Greatest gay novels
(A time capsule of queer belief, from the late 1990s)
The Publishing Triangle complied a selection of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels in the tardy 1990s. Its purpose was to broaden the appreciation of lesbian and gay literature and to promote discussion among all readers gay and straight.
The Triangle’s 100 Best
The judges who compiled this list were the writers Dorothy Allison, David Bergman, Christopher Bram, Michael Bronski, Samuel Delany, Lillian Faderman, Anthony Heilbut, M.E. Kerr, Jenifer Levin, John Loughery, Jaime Manrique, Mariana Romo-Carmona, Sarah Schulman, and Barbara Smith.
1. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
2. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
3. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
4. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
5. The Immoralist by Andre Gide
6. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
7. The Adequately of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
8. Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
9. The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
10. Zami by Audré Lorde
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
12. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
13. Billy
The new LGBTQ+ lit list, chosen by writers
It was a note in a David Bowie interview when I was 15 that led me to William Burroughs’s 1971 novel The Wild Boys, bought in a secondhand bookshop in Brighton with money from my paper round. I was confused by Burroughs’s cut-up style and his jagged apocalyptic vision, entirely different from the Dickens and Shakespeare that we’d been introduced to in school. Here was a world of dissident queer teenagers, of lurid sex. I was puzzled, embarrassed, titillated. I carried the book in my school bag – a concealed weapon – and, when I was sure that I couldn’t be seen, read a few pages at a time.
Growing up a young queer in the early 1980s, I was a sleeper agent in an enemy territory: identity concealed beneath a carefully constructed alias, cautiously speaking an alien language, waiting for a sign from the mother country, unsure if the war would ever end. The only place to find a coded signal of resistance was in the pages of a book.
Homosexuality was partly decriminalised in 1967. Outside of a rare big cities it made minute difference to
Visibility. It’s one of the most crucial needs of the queer community. To be understood, to be accepted, the LGBTQIA+ community needs first to be seen. This has meant that centuries of authors writing about the experiences, love, and pain of the queer community have been crucial in making progress towards a radical acceptance.
From the delicate art form of the semi-autobiographical novel — a life story veiled behind fictional names and twists — to the roar of poetry to a dense dive into the history that has too often been erased and purged, queer literature has helped to challenge, move, and shape generations of readers.
As a pansexual, demisexual cis girl on my way into another Pride Month, researching and crafting this list was a singular joy. I have many books to put on hold at my local library. Many stories to encounter. Many histories to educate myself on.
Because queer texts help to increase our visibility to the “outside” world, but they also increase internal visibility and acknowledgment. Today, transphobia is rampant among the queer community, and there are still
Feed your gay wanderlust with our roundup of the best gay books to read whilst traveling!
RuPaul has always taught us that reading is, what….? FUNDAMENTAL!
Neither of us had read much for pleasure since our schoolboy days (don’t judge us, we were too busy being fabulous…). So, we decided to stop scrolling on our phones and taking selfies on our bus/train/plane journeys, replacing that time with some reading instead. Just like the olden days.
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And what better way to fracture a reading slump than to read books with gay content and exciting travel locations? Not only are we getting a representation of ourselves in literature, but it gets us pumped up for our next destination.
And sure, you might think: “But guys, gay fiction is all sappy romance, com