There is no indication that the audience has changed. The problem may not be the audience. Ninety-eight percent of acquiring editors from mainstream houses have never even bid on a novel with primary lesbian content. The personal bias of individuals with the power of selection keeps lesbian literature from being seen as American literature and relegates it to special-interest fiction. To some, the success of writers such as David Sedaris, Alice Walker and Michael Cunningham in reaching mainstream audiences is a result of an openness to quality in writing.
Some authors are indeed able to be quite successful.
Roughly 320,000 copies of Invisible Life have sold so far, and 1 million copies of his subsequent books are in print with Doubleday. Other prominent gay authors are doing as well. Sedaris's latest book, Me Talk Pretty One Day , had an initial print run of 75,000 copies, pushed up to 100,000. Michael Cunningham's The Hours , which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, has 170,000 copies in print, after two trips back to the presses. Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City books have more than 3 million copies in print, and the third television miniseries based on them just wrapped production in San Francisco this summer, for an upcoming cable airing.