Queer Books
Those who have been ignored within the dominant cultural narrative must create their own stories. That’s certainly true for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered authors, who have had to revisit and accurately revise their own history throughout the years.
The six illuminating works below are listed in chronological order — not of their publication, but of the era in which each is set. Several of the books — Sarah Walters’s The Night Watch, Armistead Maupin’s Babycakes and David Sedaris ‘Naked — are ensemble pieces: novels or collections that deal with a cast of characters connected through bonds of blood, friendship and/or hardship (and in Sedaris’s case, somehow all three at once). This makes sense: Community is vital for people who have often been cast out and/or ignored by society. Perhaps this is why the “genres” — historical fiction (the Walters, again), sci-fi, humor (Sedaris, Wilde, Maupin), dramatic writing (Wilde, though not in this iteration, and Hwang’s M. Butterfly) — have been such welcoming homes for non-hetero authors.
Two books on the list, John Colapinto’s As Nature Made Him and The Trials of Oscar Wilde, are true stories. Both are simultaneously deeply upsetting and eloquent: the story of a mutilated child who had to find his own way to his true gender, and the transcripted downfall of the 19th century’s bravest and least abashed gay pioneer.
