Celebrating GLBT Literature – Part Five
Today is our last installment of the Celebrating GLBT Literature series where readers offered their insight. I’m posting a comment as it’s own topic because I’m not sure everyone saw this buried in the threads and it offers some really great recommendations and thoughts.
Reader Cary:
I’ve enjoyed reading what everybody had to say about why they like GLBT lit. Hope it’s okay if I chime in with some of why I like it.
1. It is a kind of outsider lit, queer culture being something outside of the mainstream in some ways and yet very much part of the larger culture. (Some of the m/m romances I read these days are set in a world where same sex pairings are unremarkable — even firemen and cops having virtually no issues about gay coworkers. I don’t know that world, but it’s lovely that so many writers seem to, and maybe over time writing about that world may usher it into being.) I always feel myself to be a non-mainstream, more fringe person, and I like books that cover the gamut of life, but from a sort of sideways, semi-outsider perspective, which is something I especially like about GLBT literature.
2. How I found it. (Not that anyone asked.) I first fell into m/m books back in the early 1970s, when Mary Renault’s books were coming out in paperback and I was in high school probably. (So long ago, it’s all a bit misty and vague.) I loved Renault’s classical world themes, Ancient Greece and Alexander the Great, and they had these amazing romances between men. Did I know of such a thing before reading them? Well, I remember my best friend telling me he’d happened upon his brother and a male friend in the shower together, and I did know what that meant, even in junior high. In the classical world Mary Renault depicted, m/m pairings were mainstream, but in her contemporary or near-contemporary novels like The Charioteer, what a contrast — the ostracism of the m/m pairings. That’s what got me going on m/m from my high school days: gay friends and Mary Renault. (I didn’t know my best guy friends in high school were gay until later years, but that we all loved The Persian Boy was a big clue.) Have to admit that I thought the m/m pairings in Renault’s book were HOT, but I also thought back then that it was not okay to think that. (Transgressive.
) In late 70s/ early 80s, I was hanging out with lesbians in law school (talking about women’s issues, naturally, in those days) and read some lesbian authors (for the sexual politics
3. It’s that never quite fitting in like you’re “supposed to” thing that I identify with very strongly in GLBT books. For romance in particular, I enjoy the m/m, because I don’t compare myself (as a woman) to the men in the romances, while in a m/f or f/f romance, I always feel a need to compare and I just don’t identify well with most of those heroines. When I was younger, I liked the m/f romances, but I just can hardly read them any more. And I always have liked the GLBT books for the alternate views of society and the courage of the characters and the authors.
4. And you never know what strangely transgressive things you may run into in GLBT writing. It makes me chuckle still how shocking I found George Baxt’s first Phoenix Love mystery. A Queer Kind of Death, I think it is. That book ran me into boundaries and expectations I didn’t even know I had. I won’t spoil it for anyone who might decide to seek it out. It was published maybe in the 1960s. It’s actually clever and delightful — and transgressive. I like to know that authors are capable of true originality that can still be accessible story telling.
Thank you to everyone that participated in this series, it’s been truly wonderful!
Posted in Ramblings
#3 particularly resonated with me – I was thinking “Yes, that’s it exactly” as I read it!
#3 resonated with me, also, but #1 moreso. “that sideways, semi-outsider perspective” hit it right on. My other favorite brand of reading these days is urban fantasy, and I like it for the same reason – Characters out of the mainstream but still very much a part of it, and in a world that is sort of like reality but not really.
Some great thoughts here, and I agree with a lot of it. I know many people read for comfort and familiarity, but I like to read for challenge and a new twist, either in style or plot. I like to be surprised – not in the horror way! – and engaged.
I especially liked “and maybe over time writing about that world may usher it into being.” Good God, I’m always bleating on about one of the best ways to bring something into being is through familiarity. I think it’ll take much longer than I ever hoped, but I’ll continue to do so.
Great post, thanks for sharing!
Hey, Kassa, Chris, wren and Clare – Thanks for the validation, for identifying with me a bit. I’m glad there are so many authors and readers taking interest in GLBT books these days. One of the best things we take away as readers is to be introduced to the world as seen and experienced by others’ eyes.