Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

History of Gay Literature, A
Gregory Woods
Yale University Press
How to order Gold by the Inch
Lawrence Chua
Grove Press
How to order

The idea of a unique tradition of gay writing is recent, dating from early this century, as homosexual writers had the chance to write more openly. Yet writers-- both gay and straight-- have expressed the experience of homosexuality since ancient times. In his encyclopedic overview, Gregory Woods's A History of Gay Literature (Yale University Press, cloth, 445 pages, $35) gives us a cross- historical and cross-cultural history of male homosexual writing over the centuries. Using a broad, but readily applicable, definition that includes work by openly gay men, works in which homosexual activity occurs, and works that manifest a gay "sensibility," Woods manages to move us from Homer to David Leavitt, from Arabic poets of the classical age to contemporary South African poetry, from closeted Victorian memoirs to AIDS literature.

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One of Woods's most intriguing chapters is "The American Renaissance," which looks at the homoeroticism of late 19th-century American fiction. His readings of Walt Whitman (as well as the photography of Thomas Eakins) cast a new light upon the US's most obviously homoerotic writer, but his extrapolation of these themes to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn moves us into new territory. Relying on Leslie Fiedler's work (which was published in the late 1940s and the 1950s) Woods reconstructs a deeply rooted homoerotic theme in American writing from the post-colonial novels of James Fenimore Cooper, to Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Billy Budd, to the adventures of Huck and Jim on their Mississippi raft. This re-establishment of a homoerotic/homosocial theme in US writing not only discovers an aspect of gay history and writing, but places all of our national literature in a new context. While he doesn't dwell on this (although Leslie Fiedler does at length), these homoerotic implications-- intense relationships between "whites" like Natty Bumpo, Ishmael, and Huck with the "less civilized" native Americans and African-Americans-- set the stage for the endlessly complicated manifestations of race and ethnicity in US culture, and as such is about far more than "gay literature."

By its nature, A History of Gay Literature lacks the specificity of critique that illuminates individual work, but this is more than compensated for by its ability to locate and discuss amazing similarities of experience and expression throughout history and culture. Woods writes with a sensitivity to detail and to interpretation that is rare in modern scholarship. Highly intelligent, jauntily written, and endlessly informative, A History of Gay Literature is an impressive addition to contemporary gay scholarship.

Lawrence Chua has long been praised for his astute cultural commentary and his experimental prose. Now in his first novel, Gold by the Inch (Grove Press, cloth, 207 pages, $20), he proves himself a vibrant and breathtaking writer of literary prose. The narrative of the book follows a young gay man of Asian descent as he returns to Thailand from the United States for an extended visit and to recover from his father's death and a failed love affair. After becoming involved-- well, obsessed-- with a young male prostitute, the narrator has to confront issues he has long avoided: national identity, the exploitation of other people, and the endless clashes between Asian and Western cultures.

Like the novels of Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, Gold by the Inch attempts to wed the personal with the political, the emotional with the cultural. It is as much a novel of political ideas as it is a meditation on romantic and sexual relationships. Chua's prose is boldly literary and often shocking in its simplicity; he knows the power of words and has the ability to conjure I images that surprise and resonate. Gold by the Inch is both disturbing and deeply moving.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com