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Introduction: Gay Literature
What is Gay Literature? Is it possible to talk about gay literature before homosexuality was invented? Or before people started to research the subject? This short introduction will try to answer these questions and also in some ways questioning the genre when it comes to to smaller languages, taking Swedish as an example.
Gregory Woods in A History of Gay
Literature, especially in the chapter "The making of the Gay Tradition"
tries to find the exact point of the birth. He claims that literature, depicting male homosexuality or male love, has been around a very long time. Indeed Gilgamesh, which is the oldest written story that has been brought down to us, had a gay themed relationship between its two male heroes. However this does not, according to Wood, mean that the genre started this early. He argues that there is no point to talk about a genre until scholars have started to find a canon. The genre does not start to exist only because there are homosexuals who writes, but the genre rather grows out of the sum of the process, the product and the evaluation of the scholars. Therefore gay literature genre's birthplace is not some Assyrian ruin with the Gilgamesh but rather at the Victorian universities, where student, taught by likes of Walter Pater and Benjamin Jovett, started to list the names of philosopher and poets that loved boys. These lists would later be the source to anthologies that was to be
written.
The listing of
homosexuals was not a new phenonema, as these lists existed long time before. Christopher Marlowe was the first to do it in Edward II
where the relationship between Piers Gaveston and the king
is compared with famous male couples from the past, like Alexander the Great and Hephaestion. In the poem Don Leon (1823-1836), assumely written by Lord Byron, the poet justifies his love for boys with other known homosexual poets before him. Oscar Wilde is also known to do this in his speech "The love that dare not speak its name" during the sodomi-trial where Wilde later would be sentenced to prison. Woods points out that we are now talking about homosexual men who tries to create a homosexual tradition, to show that homosexuality is something highly natural even common, and that it has existed for as long as humans have.
Gregory Woods claims that the
birth of the gaybook can be pinpointed to a certain time, and that is when an
open homosexual writes about his experiences being homosexual. This works very
well when it comes to larger languages such as English, Spanish or French, where lots
of literature can be printed, because there is a very diversed market. However
it becomes problematic when applied to smaller sized languages, where the amount
of books published every year will be limited due to the limitations in the market. That is not to say that homophobia is not a part of it but just another layer that has to be reflected on. In Swedish literature for instance, there has been very few open homosexual authors, and most of them has
been in the late 20th century. There has of course existed closeted homosexual writers, such as the religious writer Pontus Wikner whose homosexuality was not known until after his death, and therefore he would not be able to write a gay book applying Wood's rule.
In 'En gayguide till litteraturen'
the authors attempts to create a Swedish canon. Listed are authors like Vilhelm Ekelund (an important 20th Century poet), Jonas Gardell
(novellist and dramatist), Lars Norén (dramatist) and Inger Edelfeldt
(novellist), also Pontus Wikner is pointed out as a gay author. Gay readers might recognize these authors, but I do not think that the public in large would count either Vilhelm Ekelund or Lars Norén as gay authors.
Scholars
of Swedish literature has not to come to a final agreement on
how to define gayliterature. Three main standpoints has grown out of the debate however:
Taking this stance books by authors,
who are not homosexual males, would not be classed as gay
literature. Personally I am opposed to this stance because it exludes
important literature which has made a difference and perhaps
inspired homosexual writers. Another problem is
what I have argued before that there are very few open homosexual writers before 20th
Century. Even Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu would not meet the demands
of this stance although the author was clearly gay, the book has a strong homosexual theme and has characters that are clearly homosexuals,
because he himself was not an open homosexual.
Greger Eman argues that authors like Jonas
Gardell weather he writes about homosexuality or not, sells good within the
homosexual circles and all his work should therefore be classified as gay literature whether it has a gay theme or not. He backs this up by the sales figures in Rosa Rummet (now closed bookshop runned by RFSL). This stance also embraces female writers
if they are read by homosexual men.
However this means that the plot becomes unimportant when classifying the book as gayliterature, which again exlude books in the genre. One an example is Swedish author Jascha Golowanjuk who wrote up to 40 novels with homosexual themes, but never reached the homosexuals at that time, and therefore cannot be classified as gay literature.
This stance focus on the text, and only the text. The author's sexuality becomes superfluous. This means that all of the books that falls away in the other stances can be included.
I have taken the last stance in the debate on what gay literature is; all literature that portrays Men who Connect with Men (MCM) is gay literature. I think it is important to acknowledge that every written story has a life of their own away from their author.
Within this page I aim to list books with a gay-theme or that has MCM characters. It is an on-going exploration that hopefully never will be fully finished, since new books about homosexual/queer/gay/bisexual men comes out in greater numbers every year.