mildly.
True, but Romeo died by his own hand (as did Juliet), not because one of the Capulet clan smashed him in the head with a tire iron. Though I’m not saying I would’ve liked Brokeback better if Jake Gyllenhall had pulled an Anna Karenina, instead of getting his handsome self gay-bashed.
One “gay” classic that I would recommend to absolutely everybody: David Ferry’s very rhythmic, highly accessible version of the 3500-year-old Gilgamesh Epic. Partly because it’s in iambic-pentameter couplets, and partly because the cast of characters are less familiar than the names from Greek or Roman mythology, you might need two or three passes to fully appreciate it — but as ancient epic poems go, it’s fairly short (something like 90 pages of wide-spaced verse), so you can read it in one long afternoon.
Of course, not everyone agrees that King Gilgamesh and his wild-man sidekick Enkidu were lovers in the physical sense (though frankly this is one story where excluding a homosexual interpretation seems like a bigger stretch than bringing in such a reading).
But the David Ferry rendering makes the tale just about as readable as it could possibly be — considering that it’s based on fragmented clay tablets and presumably was meant to be sung in the extinct Akkadian language to harp-accompaniment — while leaving ample room to speculate about the sexuality of the characters.
So there’s really no excuse for NOT buying a paper or electronic copy and reading the damn thing, is what I’m sayin’…
If you ever read one of Ann Rice’s gay sons books and you get to a happy ending, stop reading it.
If you do realism how would the time traveler react when his boyfriend is old, bald, with a white beard ,and walking around naked on the street leering at young guys in dog masks? I don’t want to be one of those guys when my hair turns white. Even worse NYC “so we can get gay married, but drinking a 20oz soda or selling untaxed cigs will have cops kill you, hey where is the salt in restaurants, smoking section please”
How do you lower the number of arrests of non Asian minorities? Have no cops.
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/01/28/only-on-2-lapd-officers-say-more-patrol-needed-in-times-of-emergency/
“between 5:30 and 10 a.m., there were just three patrol cars assigned to the West LA division. Two cars to protect more than 200,000 people in a 65 square mile radius.”
Part of the reason I liked the Renly/Loras romance in Game of Thrones was that it played a role above and beyond itself. It was clearly Loras who put Renly on the “usurp the throne because people like me more than my brother” path. It was the romance between them that motivated Renly to marry Loras’ sister, so that he could keep Loras close; it was Renly’s reluctance to actually consummate his marriage to Margaery that allowed her to make her own play for power by getting engaged to Joffery; and it was Loras’ homosexuality that gave Cersei an angle to go after Margaery.
I actually liked how homosexuality has been treated in Game of Thrones for the most part. Several characters refer to Loras’ homosexuality with amusement or slight disapproval, but his ability overrides that for them. Really only gets mocked directly once, and indirectly as a way to needle another character. However, I don’t like how the Faith Militant in the fifth season got transformed from a force for good and voice of sanity in King’s Landing to fantasy Westboro Baptist members, and how Loras used as a prop for that.
If you can find a copy, try “Reunion” by Fred Uhlman. The intense friendship it’s about isn’t necessarily “gay”, and there are no sex scenes. I don’t recall anything in it that would *force* one to interpret the friendship as being necessarly homoerotic.
The story is about love and betrayal and redemption of a sort.
It’s a very short story, and I recall being deeply affected by it.
… Google informs me that “Reunion” was made into a movie in 1989.
“Tales of the City” is a book that was really a collection of Maupin’s column in the Chronicle. It ran for many months and was very popular, and finally he turned it into a book. It was better as a daily column.
the core argument (aside from the “You are a bunch of left wing voting cliques who will refuse anything not left wing no matter how good, and will vote for pap as long as it pushes the correct message, and will destroy the award rather than let good stories by “Wrongthought” authors win a damned thing”) of the Puppies has been Write good stories that may or may not contain messages and people will buy them. Then when pups pointed out some good stories by left leaning sorts they were poopoohed and blown off (wrong publisher and author was old white guy) or harassed the authors to pull out of the award for the crime of having WrongFans.
Sarah is working on the next books in the Darkship/Few Good Men stories, but the earth revolution one is more from Zenobia’s pov, so less Luce and Ned in this one. But there are more Luce stories to come.
You might try Rechy’s City of Night. Overrated? Sure. But there is enough literary (specifically rhetorical) quality in it that at times the immediate subject matter transcends the seamy plot and — probably unintentionally — occasionally raises the gay drifter to a level beyond cliche, to themes that are universal. If you’re looking for first-rate fiction that happens to be gay, I recommend Melville; Billy Budd (and I don’t know how anyone can read this novella as anything but gay fiction) might make for an interesting prototype for a future sci-fi classic, space ship and all.
@ Ignatius: Ooo, I can just see it now. Billy, the orphaned product of a human-alien union, enlists as a cadet aboard a human capital ship just as humanity goes to war with his alien parent’s species. Soon, Billy garners the desire- and hatred- of Lieutenant Claggart, the ship’s bigoted chief security officer. Meanwhile, the ship’s captain Vere also finds himself attracted to the innocent young half-human, and his attempts to protect Billy from Claggart’s machinations result in a clandestine affair that could get both men killed.
… I call dibs.
I have read some gay fiction and much of it is essentially porn or more akin to some of the bodice ripper romances with two men instead of a man and a woman.
I find the books that I enjoy most with gay couples tend to be books where the central theme isn’t the gay couple-it’s a genre that isn’t porn or romance where the couple happens to be gay. One of the best developed gay characters I’ve ever read was Milo in Jonathan Kellerman’s mystery series. He was a secondary character but in the Watson to Sherlock sense and over the course of the series you saw him struggle with things you would expect but it was part of the story.