The best books that were important for saving gay men’s lives

When Jonathan of the tribe of Benjamin is slain in battle, David of the tribe of Judah laments: “Your love to me was more wonderful than the love of women.”

The intimate devotion of these two warriors (famously, Jonathan gives David his cloak, David tells him to stay instead of going home) taught me that the deepest taboos of my small Northern Irish hometown weren’t necessarily so. The Bible told me so.

Important novels do not have to be very good novels. Quatrefoil, published in 1950, is billed as the first modern book to portray homosexuality in a positive way. Positive? The snobbish young hero (echoing the “expert” opinion of the time) describes himself as “beset with melancholia. emotional frigidity, or the homosexual symbolism he found in himself.” The novel is rife with unconscious class prejudice and ugly hostility towards women. But this story of a young naval officer and his older gay mentor is the sincere attempt of a gay author to imagine how a love relationship between two men could work in the context of family and the closeted world they knew. To me, it was rain in a desert of ignorance. 

Written in the fifties, perhaps the author’s gender helped excuse her brave assumption that the intimate thoughts and feelings of a group of young gay men attempting to come to terms with their sexual identity was a valid topic. Renaud writes of stunted lives: the invented girlfriends, the cautious hints to probe another man’s preferences, the desperate need to belong, provoking the retreat into society’s stereotyping even amongst themselves. The novel is dated; one character has to explain to another what drag is! But it was one more step towards gay men’s forming their identity and self-acceptance. 

“I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” These lines from Walt Whitman announce that Baldwin’s eloquently written novel is probably the first by an already famous author announcing that he was gay, or at least bisexual. The only explicit sex in the novel is heterosexual. Including only straight sex in the story of an American expatriate in Paris and the waiter Giovanni reflects what could be published by a major publisher. It echoes one of the book’s main themes: denying your true feelings is a kind of living death, destructive of others as well as of yourself.

My first sexual experience after I moved to London in 1957 was with a slightly older man I met at one of the parties I got invited to after my book was published. When we got to his flat I knew enough to take my clothes off and lie down on the bed, but what was I supposed to do then? Clueless, I lay there like a stick of celery. “You’re not gay,” he kept repeating. “Yes I am,” I kept repeating, but didn’t know how to prove it.

Too many years later, in 1966, The Song of the Loon filled in the blanks of how gay men actually had sex. It’s very well-written explicit erotica, a backwoods fantasy about impossibly handsome masculine men living far from those city gays corrupted by shame and disappointment. Song is no quick potboiler. It’s a gay author’s well-realized attempt to bring to life his own sexual dreams.