My guess is that if you asked anyone born after 1982 to name a gay publishing sensation, they'd tilt their heads towards their smartphone and begin googling 'famous gay writers born after 1982.' Part of the reasons is that there are so few "voices of a new gay generation" and, partly, it's because the Millennial generation, as a whole, has very little interest in the voices and acts that made their comparatively-easier-lives-to-lead worth researching. Almost 70 percent of those polled between 18-30 know someone gay, are comfortable around someone gay, do not think homosexuality is morally wrong and support same-sex marriage. Don't bother me about how we got here, I'm texting.
It would be a great loss, however, if they, or anyone else for that matter, failed to pick and read a copy of Christopher Bram's newest effort, Eminent Outlaws. The book, which a brilliant conceit - that the gay civil rights movement actually started as a literary movement - is also a fun, dishy retelling of some of the biggest names in gay male literature. (Mr. Bram noted that a book of lesbian literature deserves its own effort.)
The book is divided into chapters - "Into the Fifties," "The Sixties," "The Seventies," "The Eighties," and "The Nineties and Beyond" - but could just as easily be compartmentalized by the authors themselves, with Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, Christopher Isherwood, James Baldwin and Truman Capote taking up the first half of the story and Edmund White, Amistead Maupin and Tony Kushner taking up the second half. The poet Allen Ginsberg, playwright Matt Crowley, novelist Michael Cunningham and a handful of other writers get much shorter shrift - and aside for Mr. Baldwin, minority authors are all but redacted - but this is one of those times when perfect must not be the enemy of good.
Mr. Bram, the author of Gods and Monsters, has done a pleasing job of recounting the rich literary traditions of our past without infusing his prose with a lot of dry, tooth-aching analysis. (The New York Times felt just the opposite, criticizing the book for relying more on dish than an susbstantive analysis.) But it's an absorbing narrative arc just the same; from the some of the first openly gay characters in mainstream (read: straight) literature - "Other Voices, Other Rooms," "The City and The Pillar" and "Cat on A Hot Tin Roof" to what I like to call the brutally, self-analytical phase - "Boys in The Band," Faggots," "Dancers From The Dance," to the unapologetically open homosexual characters of the modern era - "Angels in America," "Jeffrey, "A Home At The End of The World" and "The Married Man."
I remember when I was struggling with my sexuality, when AIDS was a gay man's disease and depictions of on-screen of "masculinity" usually involved rapid-fire machinery, sleeveless shirts and a morbid dose of steroids. One day, back in that long-ago era of bookstores, I stumbled across a book that had drawn my attention because there was a handsome young man on the beach on the cover. I had never heard of this author, Edmund White. The year was 1982 and my life, after reading it, was forever about to change.
I wonder these days how anyone struggling with their sexuality has the luxury of stumbling upon on a work of art - specifically a work of fiction - that might, just might give them the courage to step out of the closet. If not, then they always have Bram's panoramic and well-research work of non-fiction, "Eminent Outlaws," to curry favor with.
