50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read

by Richard Canning (Editor), Harold Bloom (Introduction)

Gay topics have been central to most national literary traditions, whether in fiction, memoir, drama, or verse. Yet “crossover” success stories are remarkably few, as are works of literature about gay subjects, written by heterosexual authors. Furthermore, openly gay-themed books tend to get passed over in favor of works more evidently addressing “universal” or “mainstream” concerns. No longer: Here's the book that cues you in to the essential titles in the gay and lesbian literary canon.

Edited by Richard Canning, with a foreword from renowned literary critic Harold Bloom, this volume contains fifty succinct essays by critics, public figures, and authors. They illuminate works by fifty men and women that everybody should read.

Canning tackles important themes, issues of regional and cultural diversity, political aspects, and analyses of that old chestnut: What makes a work of literature gay or lesbian? Don’t expect a definitive answer. Do expect to learn why these titles are must-reads.

Rearrange your shelves, book-club lists, and expectations. Whether your preference is for Ginsberg or Woolf or Melville, this is one volume no bookworm—straight or gay—should miss out on.

Genres: LGBT, Nonfiction, Gay, Books About Books, Reference, Queer, Literary Criticism

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

of all the genres I dabble in, Queer Fiction is the one where I often have the most issues with what I am reading. maybe because I am a bad, disloyal queer? I hope that's not the case. I like to think it is because I don't have a lot of sentimentality when it comes to my queer brothers and sisters; if anything, my viewpoint is especially critical because I am also looking at myself, as a queer, with the same critical regard. or who knows, maybe it is because I live in the queer mecca of San Francisco and I'm just over it - specifically, I'm over seeing "queer" as especially different than "not queer", and I'm over seeing people defined by who they sleep with. well whatever the case may be, I came to this guide ready to be annoyed.

happily, I wasn't too annoyed. this is an interesting book, even a challenging one at times. although a bit predictable as well.

I want to get the predictable part out of the way first. so by now I'm sure everyone's familiar with or has at least heard of the "Queer Eye"... maybe from the old Bravo show, but hopefully more along the lines of looking at supposedly straight things and seeing the hidden meaning, the secret text, the signs & wonders of what is being looked at - and recognizing the queerness there. and so various classic musicals and cheap sword & sandal epics are queered. macho sports like football can be queered. everything from Flaubert to Art Deco to the entire filmography of Parker Posey can be queered. and hey I just queered the biblical phrase "signs & wonders" in this here paragraph. sorta.

this guidebook does its fair share of queering the text - a fairly common gay sport. we have The Bible (tl;dnr), specifically David & Jonathan. we have Plato and Walpole and Melville and that poor repressed queen, Proust. we even have the Epic of Gilgamesh! that was a new one. but these particular essays were not particularly interesting to me; they suffered from a certain amount of silliness and shallowness. my problem was not with their basic point - i.e. these are also queer texts - but rather with the superficiality of the writing and how overemphatic the authors were when explaining their positions. fortunately those sorts of essays are in the minority.

so back to why this was an interesting book.

one of the hallmarks of classic Queer Fiction (and by classic, I suppose I mean Modern Classics - openly queer books written from the mid-20th century up through the 90s) is that these texts blur the line between Fiction and Personal Narrative. many classics of the genre are stories taken from their authors' lives and feature fictionalized accounts of their own trials and tribulations. being queer has often meant being rejected and so writing a book about being gay or lesbian is often writing a book where the author stakes a claim on their own identity. they are exploring their identity and what makes them who they are, through fiction. every book of fiction, queer or otherwise, is a reflection of their author in some way; because of what queers have had to deal with in their lives - especially in the 20th century - the personal is automatically made political and so queer authors are blessed (cursed?) with automatically having a story to tell. the story of their life, the story of how they came to be the person who is writing a book. the telling of that story, that combining of the author's personal life with a piece of fiction that they are writing, becomes many things: a challenge and a political stance; a personal stance and a way to share stories that emphasize the universality of experience; a rejection of the supposed Objective in favor of the Subjective; and of course a narrative where the author is not just the writer of the piece, they are a character in that piece - the book as a direct reflection and exploration of the author. meta-fiction, of sorts. I do this myself, the insertion of the author's experiences, in many of my own reviews - I have a whole shelf dedicated to those sorts of reviews. but hey, I'm a queer, so self-absorbed self-reflection and of course insertion of myself in all sorts of places comes naturally to me. ba-dum ching?

