The Classic Gay Novel?

[Aunty]

I was having a mag with some friends of mine the other day when the subject of what a classic gay novel should look like. You know what sort of storylines, plots, characters etc., and themes should it contain? I mean there are potentially so many. Coming out, boy meets boy, fag hags, bisexuals, denial of sexuality, trapped in a sexless str8 marriage, longing, unrequited love for a str8 boy, sex, cruising, butterflysтАЩ, but then open love, visibility, courage, truthfulness, pride, etc., I mean the list is endless really. We couldnтАЩt agree, but maybe thatтАЩs because what it means to be gay, and gay experience in general, is just too disparate among gay men throughout time and place for a single laundry list of themes to emerge and be agreed upon.

But I am mindful that if we think about str8 literature there is any number of classics we could name that deal with the themes of heterosexual love, but homosexual love?

So what I would like to know from the men here is from your perspectives, what themes would you expect to see in a gay novel that would raise it to the level of a classic of gay literature? The classics often tell us about what it is to be human, so what should a gay novel tell us about what it is to be gay?

Aunty are you trying to pick our brains? Will we at least get a credit on the back cover?
So we are talking a classic romance?
I see you are being serious, well OK:

I am thinking along the lines of the story being less about all the things you mentioned, and more along the lines of a hidden love, not one that necessarily is in denial but one that is very, very private.
No coming out or short term or any of the other things mentioned ( I keep seeing this in movie format, but I am doing my best to concentrate) but the inner sanctuary of the minds involved.
Perhaps the private world of a gay relationship where both persons in the relationship live totally different and separate lives due to conventions of the time or just because it is a safer, safe from the overbearing world they must inhabit.
Forced apart if you like, but who are also totally dependant on one another for everything. This could include a bit of butterfly, it most definitely will be a drama as well. No gay relationship exists without tears. Perhaps no other kind either. It will include happiness and deep feelings of security but also manic feelings of vulnerability.
I think it could also be quite tragic as well, it could include accusation and mob justice, and the love of a boy, that is a child substitute. It could all be quite poignant and not necessarily about the actual physical side of love. Death, a funeral, not invited to his great and only eternal loves burial. Denied and less denial. I dunno, will that do for some ideas?

The setting is a problem? America might do? But without the Americans if you know what I mean, maybe Australia na? i am falling asleep, just hit that Submit button....aw fuck one spell cheque to go. why are some peopless sostrick on us mere mortals.

... doing a little plagiarism, just nick the best bits from:
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil
Latter Days
Last Summer
Room With a View
Geography Club
Mysterious Skin
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime (not gay themed but love it)
Life of Pi (again not gay themed but love it)
Almost Like Being in Love
Last Days of Summer
Boy Meets Boy
Death in Venice
Clay's Way
The Night Listener
The World of Normal Boys

So, coming of age, drug abuse, animals, death, hysterical women, unrequited love, straight boy experimenting, mystery, murder and then throw in a few 'Brett gazed longingly at Jared's throbbing manhood in the shower after football practice' and you have a winner. Tacky, but a winner! :cheers:

These may not be but I liked them, others might hate them. Reading, like eating, is a matter of taste, some people like truffles, others say they taste like flatulence smells; why not just have a limburger cheese burger.

Charles Nelson - The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up Viet Nam
James Earl Hardy - B-Boy Blues
Shyam Selvadurai - Funny Boy (Set In Sri Lanka.)
Ricardo Ramos - Flipping About Filipinos\Flips

Authors I like:
Michael Cunninghan - A Home At the End of the WorldAlan Hollinghurst - Swimming Pool LibraryChristopher Isherwood - A Single ManArmistead Maupin
Gordon Merick - The Lord Won't Mind (and other mindless but entertaining beach reads W/no suicides.)
Malcolm Purdy - Eustis Chisholm & the Works
John Rechy When your feeling rauncy and nothing but sleeze with scratch the itch.
Edmund White - Haven't read Nocturn for the King of Naples but it's on my list.
Tennessee Williams - One Arm and Other Stories Maybe out of print.
Another no-brainer, The Winter of Our Discotheque (King Queer?) but fun, Forgot who wrote it.
Ditto the above, Blind Items Some good zingers. Every old queens fantasy?

I think everyone read The Front Runner. Wonder how many others thought it was a bore?

