A Very Queer Notion About LGBT Literature

Entertainment Weekly's Pride Double Issue for June 2020 published a Q & A article by David Canfield called "The Library Is Open." These interviews involved four up and coming queer (I hate that term) authors and was conducted via Zoom.  (It should be noted that the authors--Nicole Dennis-Benn, Naoise Dolan, Akwaeke Emezi, and Garth Greenwell--are all under the age of 45.)

Sandwiched between the article title and Canfield's byline is a headnote briefly introducing the
four authors. The headnote immediately makes this startling statement--"There's never been a more exciting time for queer literature." I don't know who to blame for such a false pronouncement, Canfield or one of the magazine's editors. Whoever wrote that statement is clearly unaware of the enormous amount of gay and lesbian literature that came out of the 1980s and 1990s. During those decades, I was writing for the New York Native and the Lambda Book Report and was reviewing some of those books.

In the 1980s and '90s,  there was an explosion of novels, short stories, plays, and poetry coming from black gay writers, for example. Melvin Dixon, Randall Kenan, Thomas Glave, Assotto Saint, and Essex Hemphill are a few black gay names that come to mind. Plus there were several black gay literary journals that were being published back then. Among them were Blackheart, Pyramid Periodical, and Other Countries.

Other gay and lesbian writers included David Leavitt, Christopher Bram, Audre Lorde, Rita Mae Brown, Alice Walker, Felice Picano and his fellow Violet Quill writers.

Anyone who had ever set foot in a gay bookstore like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in Greenwich Village and its nearby competitor A Different Light and marveled at the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of LGBT books and periodicals on their shelves would scoff at the idea that today is "a more exciting time for queer literature."