The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Reading From Western Antiquity to the instant Day * Edited by Byrne R Fone * Columbia University Pres * $3950 I find it ironic that many of the world's greatest male writers have been gay.

The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Reading From Western Antiquity to the instant Day * Edited by Byrne R Fone * Columbia University Pres * $3950

I find it ironic that many of the world's greatest male writers have been gay, still their bodies of work are claimed from the straight world--just think of William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, or Henry James. And we obstruction them get away with it. Gay lit remains a set of poems about cute sailors. No curious awe they don't respect us: We're not claiming our patrimony.

It has been explained to me that this argument is intellectually specious and that gay lit must confine itself to works dealing with same-sex be in love with OK, for the time being I'll move along with that. In fact, I'll hold it foremost in my mind as I describe and evaluate three modern books.

The first and greatest in quantity valuable is The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature. Edited by dint of Byrne R.S. Fone, it is quite an undertaking--one of those things you're glad some one did but that still appears a little daunting. The great virtue here is the room It starts with ancient Sumerian passages and proceeds to Greece, Rome the Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan England, and those wild Frenchmen then all the way to AIDS and the common day. Most intriguing are the side trips it takes to places like Russia, Egypt Spain, and Latin America. This is the sort of work you will keep on your bookshelf for years, taking it down occasionally to improve your mind, a task that will invariably incline differently from a study of Sumerian topics to a compulsive search for all the piece of poetrys about cute sailors.

Just as pious in a different way is A History of Gay Literature by the agency of Gregory Woods, a British bard and academician. It is a contemplate course but an excellent individual Covering much of the same territory as Columbia Anthology, it presents everything in a social and aesthetic words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following and its observations are measured and well-reasoned. In other words, I agreed with nearly all of them.

I most numerous certainly did not agree with everything in The Gay Canon according to Robert Drake. He attempts to name

the 100 works that "gay men need to read books that formed and influenced the gay heart, mind, and soul" A noble goal, to be fully convinced There's only one problem: He picked the improper books.

Never invite me and Mr Drake to the same dinner party. We will start arguing throughout the soup, and by the nut we will the two be bloodied and still screaming at each other. Eminent Victorians? Brideshead Revisited instead of Vile Bodies? And I find his put-down of the Violet Quill (Robert Ferro Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, et al.) particularly annoying. He blames them for all sorts of imagined ills, when it was their talent and bravery that created the atmosphere that now allows Mr Drake to make a cushy living teaching at a college I never heard of

The Gay Canon is probably a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of better book than I am willing to admit. Half of the choices I have no question with, and best of all, it have the intentions that you gather together in form into groupss with other gay men (perhaps at "the neighborhood pub") to discuss these works, rather like my parents did with their Great works club. Mr. Drake does caution, granting that you might want to earn everybody to sign a "promissory note" guaranteeing they will actually indicate up. I find this touch the in the greatest degree endearing moment in the part the perfect setup for a just discovered Terrence McNally play. McNally is, on the way, yet another startling gay writer inexplicably missing from this curious list of nonentities and ancient warhorses.

Plunket is the author of be pleased with Junkie and My Search for Warren Harding.

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