[Aunty]

Aunty are you trying to pick our brains? Will we at least get a credit on the back cover?
So we are talking a classic romance?
I see you are being serious, well OK:

I am thinking along the lines of the story being less about all the things you mentioned, and more along the lines of a hidden love, not one that necessarily is in denial but one that is very, very private.
No coming out or short term or any of the other things mentioned ( I keep seeing this in movie format, but I am doing my best to concentrate) but the inner sanctuary of the minds involved.
Perhaps the private world of a gay relationship where both persons in the relationship live totally different and separate lives due to conventions of the time or just because it is a safer, safe from the overbearing world they must inhabit.
Forced apart if you like, but who are also totally dependant on one another for everything. This could include a bit of butterfly, it most definitely will be a drama as well. No gay relationship exists without tears. Perhaps no other kind either. It will include happiness and deep feelings of security but also manic feelings of vulnerability.
I think it could also be quite tragic as well, it could include accusation and mob justice, and the love of a boy, that is a child substitute. It could all be quite poignant and not necessarily about the actual physical side of love. Death, a funeral, not invited to his great and only eternal loves burial. Denied and less denial. I dunno, will that do for some ideas?

The setting is a problem? America might do? But without the Americans if you know what I mean, maybe Australia na? i am falling asleep, just hit that Submit button....aw fuck one spell cheque to go. why are some peopless sostrick on us mere mortals.



Maybe you are right Cedric. Maybe gay life in many respects has just become to clich├йd to make the stuff of a classic? Coming out, Aids, Drag Queens, Cruising, Camp, these images project a caricature of gay life, something we recognise when we see it as тАШgayтАЩ but really it is our truth as gay men distorted, that for most of us this is simply not the narrative of our experiences as modern homosexuals. At best these now are nothing but the salacious clich├йs that titillate and amuse straights, that keep us as a group sufficiently foreign to be classified them; not us. Maybe our clich├йs now do nothing more than to keep us trapped, disempowered, disenfranchised and enslaved to yesterdays agenda?

Maybe you are right, what is needed now for the great gay classic is a collection of stories that paint the intense struggle for the intimate moment, but something that is very much done in private. In private thoughts, in private houses. in private moments. I wonder if that means as gay men we have moved from once being anonymous to now being private? From a love that dare not speak its name, to one that now speaks, but in private?

I would love to write the great gay classic novel, but that would require talent as a writer, which sadly is something I have not got! Lol. But if I did, I would set it in the deserts of China, (you are right it is not an American tale) with two beautiful young Chinese men, or maybe a young Chinese and a young Uyghur, or a Chinese and a Tibetan and I would move them around China a lot, with the different landscapes of China acting as metaphors for their internal spaces and their progression as lovers. And thereтАЩd have to be Opera in it, so IтАЩll make one of them a Puccini fan! And dear Cedric IтАЩll put you in it, as an incredibly hot one night stand!

i just had an idea, ok avoiding all the clich├й's around Lawrence of Arabia ( if this is possible) this is in fact a gay classic, but it could be set in the middle east, nothing across the Arab Israeli stuff, but rather a simple village setting lets say in Afghanistan?
they could smoke a lot of opium and see the world through a haze of death and destruction clinging to our love in the high mountain plateau. child like skin against skin buried in fur. back drop of bearded extreme hansome locals, gaunt and striking and doing stuff around fires and guns secretly.

they Take full advantage of the American presence ( a small outpost, but they have TV and medicine and good underwear etc or what ever) by insinuating themselves on figures of minor power. it was all a mistake !! But one of the soldiers gets killed, a broken neck, is found stripped and contorted, at the foot of a cliff one wintery morning being pecked at by ravins, by a shepherd who keeps the secrete, but knows who did it. he cant live with the guilt and tries to tell the soldiers, because he needs medicine for his dog, who is very ill, it is a truly magnificent gaurdian breed , with soft blonde curls and and a gently wagging tail.
They leave just in time, for the mountains again but this time the very peaks where even the trees dare not tread. and one gets killed on the way the other making it to a hideaway used by, well, insurgents, will do. And there he suddenly finds out he is already a man, when he sees his face in the water a few wisps of hair trickle from his chin, he picks up a stone and throws it at a ravin which drops dead with some fluffy flopping flapping of feathers, blood on his stolen shoes he cries. And the mountain stream babbles away into the distance, he drops his lovers shirt which he kept in his tightly held fist, into the water, and it unfolds slowly and is gone.

