Two years ago, David Leavitt published an essay in the New York Times about the welcome transition from gay fiction to what he termed "post-gay fiction" -- "novels and stories whose authors, rather than making a character's homosexuality the fulcrum on which the plot turns, either take it for granted, look at it as part of something larger or ignore it altogether."
...
At first blush, this reticence would seem to harken back to the pre-Stonewall days of a love that dare not speak its name, but in fact Sweeney is doing something far more modern.
Ummm...no. It's certainly
contemporary (in that it recognizably happens all the time), but calling it "far more modern" suggests that it is some sort of
change, even intimating that it is some sort of
change for the better. It's neither. It's just the same old closet crap. What this 'reticence' looks like at first blush is pretty much what it is. Mr. Leavitt is mistaken on this point... there is no "post-gay," there is no "shift" to be perceived here. Certainly books with this attitude exist -- they've pretty much always existed.
It is a quite simple matter to write a narrative that excludes a character's homosexuality or relegates it to a matter of trivial insignificance. I, for instance, walked out to an aquarium shop and bought an oranda this afternoon. I could embroider this rather banal tale to include the fact that it was humid, really very hot, and the traffic was lighter than might be expected for a late Monday afternoon. Ho hum. Yes, I have a really very uninteresting life... phrased that way.
I am, of course, neglecting to mention the positively electric blond (three-quarters naked, and perfectly lumpy in all the best places) who stopped his car to ask me directions. I'm omitting, for no real reason, the troupe of tawny twenty-somethings that passed me in the street -- their trousers seem to have been held up only by the curvature of their asses (and no small amount of prayer). I suspect their manner of dress wasn't entirely legal, but I offer no complaints. I completely ignore the fact that the very attentive woman who waited on me at the shop had to draw my attention back to the business of buying a fish when I became hopelessly distracted by a really very beautiful man who was engaged in the serious task of comparing aquarium filters of German manufacture with competing brands of American manufacture. Naturally, after allowing the clerk to discharge her duties without further interruption, a conversation simply HAD to take place about the recent improvements in American filter technology, but how the German firms have always been the leaders in the field and quite likely always will be... as far as quality of operation goes. The almost absurd earnestness of the conversation did not surprise me one bit. It's not like the relative merits of aquarium filter manufacturers are of any Earth-shaking importance... but really, ANY topic of conversation that can persuade a beautiful man to look right into your eyes is quite important.
But... I walked to an aquarium shop and bought an oranda. (It has since been named Squiggle.)
A person can SAY that their orientation is of little import. A novel can be written so that the orientation of it's characters has no importance at all. Saying so does not make it true. Ignoring orientation does not make it go away.
Andy Towle's rendition of the quotation from Mr. Leavitt retains a bit more of it's original context.
"A gay bookshop (or a gay shelf in a general bookshop) implies that there is such a thing as a gay book. When I started writing, a gay novel, at least, was fairly easy to define. In it the hero or heroine's homosexuality stood by necessity at the dramatic center of the plot. More than that, such a novel presumed that any gay person's homosexuality stood at the center of the plot; that in the paper-rock-scissors game of identity, gay was always the rock...More and more, gay fiction is giving way to post-gay fiction: novels and stories whose authors, rather than making a character's homosexuality the fulcrum on which the plot turns, either take it for granted, look at it as part of something larger or ignore it altogether."
The entire essay
can still be read here. The text
also appears here.