What!? "Rubyfruit Jungle" not on the list. For shame!!

Naked Lunch? or is that not considered gay?

I suspect a wee bit of professional rivalry in the exclusion of Alan Hollinghurst from the list but no James Baldwin?

Loved "Dancer From the Dance" and of course "Tales of the City".

What about "City of Night" by John Rechy?

Nights in Aruba?

this list was put out in 2001. the line of beauty was published in 2004. can't snub a book that's not yet been written.

Dancer from the Dance? Siiigh, I know some loved it, it is just so dated it feels like I'm reading some psych 101 textbook from the 1960's Although in fairness, I liked Two Gentlemen Sharing and that could be called dated too. Ok, so then my post said nothing.

Dancer from the Dance and Larry Kramer's "Faggots" tell essentially the same story, except that Kramer's book was much grittier. Both protagonists were kinda shallow though.

Edmund White? Middle class white queen riding around in an expensive car equates his situation with racism when he looks over at a black woman at the stop light next to him. Book totally lost me after that passage. But then "gay lit" was started by middle class white urban dwellers.

City of Night? Great writing, interesting characters in a road story that goes nowhere which makes it a drudge to read. Would have been better as a collection of short stories, or maybe it started out that way?

yeah I took Gay lit in college (TWICE, the reading list/professor changed).

I always found David Feinberg's books Eighty-Sixed and Spontaneous Combustion to be great reads. Although they horrified me when I first read them in the early 90's; years later I learned to appreciate their place in gay-lit history as a snapshot of the AIDS epidemic, as told by a person who lived and died through it. Important for those of us who were kids in the eighties who, although we began to realize we were gay, didn't really know–understand?–what was happening around us.

I'm also disappointed that there was nothing by Paul Monette, or David Leavitt. And I have to agree with Andrew, The Line of Beauty was excellent. But I have to say I'm biased because there is something about 1980's England which has always enthralled me.

Burston appears to be fond of "gritty reality" - none of which seems very real to me.

I would consider:

Other Voices Other Rooms - for mainstreaming Capote and putting (ambigiously) gay characters on the NY Times best seller list.

the Buddies series from Ethan Mordden - for the quirky delightful joy of it

Best Little Boy in the World - by John Reid (Andrew Tobias) for letting a generation know that gay people can succeed.

Rainbow Boys by Robert Sanchez and Geography Club by Brent Hartinger - for providing gay youth with believable characters and a youth perspective.

I'm sure there are many more. But the "forefathers of gay lit" - White, Rechy, Monette (to some extent) - seem too self obsessed and enthralled by their own outsider status (oooh, look how edgy I am) to really feel either genuine or enjoyable.

Oh, forgot… The Line of Beauty???

Really?

I tried and tried to read that book but I found the characters so unsympathetic that I really didn't care what happened to them. I didn't hate them enough to wish ill or like them enough to hope the best.

But, then again, it's a popular book so maybe I'm the only one who didn't find it absolutely fabulous.

Paul Monette wrote some enjoyable novels, but his best writing is found in his essays and autobiographical writing. Becoming a Man, and Afterlife are both works of art.

In terms of fiction, there are a couple of books by Michael Chabon that could qualify. I'd nominate his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but almost every one of his novels has well-developed gay characters.

Wow Paul

I totally forgot about Leavitt and The Lost Language of Cranes, Dancer from the Dance, The Page Turner and While England Sleeps.

I wonder if re reading these books will make me feel young and innocent again.

I remember reading City of Night as a youngster and it making me want to move to L.A. to become a street hustler.

Wait..Dancer from the Dance is by Leavitt….

or Holleran?

Hey Queerty! are you all asleep at the wheel? 2001???? But we'll let it pass since it's always fun to josh on queer books.
Leaving out Capote is a crime. Other Voices, other Rooms is one of the best debut novels ever.
And I'm soo happy someone mentioned my old, departed friend David Feinberg and his "eighty-six-ed'. It was a real snapshot of NYC during the early days of AIDS.
Check out Scott Hiems "In Awe", He also wrote the novel which the movie "mysterious Skin' is based on.
the thing that scares me about the original list is that he chooses to focus on novels FOR gays and gives a tad short shift to novels by gay men that shocked and provoked new trends in lit. Genet might have been self loathing, but his internal monologue of desire is astounding. If you feel dirty after reading it, you missed the point. Burroughs is only being appreciated now for his idea of the Word Virus. His reputation is still being defined.
Personally, Leavitt is a snooze for me. he is a child of Genet, only he has nothing interesting to obsess on.
I wanna blog about this.
If anyone wants to shoot me some of their suggestions, please do - timfoot12 at yahoo
Yeah, I'm crazy for gay fiction

I agree with L and smartypants
Rita Mae Brown and Paul Monette should have made the top ten

Oh yes. I loved The Lost Language of Cranes too. For gritty, LA, junkie realism (sounds just swell, right?) I liked Closer by Dennis Cooper.

dancer from the dance. amen. read it when it came out and reread it every few years. it is literature.

Check out the following novels by Colm Tóibín;
The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship.
Amazing!

What about Maurice?

Brian,

I love Forster. And while I love that Forster did write a gay novel (though published posthumously), as a novel Maurice is by far his weakest.

Leavett is definitely worth a mention as is (don't hit me) Sedaris.

ANd if we're counting gay writers, not gay lit, I also like Burroughs and, for sheer delight, Gregory Maguire.

And if we go for non-fiction, I'm going out on a limb and saying that the most important non-fiction piece by a gay writer ever may be "Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality" by John Boswell. He is the first voice to present a (exhaustively) researched and documented argument that the scriptures that are believed to condemn homosexuality actually do not.

this is pulp gay fiction -

Scott Heim and Dennis Cooper should definitely make any queer book list.

No Truman? How could this be? Leavitt puts me to sleep.