anyway, I was challenged in surprising, often positive ways by many of these essays. a lot of them are personal narratives about the essay writers, their own experiences as a queer, and how the book in question impacted them on a personal level. this may not be the right guide for the reader who wants a survey of Queer Fiction. but it is a good book for those who are interested in how a book can impact a person, or how a person came to be the person who is loving or disliking the book in question. for a guidebook, it is remarkably personal and at times it reads like a series of journal entries written by a lot of very different people who have one thing in common - namely, their queerness.

and so the book rises or falls on how much interest the reader has in the personality of each essay writer. it was a mixed bag for me. I was enchanted by Brian Bouldrey writing on Ronald Firbank, Jane DeLynn writing on Virginia Woolf, and Tania Katan writing on Audre Lourde - but only because I found each of these essayists to be an intriguing person in their own right. I liked their personal stories. conversely, I found Kevin Killian's, Mark Behr's and V.G. Lee's respective pieces on Rimbaud, Alice Walker, and Jeanette Winterson to be practically intolerable, probably because I didn't especially enjoy the personalities or stylistic decisions on display.

there are a number of straightforward critical appreciations in the book as well. although most get rather lost in the mix of all the personal stories, my two favorite essays were actually standard book reviews. the estimable Edmund White does a splendid job writing on Marguerite Yourcenar. and Eric Karl Anderson's appreciation of Djuna Barnes' brilliant, difficult Nightwood stood out as particularly marvelous. I'll read both of those again; I'm not sure I can say the same for the rest. nonetheless, overall it was an enjoyable experience reading this book. so many voices and life stories - I felt like I was at a retreat for queer authors, listening in on their share sessions.

[Jana · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's rare that I finish reading a book that makes my blood boil, but here we are. This book is, by my estimation, an example of the larger problems with queer literature these days. We, as a community, can do better. Must do better, for the sake of young community members.

Pederasty is not a lofty Greek ideal; it involves a fundamentally abusive power-based relationship. Fullstop. This is a fact that the queer community must accept without glamorizing.

I cannot fault the books analyzed in this collection; they are sexist, racist, and a wide variety of offensive that I can't even begin to list in total here. However, they are products of their cultures, they are glimpses into the ideals, ideas, and beliefs of the past and the present; they carry messages, dangerous messages, powerful messages. It is the reader's responsibility to chose how they will interpret these messages and what they will take with them when they close the book. The essays in this collection are educated readers' interpretations of these books. Some are moving and personal, some are academic. All are well-written. However, this edited collection was published in 2009, and these essays serve as windows into fundamental problems within modern queer culture.

I do not have a problem with Palimpset by Gore Vidal, but Paul Reidinger's essay on Vidal's work? Problematic to say the least. Reidinger opens his essay by waxing poetic on how he, like Vidal, had an affair with a teenage baseball player; a point of commonality between our two authors. However, while Vidal's affair was with a boy the same age as him, Reidinger's affair was with a child of some neighbors who was "at seventeen, was slightly less than half [Reidinger's] age and, by most of the signs, heterosexual." Even more disconcerting is Reidinger comment on Vidal's discussion of some men's predations on teenage boys: the "stab of alarm" Reidinger feels is centered on how close his age is to these older men, a concern he later expands on by commenting that he "did not want to be a dirty old man who gave renewed life to vile stereotypes." From there, the essay about Palimpset continues. Reidinger comes close to acknowledging predatory actions he may have performed, but instead paints himself as a victim (or at least innocent) rather than acknowledging the power imbalance present in his sexual relationship with a neighbor's son. Reidinger's insights on Vidal's work are excellent. His un-critical comments on his own sexual improprieties and potential abuses (abuses of his power, at least), which normalize such dangerous and potentially damaging relationships, are not.

If Reidinger's essay was the only one guilty of normalizing/glamorizing/perpetuating such abusive relationships, I would not be offended. However, this happens repeatedly throughout Canning's edited collection. One author, Blair Mastbaum, comes close to addressing this issue in his essay on Matthew Stadler's Allan Stein. The novel focuses on a schoolteacher's affair with his fifteen-year-old student, Stéphane (despite the name, Stéphane is a boy). Mastbaum notes that "in a relationship between someone younger and older, particularly when one of them is a boy, the power always remains with the older person. It may seem that the man is being drawn to the boy, so the boy is in control but this seeming draw is an obsession that doesn't exist outside of the man's mind." However, Stadler's work "feels different. Stéphane is in control I think, and it's cool." Mastbaum proceeds to not discuss in what way the relationship depicted in Allan Stein is subversive, and instead discusses how "Stadler writes about sex with teenagers better than any other writer" (What is that even supposed to mean? Is Mastbaum keeping track of, and rating, how awesome authors are at writing potentially abusive sex scenes between a consenting adult and an individual who is incapable of providing consent?) and then proceeds to describe how apparently amazing sex between this schoolteacher and his student is for the reader. Mastbaum closes his essay with a discussion of how Allan Stein could be seen as "a homo Lolita," except that it isn't a satire. Lolita was about a grown man creating an idealized image of a child, sexualizing her, and convincing himself that not only was this little girl capable of giving consent but that she somehow was partially responsible for his lusty feelings and advances. I definitely see the parallels between Allan Stein and Lolita, but I can't help but to feel that Mastbaum completely misread Nabokov's work and, by extension, Stadler's.

