From: joe@spdcc.com (Joseph Francis)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Top GLB Fiction
Date: 19 Dec 92 02:33:40 GMT
Article-I.D.: spdcc.1992Dec19.023340.17274
Organization: S.P. Dyer Computer Consulting, Cambridge MA

In article <1grnmbINNcr2@mizar.usc.edu> adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson) writes:
>In article <cccrsbc8.724635893@brolga> 
>cccrsbc8@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (cc rs) writes:
>
>> I was wondering if you guys would mind contributing
>> to a list of books by GLB authors or about GLB topics
>> that you would recommend as essential motss reading:
>
>John Fox, "Boys on the Rock"
>Ronald Firbank, "Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli"
>Ronald Firbank, "Valmouth"
>Ronald Firbank, "Prancing Nigger"
>Frank O'Hara, "Selected Poems"

A few keys, perhaps?

Petronius, "Satyricon"
Plato, "The Symposium"
Shakespeare, all the sonnets
Diderot, "Rameau's Nephew"
Huysmans, "Against Nature" (or "Au Rebours")
Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Dorian Gray", "The Decay of Lying", 
             "Teleny" (attributed, only for a fun read)
Cooper, later novels from Leatherstocking Tales
Melville, "Moby Dick"
Austen, "Sense and Sensibility"
Whitman, "Leaves of Grass"
Forster, any novel except his gay novel, "Maurice"
Firbank, "The New Rhythum" (virtually anything, actually)
Steinbeck, "Of Mice and Men"
Stein, "Three Lives"
Baldwin, "Giovanni's Room"
Burroughs, "Naked Lunch" (not at all gay positive, BTW)
Capote, "Other Rooms, Other Voices"
Vidal, "The City and the Pillar" is a novel to avoid
Mishima, "Forbidden Colors" (I'm almost ambivalent)
Renault, most novels are good reads, but low on quality

What's left out? Lots. There is no critical writing, escept for
Wilde's "The Decay of Lying". Certainly there's lots of it - in
contemporary writing, Susan Sontag, Paglia, at al. Backwards a little
bit, Leslie Fiedler, Tomkins. I don't think there was much good
American critical writing before then which wasn't heart-rendingly
heterosexual. British critical writing I find uniformly dreadful.
There is plenty in French, Barthes et al. Very little poetry - I'm
afraid I'm not a big poetry fan. I like well-written prose,
prose-poetry. Not a hell of a lot of biography; I don't think that
there is much good gay biography floating around, it is all too
polemical. I love Rita Mae Brown, but then I'm not convinced that
Rubyfruit Jungle is a 'classic'. She now produces such things as
"Southern Discomfort" which just don't do it for me. Patricia
Highsmith is great, but purely as psychological mysteries ("People who
knock on Doors", "Strangers on a Train"). Patricia Nell Warren.
Radclyffe Hall. I love Eudora Welty, but I don't know if she is
lesbian. There are the Danielle Steele types - Gordon Merrick. There
are certainly gay science fiction writers, but I don't think they
write very well. I find most modern lesbigay writers sensationalistic
or coping - "Lost Language of Cranes", "A Boy's Own Story". Edmund
White has an ability to write very well about things I couldn't care
less reading about. There are the gay 'scene' writers - Kramer -
"Faggots", Holleran - "Dancer From the Dance", Rechy - "Sexual Outlaw"
- I suppose we need our trashy fiction like anyone else. Burgess'
"Earthly Powers" should, by all signs, be a classic novel and a major
gay icon, but like much Burgess, simply feigns depth with pressure.  I
don't know to include Nabokov, "Ada", "Lolita", "Pale Fire", or
Ballard "Crash" - I don't know to include, I don't know how to
include. How does one even go about classifying the moral stories of
Hawthorne, or just plain erotic literature. Did Nathalie Barney write?
-- 
US Jojo; damp, slighly soiled, but tasty nonetheless.