LGBTQI+ Literature – My Purely Subjective ‘Library’

Fiction

At school, even before the advent of Clause/Section 28, there was little LGBTQI+ literature that someone could be introduced to.  Buying magazines was a daring (dangerous?) pursuit as Gay Times was always on the top shelf of newsagents amidst all the explicit (straight) pornography.  I only dared to buy a copy in my second year at university aged 19 and it felt shameful.  When Channel 4 went live in 1982, despite the hostile environment for the LGBTQI+ community at the time, it started to push the boundaries of acceptability on TV through greater inclusivity of marginalised people (does anyone in the UK remember 1983’s weekly ‘One in Five’ magazine programme?).  But in 1985, Channel 4 broadcast ‘My Beautiful Launderette’ by Hanif Kureishi, set in Thatcher’s Britain and focusing on relationships between Pakistani and English communities.  And of course it was a love story between Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis).  I owe a debt of gratitude to both Hanif Kureishi and Channel 4.

Over ten years later in 1994 on Channel 4, Brookside aired the first Lesbian kiss on mainstream British TV prior to the 9pm ‘watershed.’  Of course, the BBC’s Eastenders got there first in 1989 with the scandalous (at the time) first gay male kiss shown before 9pm.  Some of us were watching as ‘children’ and no doubt experiencing both the joy of visibility and inclusion together with our shame.  Such things were strictly forbidden by the ‘moral majority’ of Daily Mail readers calling for such things to be banned.  One Conservative politician described Eastenders as ‘promoting perverted practices.’

I think Christopher Isherwood wrote the first gay male novel I ever read in the late 1980s, ‘A Single Man’ (turned into a 2009 film with Colin Firth & Julianne Moore), or was it ‘Christopher and his kind,’ or ‘Goodbye to Berlin.’  All stories of 1920s and 30s Berlin, the latter story was also the basis of Cabaret (starring Liza Minelli).  Radcliffe Hall’s ‘the Well of Loneliness’ (first published in 1928) was a tough but important ‘story’ in the history of lesbian fiction.  My best friend at university, a gay white woman, first read this as part of her ‘coming out.’  The female protagonist, named Stephen at birth by parents who wanted a boy, makes a plea to God at the end of the novel, ‘Give us also the right to our existence!’  I also discovered E M Forster’s ‘Maurice’ (also turned into a film).

A few years later, I began to read Patrick Gale, a gay male author, after a straight friend at university introduced me to his novel ‘the Cat Sanctuary.’  I find his books very readable and they were important for me in featuring positive but ordinary stories of families and gay characters.  Around the same time I discovered David Leavitt’s ‘the Lost Language of Cranes’ which was turned into a BBC series in the early nineties.

Theory

Given homosexuality’s ‘invisibility’ to a certain extent during my growing up period, the first ‘theory’ book I would reference is the dictionary.  It was a way of seeing something of myself, though not particularly educational.  I think my interest in psychoanalysis was due to the fact that, going straight to the index page at the back, homosexual was often referenced, though I can’t say this gave me a particularly positive view at the time of what my identity was to become.

Right now, I would recommend ‘The Anatomy of Prejudices’ by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and ‘Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality: A contemporary introduction’ by Leezah Hertzmann and Juliet Newbigin in preference to theories proposed by Charles Socarides (e.g. Homosexuality: A freedom too far).  For a bit of televised history showing Charles’ son Richard (played by his brother, Charles jnr) coming out to his father, watch ‘When We Rise’.

Society, and psychoanalysis, has come a long way.

Other books:

My Policeman – Bethan Roberts

Now & Then – William Corlett

Swimming in the Dark – Tomasz Jedrowski

Oranges are not the only fruit – Jeanette Winterson

Brokeback Mountain – Annie Proulx

Less – Andrew Sean Greer

When we were bad – Charlotte Mendelson

Carol – Patricia Highsmith