Twenty Great Gay Novels for Summer

Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time

In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a vast seven-part novel that is at once a kind of autobiography of Marcel Proust, a vast social panorama of France in the years just before and during World War I, and an immense  meditation on love, jealousy and the relation of art to reality.  From The Guermantes Way to Sodom et Gomorrhe, homosexual relations count significantly among the liasons both surmised and real, discreet and explicit.  One of the supreme achievements in fiction, these six volumes changed the entire climate of 20th-century literature.

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice

The celebrated novella of a middle-aged German writer's tormented passion for a Polish youth met on holiday in Venice, and its tragic consequences. From a master of elegant  indirection dedicated to muted presentations of matters that were anathema to both his public and his own sedulously respectable persona comes a transfiguring intersection of artistic with homosexual passion from one of the century's great writers.  

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde’s dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal  youth and beauty. Taking the reader in and out of London drawing  rooms, to the heights of aestheticism, and  to  the  depths of decadence, The Picture of Dorian Gray is not only a melodrama about   moral   corruption.  Upon publication, Dorian was condemned as dangerous, poisonous, stupid, vulgar, and  immoral, and Wilde as a  “driveling   pedant.”   The novel, in  fact, was used against Wilde at his much-publicized trials for “gross indecency,” which led to his imprisonment and exile on the European continent. Even so, The Picture of Dorian Gray firmly established Wilde as one of the great voices of the Aesthetic  movement, with a classic as timeless as its hero.

Petronius – Satyricon

Perhaps the strangest and most strikingly modern work to  survive from the ancient world, The Satyricon relates the hilarious mock epic adventures of the impotent Encolpius, and his struggle to regain virility. Here Petronius brilliantly brings to life the courtesans, legacy-hunters, pompous professors  and  dissolute  priestesses  of the  age  and, above all, Trimalchio, the archetypal self-made millionaire whose pretentious vulgarity on an insanely grand scale makes him one of the great comic characters in literature. Seneca's  The Apocolocyntosis, a  malicious  skit  on the  deification  of Claudius the Clod', was designed by the author  to ingratiate   himself  with  Nero,  who  was Claudius' successor. Together, the  two provide a powerful insight into a darkly fascinating period of Roman history.

James Baldwin – Giovanni's Room

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion between two men—one ready to love, the other not—revealing the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

William S. Burroughs – Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of Bill Lee, addicted to hustlers and narcotics, and his monumental descent into hell.  His journey takes him from New York to Tangiers as he runs from the police and searches for a place to buy and take drugs.  Ultimately, he enters the hallucinatory fantasy world of the Interzone, a nightmarish urban wasteland where individual freedom confronts the forces of totalitarianism.  While chronicling the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture.  

Jean Genet – Our Lady of the Flowers

The novel, written while Jean Genet was in prison for burglary and  published in 1944, is as French as Notre Dame des fleurs. The  novel and the author were championed by many contemporary writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who helped engineer a pardon for Genet. A wildly imaginative fantasy of the Parisian underworld, the novel tells the story of Divine, a male prostitute who  consorts  with  thieves,  pimps,  murderers, and other criminals and who has many sexual adventures. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, the novel affirms a new moral order, one  in which criminals are saints, evil is glorified, and conventional taboos are freely violated.

G. Roger Denson  –  Voice of Force

One of this year's best novels chronicles the escalating estrangement and tragedy that ensues when a gay man and a straight man search for mutual ground despite the family, faith, profits, and politics diving them. Newspaper critic Ragland Hughes is openly gay; opera tenor Cosimo Fratangelo is famously straight. No one gay or straight says a word as they watch the men's relationship evolve from professional association to loving friendship—so long as both men remain alive and profitable. When the body of one of the men washes ashore off Long Island Sound, convulsive testimony indicts the survivor as the prosecution's lone suspect. The media melee that ensues not only casts unwelcome light on the forces keeping a gay man and a straight man from enjoying friendship, it brands Hughes a predator of heterosexual men and Fratangelo a sociopath driven by ambition. 

Truman Capote – Other Voices, Other Rooms

Published when Truman Capote was only twenty-three years old,Other Voices, Other Rooms is a literary touchstone of the mid-twentieth century.  In this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to live with the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at Skully's Landing, the decaying mansion in rural Alabama, his father is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his morose stepmother, Amy, eccentric cousin Randolph, and a defiant little girl named Idabel, who soon offers Joel the love and approval he seeks.  Fueled by a world-weariness that belied Capote's tender age, this novel tempers its themes of waylaid hopes and lost innocence with an appreciation for small pleasures and the colorful language of its time and place.

E. M. Forster - Maurice

Completed in 1914, this novel is a condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society and a plea for emotional and sexual honesty. Aware that its publication would cause a furor, Forster ensured that it did not appear until after his death in 1970.

Andre Gide - The Counterfeiters

With a complex structure that presents events transpiring over the course of several generations, Genet paints a picture of a young  artist in search for knowledge through the treatment of homosexuality and the collapse of morality in middle class France.

Andrew  Holleran - Dancer from the Dance 

This haunting, brilliant novel is a seriocomic remembrance of things past—and still poignantly present. It depicts the adventures of Malone, a beautiful young man searching for love amid New York's emerging gay scene. From Manhattan's Everard Baths and after-hours discos to Fire Island's deserted parks and lavish orgies, Malone looks high and  low for meaningful companionship. The person he finds is Sutherland, a campy quintessential queen—and one of the most  memorable literary creations of contemporary fiction. Hilarious,  witty, and ultimately heartbreaking, Dancer from the Dance is truthful, provocative, outrageous fiction told in a voice as close to laughter as to tears.

Christopher Isherwood - A Single Man

When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by  its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a  professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others  reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself.

Yukio Mishima - Confessions of a Mask

One of the classics of modern Japanese fiction, this is the story of an adolescent who must learn to live with the painful fact that he is unlike other young men. Mishima's protagonist discovers  that he is becoming a homosexual in a polite, post-war Japan.   To survive, he must live behind a mask of propriety.