Essays such as those by Reidinger and Mastbaum definitely left a horrid taste in my mouth. I thought we'd, as a community, outgrown the gilded glamor of pederasty and instead were learning to protect queer youths from those who may prey on them. I was wrong. These essays, written within the past decade, instead use literature as a way to defend and even find meaning and beauty in modern-day pederasty. Some of the essays in this book were wonderful, such as Kathy Acker's writing on The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, Stella Duffy's on Carol/The Price of Salt and Mark Behr's on The Color Purple. But they cannot make up for the careless and painful essays that they share a book with, essays that excuse and even glamorize (and in Mastbaum's case, find sexy) the victimization of queer youths. Where is the essay that analyzes how the events of Allan Stein affected Stéphane?

I was so excited when I found this book in a clearance bin for $2. I would have paid full price for it. Now, I want my $2 back.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangely enough, the edition I have isn't introduced by the great Harold Bloom, as announced here, but by Canning himself. This being said, here's a book that is essential reading (if there's any such thing) for anyone interested in gay writing. This book is much more than just a crash course through the history of literature under the gay angle. It is a marvelous way to: 1) discover some texts, fiction or non-fiction, that one may never have heard of before (or have not had a chance to open yet) 2) to learn about beloved favorites, and to think about them in fresh and new ways 3) to find out what a very diverse group of writers and intellectuals think of some important (even if not necessarily famous) books. Some of these authors, confiding about the role some books have played in their life, are actually deeply moving, as Mark Behr on The Color Purple. Others have a more analytical approach. Each chapter is relatively brief, and introduces the reader both to the written world of a gay book, and to the inner world of the one writing about it: the result is fascinating, sometimes uneven (everybody will have personal favorites and dislikes), but always illuminating. It's also, of course, a great source to explore the diversity and richness of gay literature, outside the most taken road - it's quite surprising, and exciting, to find out how many books chosen are quite obscure.

[M. Jane Colette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I belong to a Queer Writers Group/Book Club that intermittently moans and argues that there aren’t even lesbian books out there. Richard Canning to the rescue. The brilliant thing about this book is that it introduces readers to 50 books from the queer canon, if you like, but also, as each book is written about by a modern writer, a modern writer (queer and not) and her work.

We will never argue that there aren’t enough queer books to read again. We are now arguing which one to read next.

So. Awesome.

Happy.

As is always the case with an anthology, there are essays that resonate with me and others that annoy me, and a handful that are outright pretentious. But the overall effort, and the overall pay-off for me--and my community--from reading this book is immense.

[Zoe Kaplan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty uneven book. The bulk of it ranges between “good” and “very good,” with seven or eight essays that are deeply wonderful, and five that are just bad - a couple because they are boring, the rest because they romanticize pederasty, not just within the fiction, but in the lives of the essay writer.

With the exception of those three essays, however, the book is a strong collection. It has caused my TBR to grow more than I’d like it to.

[Jayne Furlong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome collection of essays! My only complaint is that it was heavier on essays about male literature than female.
I now have about 40 more books to read thanks to reading this one :)

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is interesting that Harold Bloom's name is attached to this anthology of essays (personal and critical) of GLBT books. Richard Canning has all copyright reserved according to the publishing page in the book. Either way, I hope that this will be something that someone in cyber Goodreads world will fix.

I enjoyed every word in this book. Like all criticism, it was easy and fun to read. The most exceptional essays have nice personal touches, as well as fabulous writing. The essays on Moby Dick and Mrs. Dalloway are both nicely written and very personal.

It is truly a book that I'm going to try and read everything in it. It should be a list for everyone to read, as the title suggests.

