The loss of all the books they might have written remains incalculable. The grotesque irony is that at the very moment so many writers are threatened with extinction gay literature is healthy and flourishing as never before. Perhaps the two contradictory things are connected, since the tragedy of AIDS has made gay men more reflective on the great questions of love, death, morality and identity, the very preoccupations that have always animated serious fiction and poetry. Or perhaps AIDS has simply made gay life more visible. As a result even straight readers are curious to read books about this emerging, troubled world that throws into relief so many of the tensions of American culture.
Skeptics object that gay fiction is, after all, rather . . .
But those of us who write it are convinced that the potential audience for our work is no more circumscribed than it is for any other constituency. When reviewers say they're tired of reading about gay life, they're in the same position as Bill Moyers when he asked August Wilson if he ever got tired of talking about black life. In the past, our literature has been changed by writers from different ethnic and racial minorities, and that change has always involved struggle, a turf war for power. Not everyone, of course, looks at the matter in the same way. It seems to me I've heard every aspect of this question explored in the last decade.