A review of some gay fiction
Discover the best gay fiction in this curated review list, featuring acclaimed titles like Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, Mary Renault's The Charioteer, and Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance. From coming-of-age classics and LGBTQ romance to groundbreaking drama and memoirs, explore standout works by Quentin Crisp, Matthew Rettenmund, and more—perfect for book lovers seeking diverse, thought-provoking queer literature.
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Maurice
by Edward Morgan Forster
Written during 1913 and 1914, Maurice deals with the then unmentionable subject of homosexuality. More unusual, it concerns a relationship that ends happily.
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The Naked Civil Servant
by Quentin Crisp
A comical and poignant memoir of a gay man living life as he pleased in the 1930s In 1931, gay liberation was not a movement—it was simply unthinkable. But in that year, Quentin Crisp made the courageous decision to "come out" as a homosexual. This exhibitionist with the henna-dyed hair was harrassed, ridiculed and beaten. Nevertheless, he claimed his right to be himself—whatever the consequences. The Naked Civil Servant is both a comic masterpiece and a unique testament to the resilience of the human spirit. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Christopher
by Allison Burnett
The unemployed, middle-aged, unattractive, troubled, and lonely gay narrator, B. K. Troop falls madly in lust with his attractive new neighbor, Christopher Ireland, an idealistic young would-be novelist reeling from a bitter divorce embarking on his own quest for a meaningful life, and sets out seduce him. Original.
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Dreyfus Affair
by Peter Lefcourt
The best-hitting, best-fielding young shortstop in America, Randy Dreyfus is his country's hero, but when his affair with second baseman D.J. Pickett is discovered, nothing will ever be the same again.
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The Normal Heart
by Larry Kramer
Dramatizes the onset of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, the agonizing fight to get political and social recognition of it's problems, and the toll exacted on private lives. 2 acts, 16 scenes, 13 men, 1 woman, 1 setting.
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Night Swimmer
by Joseph Olshan
Ten years ago, Will's lover disappeared on a night swim in the Pacific. Was Will's emptiness a feeling of mourning or rejection? He now meets Sean, who is himself the object of a passionate fatal obsession. As they dodge one another, they move in a network of self-conscious, gym-obsessed men.
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Latter Days
by C. Jay Cox
The official movie tie-in to the winner of the Outstanding First Narrative Feature Award at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and the Best Gay Male Feature Film Award at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. A shallow LA party boy falls in love with a hunky, repressed Mormon missionary in this gay romantic drama from the writer of Sweet Home Alabama starring Reese Witherspoon. The theatrical release date of Latter Days is January 2004, starring Jacqueline Besset, Mary Jay Place, Wes Ramsey, Steve Sandvoss and Amber Benson.
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Almost Like Being in Love
by Steve Kluger
A high school jock and nerd fall in love senior year, only to part after an amazing summer of discovery to attend their respective colleges. They keep in touch at first, but then slowly drift apart. Flash forward twenty years. Travis and Craig both have great lives, careers, and loves. But something is missing .... Travis is the first to figure it out. He's still in love with Craig, and come what may, he's going after the boy who captured his heart, even if it means forsaking his job, making a fool of himself, and entering the great unknown. Told in narrative, letters, checklists, and more, this is the must-read novel for anyone who's wondered what ever happened to that first great love.
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Boy Culture
by Matthew Rettenmund
X a wily hustler, has a dilemma. The object of his affections is his roommate Andrew, who is confused about his sexuality. Meanwhile, X's other roommate-a seventeen-year-old precocious partyboy-is falling for X in a big way. The result is an old-fashioned (well, sort of) love triangle peppered with savage one-liners-a touching portrait of love and lust among three very different gay men.
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Shameless
by Paul Burston
Bereft when his partner leaves him for a male prostitute, thirty-something homosexual Martin, finding his friends too embroiled in their own problems to be of help, drowns himself in a hedonistic world of drugs, partying, and casual relationships. A first novel. Original.
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Clay's Way
by Blair Mastbaum
Hypnotic and haunting, this startlingly authentic debut novel presents a viscerally exciting look at contemporary teen life.
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Gross Indecency
by Moises Kaufman
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award In this stunning work of theater, Moises Kaufman turns the trials of Oscar Wilde into a riveting human and intellectual drama. In April 1895 Oscar Wilde brought a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his youthful lover, who had publicly maligned him as a sodomite. In doing so, England's reigning man of letters set in motion a series of events that would culminate in his ruin and imprisonment. For within a year the bewildered Wilde himself was on trial for acts of "gross indecency" and, implicitly—for a vision of art that outraged Victorian propriety. Expertly interweaving courtroom testimony with excerpts from Wilde's writings and the words of his contemporaries, Gross Indecency unveils its subject in all his genius and human frailty, his age in all its complacency and repression. The result is a play that will be read and studied for decades to come.
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At Swim, Two Boys
by Jamie O'Neill
Two young men, Jim, the naive, scholarly son of a Dublin shopkeeper, and Doyler, a rough working boy, struggle with issues of political, religious, and sexual identity in the year leading up to the Easter uprising of 1916.
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Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
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 that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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Dancer from the Dance
by Andrew Holleran
One of the most important works of gay literature, 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.
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The Front Runner
by Patricia Nell Warren
A gifted gay athelete is threatened with outing on his way to the Olympic games. The classic novel from award winning author Patricia Nell Warren.
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Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Moving into the attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy, politically connected Fedden family in 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest becomes caught up in the rising fortunes of this glamorous family and finds his own life forever altered by his association during the boom years of the 1980s. By the author of The Swimming-Pool Library. 30,000 first printing.
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The Charioteer
by Mary Renault
After enduring an injury at Dunkirk during World War II, Laurie Odell is sent to a rural veterans’ hospital in England to convalesce. There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance. Then one day, Ralph Lanyon, a mentor from Laurie’s schoolboy days, suddenly reappears in Laurie’s life, and draws him into a tight-knit social circle of world-weary gay men. Laurie is forced to choose between the sweet ideals of innocence and the distinct pleasures of experience. Originally published in the United States in 1959, The Charioteer is a bold, unapologetic portrayal of male homosexuality during World War II that stands with Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories as a monumental work in gay literature.
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The Vampire Armand
by Anne Rice
In the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand - eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. Armand, who first appeared in all his dark glory more than twenty years ago in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire, the first of The Vampire Chronicles, the novel that established its author worldwide as a magnificent storyteller and creator of magical realms. Now, we go with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood - a ruined city under Mongol dominion - and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood. As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.