Better yet, Canning uses it as a vehicle to open up literature that is often overlooked and not already in the Canon. The titles may seem weird, The Book of Samuel in The Bible or Gore Vidal's memoir Palimpsest, because they are not usually viewed as "gay" books. They do fit into GLBT literary history. Each essay may give a new view of what we should read to dive deeper into the "Gay Canon," but the essays often lead the reader to more literature that may be seen as subversive and beautifully delightful!

Must read for anyone with a degree in English, gay, gay-friendly, gay-curious, gay-intrigued, has a gay cousin, or simply loves to be free in thought, whim or experience.

All I can say is, pick it up, and enjoy.

[Susan Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of personal essays and literary criticism of Gay and Lesbian Literature from a variety of writers. It's a mixed bag with certain essays that really touched me, (quite a few of the writers talked personally about their own experience and related it back to why they were recommending the piece of literature), but others that felt a little more detached and in this particular collection that meant they felt a little flat.

I would have loved for this book to have been more of an LGBTQ+ collection rather than lesbian/gay (although they do talk about some authors who I believe are generally thought of as bisexual/queer i.e. James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf). This collection does also seem to be weighed heavily towards male writers, in terms of both works studied and the essay contributors themselves which is a shame. (In terms of the authors of the works there are 33 books written by men, 15 written by women and 2 that are anonymous, in terms of essay contributors there are 38 essays written by men and 12 by women.)

I read this mainly to find book recommendations of some Queer classics that I haven't read yet and in that this collection definitely worked for me. I also feel I will come back and re-read the essays as and when I read some more books from the list, and perhaps get more out of them. All in all I'd say if your'e interested its worth a read.

[Jessica Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a little on the fence about this book. I read it pretty quickly and thought about it when I wasn't reading it so it certainly managed to entertain me. However I did have some major problems. One, I'm annoyed that it only covers fifty books (some of which don't even qualify as actual novels). I have tons of books about book and they generally keep the minimum at a cool hundred. I have a hard time believing that there are just so few good gay-themed books in the world. Second, the essays covering the novels are all written by different people and the quality of the writing sometimes changes drastically from essay to essay. It would have been nice if some of the authors had been less concerned about their individual craft and more concerned about the book they were trying to sell me on. Third, and I know this is petty, but there are definitely fewer lesbian-themed books covered. Come on, guys, share the love a little. This book was fun and it made me want to read some stuff I'd never heard of before, but honestly I think they could have done better. And the new cover sucks.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent list of key books of gay literature. Certainly it is not complete at only 50 books, but for anyone wanting a recommended list, this is a great place to start.

[W. Stephen Breedlove · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A TIRAMISU OF WORDS”

Richard Canning gathered a diverse group of fifty writers and turned them loose to choose works of literature that have “GLBTQ resonance” and then write about them. The result is Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Mus Read, a rich, provocative collection of essays on a wonderfully varied selection of well-known, not-so-well-known, and downright obscure gay and lesbian literature.

Aaron Hamburger contributes a witty, yet bittersweet essay on the story of David and Jonathan that is told in 1 and 2 Samuel. Lisa Cohen’s case for Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novel More Women than Men could create renewed interest in the most delightfully queer of writers. Mark Merlis ingeniously connects A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad with the Columbine shootings and sheds new light on these poems that are mostly read in adolescence.

Almost every writer tosses out a highly quotable observation that leaps off the page. Christopher Bram writes of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: “Chickenhawks can get awfully longwinded describing their beloveds.” Regina Marley describes Olive Chancellor in Henry James’s The Bostonians as “demonstrating that the U-Haul joke has a long provenance.”

In his essay on Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest, Paul Reidinger writes: “Literature is a layered confection, after all; a tiramisu of words.” Our GLBTQ literature has many layers, as these essays indelibly show. This book is a splendid source for book group selections, not only from the works discussed, but also from the contributors’ books listed after their essays.

[James Choi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read this anthology, I found it to be an enlightening journey through the rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ literature. The essays are thoughtfully written, providing context and personal reflections that deepen the reader's appreciation of each selected work. While some entries are more accessible than others, the collection as a whole offers a comprehensive look at the evolution of gay and lesbian narratives in literature. It's a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the diverse voices and stories that have shaped LGBTQ+ literary history. :)

[G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange book of reviews. It helps if you have read the books being analyzed. I read it hoping to get some sense of other books I might like to read. I only got one new possibility out of it. Many of the reviewers seemed more interested in proving how erudite they were than in anything else

[Bill Fletcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not really 50 books everybody must read so much as 50 books that 50 gay and lesbian authors think are important in some way. Some great reviews (most of which are really more autobiography than review), with only a few clinkers.