I know just the right part for the role. He works in Dubai, i think he would need at least 3 millions US and would be worth ever cent, in his see through cotton fabric, , woollen hats green eyes, sheep scenery...........

Cedrick, I used to play that game in the garage with Jackie Henery when we were ten.
And Auntie's sounds like a Leonardo DiCaprio movie. My Left Foot? Or My Fat Arse?
I don't think there's ever been a classic gay novel.
I think I'll rewrite Gone With the Wind with an all male cast and call it, Blow and Run.

[Aunty]

You know Cedric I was thinking. Afghanistan and China share a common border, ok it's not much of a border but it's still there. As your beautiful Afghan with the emerald eyes gazes as his lover's shirt drifts ever further away from him, what is he going to do now? He could turn West and walk back to the parched valleys and choking dust of conflict that have ruled Afghanistan for far to long. Bur what is there there for him? More walls for the Taliban to crush him with, bombs from the Americans, mullahs from Iran, poverty and corruption from Pakistan? No maybe he should turn the other way and look for a new beginning, a new life in the shinning Phoenix that is rising once more in the East? The border with China is only 200 miles away. Perhaps we should have your boy cross paths with my boys and have them all meet up under the leaves of a Bunyan tree in Kashgar?

Six mill huh? And your cut is????lol

Sirius I think that would be a fantastic idea. I'd buy a copy. Just think if you did that to all the classics, the new meanings it would give to some of the best lines in books and films. "Louy, I think this will be the start of a beautiful friendship" Of course in Blow and Run you may need to explain exactly what makes Big Daddy so big, just to save any confusion! But don't you think it's sad that there is no gay Gone With The Wind?

For the scinic's out there, what about a Thai/Gay Gone with the wind - 'Gone With The Money'.

Or perhaps some other titles (You work out the original title):
An Indian's Passage
Portnoy's Compliant
From Here to Tomorrow
The Catcher in the Shortstop
The Potato Queen never likes Rice
The French Lietenant's Ladyboy
I Cravedick
The Satanic Viagra
101 Hot Thai Dishes - actually this last one I made up and imagine as a cook book :cheers:

Aunty cheer up, a new gay age is dawning, and in your timeless way, you and all of us will feel the full force of being one with the world. BrokeBack mountain, (Taiwanese Chinese) is a good start. Look to the horizon, even if that is only the back of your garage door, Sirius.

Aunty I think we might have a date, on that craggy border crossing between Afghanistan and China, i would have to work on my man a little, perhaps sweeten his fee? Because my man is unsure if he wants to fill his lungs with pollution and and his tummy with poison, just to get indifferent cock shy Chinese queens, turning up their tiny "noses" at his magnificent part. And besides he can't envisage home being a shopping mall for ever. He just cannot be tied down like that, even if it is Donnatella's best take on S&M for tai tai's who have had one too many dim-sum.

He needs the full weight of oiled leather and the smell of the great wide world in his nostrils, and a river or three to cross. His eyes need to focus into the distance, and that requires at least a couple of thousand hectares of virgin wood and mountainside. None of this up close with your head stuck in a bowl of sticky-rice congee, he needs vision, and exploration of vast untapped minds.

I will see what i can do, Mongolia might just persuade him,but then you are talking epic, and well that also increases the fee somewhat. sorry to keep banging on about money, but honestly woudnt it be better for him for you, if he went down to the coast, and in his borrowed wet undies, struggling with a scarlet sailed dhow on a soft white beach, sail off into the vast deep cobalt blue Arabian sea? Just a thought. i don't want to crowd him, you know what they are like, high spirited and full of well bred energy, he could bolt, and believe me there is just no replacement, not this side of the Burj al arab.

Big Daddy in Gone With the Wind? Are you confusing it with Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, Aunty? Already gay, sort of, but what to call the really, really gay version? I shudder to think! Dick Through a Cold Tin Wall, did come to mind but didn't Joe Orton do that one already?
Which reminds me of the kid, I can't remember his name but was a rocker for a while, who won a poetry contest for a poem called Thick As a Brick. Then the dummy informed the judges he wasn't saying, brick.
And they took the prize away form him.