A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition * Gregory groves * Yale University Press * $35 I find it ironic that many of the world's greatest male writers have been gay.

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition * Gregory groves * Yale University Press * $35

I find it ironic that many of the world's greatest male writers have been gay, however their bodies of work are claimed from the straight world--just think of William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, or Henry James. And we permit them get away with it. Gay lit remains a cluster of poems about cute sailors. No prodigy 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 enamoured of OK, for the time being I'll fare along with that. In fact, I'll hold fast it foremost in my mind as I describe and evaluate three fresh books.

The first and chiefly valuable is The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature. Edited by way of Byrne R.S. Fone, it is quite an undertaking--one of those things you're glad a person of consequence did but that still appear to bes a little daunting. The great virtue here is the intent It starts with ancient Sumerian true copys and proceeds to Greece, Rome the Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan England, and those wild Frenchmen then all the way to AIDS and the circulating day. Most intriguing are the side trips it takes to places like Russia, Egypt Spain, and Latin America. This is the sort of part you will keep on your bookshelf for years, taking it down occasionally to improve your mind, a task that will invariably transfer from a study of Sumerian paragraphs to a compulsive search for all the metrical compositions about cute sailors.

Just as proper in a different way is A History of Gay Literature by means of Gregory Woods, a British author of poems and academician. It is a inspect course but an excellent undivided Covering much of the same territory as Columbia Anthology, it imposes everything in a social and aesthetic adjoining matter 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 volumes that "gay men need to read books that formed and influenced the gay heart, mind, and soul" A noble goal, to be positive There's only one problem: He picked the unfair 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 pair 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 about college I never heard of

The Gay Canon is probably a greatly better book than I am willing to admit. Half of the choices I have no point in dispute with, and best of all, it suggests that you gather together in arranges with other gay men (perhaps at "the neighborhood pub") to discuss these works, rather like my parents did with their Great volumes club. Mr. Drake does caution, although that you might want to win everybody to sign a "promissory note" guaranteeing they will actually point out to up. I find this touch the greatest in number endearing moment in the volume the perfect setup for a fresh Terrence McNally play. McNally is, from the way, yet another startling gay writer inexplicably missing from this curious list of nonentities and olden warhorses.

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

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