I’m writing this paper, and I’m glad that the subject matter is completely fascinating and titillating to me, because writing a Review of Literature is one of the most boring and mentally taxing things I’ve ever been asked to do, like counting out all the brown M&Ms or sitting through a lecture on the overpopulation of deer. Snooze.

But my Monday night class (AKA Monday Night Football, AKA Race, Gender, and the Media) is an experience in specialness, and as a graduate student I have to write a Review of Lit (by tomorrow) over the topic of my choice. And since I am an aspiring novelist, who will, against his will, likely be pigeonholed into the “gay writer” genre (though I hope for a more David Sedaris-esque kind of course for my career), I thought that I should do something about representations of gay men and lesbian women in popular fiction. That way, in two years when they come to me and try to tell me this class didn’t count for elective credit like they said it would, I can claim to have done something pertaining to my career path.

My nervousness works to my benefit, some of the time.

So I’ve been reading all the scholarly literature about gay fiction. There is surprisingly little to choose from. Most of what I’ve read concerns either the Pulp Novels of the postwar era, which hit their peak with the Homophile movement of the 1950′s and 1960′s. What fascinates me about these books – not having read them – is how it seems that an entire generation of gay and lesbian people were able to find them at their local drugstore or supermarket, cleverly hidden among all the other dime-novels on the spinning wire rack. There was an elaborate code set up by which a cover would betray its homoerotic content so that you’d know which book to buy. And there was apparently this whole underground network of book trading, whispered reviews, nothing in print of course, because McCarthyism effectively scared discussion of it out of the New York Times Review pages.

I remember being about thirteen or fourteen and being by myself in a mall bookstore, like Waldenbooks or B. Dalton or something, and finding a book of gay male erotica. It was like some whole world was opening up; it was like coming home. Of course there was the requisite Middle-America-Teenage-Angsty-Guilt thing happening, but also there was something like a fresh breeze breaking through. Like I’d found my people, you know? It wasn’t just the sex; that was ancillary in a way, because it was about finding out that there were people who had the same thoughts and experiences you had; and if there were other people out there having them, it probably wasn’t as twisted as the whole world was trying to get you to believe.

Yesterday I saw a straight couple walking across campus holding hands. I got furious for a second, because of how much they seemed to be taking for granted that they get to do that freely.

Not that I have someone to holds hands with; I wish I did.

But the miracle of all this gay literature – even and especially now – is that it has the power to help us to craft a unique cultural and political identity. Now. I’m not all about some of the more licentious aspects of gay culture, although I do understand their genesis and, in a way, their necessity. Not necessity in a sense of being needed or helpful, but in a sense of being inevitable. Like Margaret Cho said, “When you’re persecuted for who you like to fuck, you’re going to kick up your heels and fuck. And it is such an inspiration to watch.”

What is interesting is how much gay writing, especially gay erotica, changed once AIDS hit. For a while it seems to have disappeared altogether. It is strange to me how much the late 1970′s and early 1980′s changed the world for gay people. On one hand we became much more visible, partially because it was one of the first times our culture had been embraced by the wider culture. On the other, Anita Bryant and AIDS came along to convince the world we are a people to be feared, and this conception has stayed with us ever since. AIDS killed the whole “sexual liberation” thing of the 60′s and 70′s; which may be good, but what a toll. What a toll.

When gay erotica reappears it is in this context; a lot of the attitude and the narrative behind it has changed. It is less free, and a lot less edgy. Gay fiction begins to deal almost exclusively with AIDS for about a decade before taking up the mantle of the coming-out experience. These two subjects frame the greatest portion of what would be called “gay fiction” now.

But there’s the problem. If you look at the “gay literature” section of your local Border’s or B&N, you’ll find a lot of stories in those three veins: erotica, AIDS, and coming-out. When gay literature is written about everyday gay people living normal lives – David Sedaris, David Rakoff, Colm Toibin – it is classified as literary fiction and shelved so. But there is no scholarly literature surrounding the literary patterns of “gay fiction.” What constitutes it? Does it always have to do with coming-out, AIDS, or sex? Some of your better books involve all three. There has been almost no literary criticism to this effect, and I believe a study of such could be very helpful, considering a) the market for gay literature – gay product placement in general – is one of the largest, most freely-spending and untapped markets in America, and b) a lot of gay fiction seems to have fallen into – or been placed into – a genre apart from literary fiction and erotica that seems to have its own rules and freewheeling style. You may call it just a sub-genre, but it merits study.

As much as I dream of being on NPR, becoming David Letterman’s new best friend, and winning the Pulitzer, I really love those gays and want them to read more things that are going to give them their lives back. People I’ve read – inside and out of that genre – have done that for me: William S. Burroughs, Paul Monette, Kirk Read, James Baldwin, David Sedaris, Paul Russell, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman. They were my people, and they handed me myself in words. I want to do this for other people, especially gay people, because we need a lot of hope, especially under this administration.

I could never write erotica; I don’t want anyone to picture me having sex. Though “Moving Van People” does hit a few high sexual notes, I would never expect excerpts from it to get published in “Man on Man 4″ or anything like that. I don’t have the big brass cojones it takes to write explicitly sexual material. What I do have is an understanding that for gay people, finding out about sex is a fundamentally different experience than it is for heterosexuals. Because even if it’s embarassing, for a straight kid it’s Okay to ask sex questions. It’s Okay for them to feel the way they feel; it’s expected. Even if you grew up in a home where you were raised with a strict set of sexual mores, you were assumed to be straight. You were expected, sooner or later, to start asking what the deal was.

But the problem for us is that we never could. We didn’t grow up in a place where it was Okay to ask the questions we had. “What if I want to kiss a boy instead of a girl?” Even the most well-meaning of parents would have freaked out. We heard “faggot” all the time at school; there was a culture of fear there. So for gay men – gay youth especially – to start finding out, covertly, that their sexuality is something that exists for real, in others, in the world, is massively transforming. I hope to God that someday we don’t have to find out about it in secret, hiding in the corner of a Waldenbooks with some other book over the one we are actually reading. I hope someday it is Safe for gay kids to ask these questions at school, and at home, and – God help us – maybe even at church. But now, it is not.

Gay lit is important; I’m just not sure anyone knows at present what exactly it is. It’s about so much, SO much more than sex, like being gay itself is. Good thing I’m stoked about this paper now. ‘Cause it’s due tomorrow.