How Much Gay Sex Should a Novel Have?

1.

The first thing to say, of course, is that the question is deeply silly. The half answer, half protest that immediately springs to mind is, It depends. Many are the conditions that it depends upon.

History is one. Once upon a time, novels were frank about sex. Two limitations are worth noting: the candor was, for the most part, limited to heterosexual episodes and, in respectable quarters, it did not extend to the corporeal mechanics of sex—it merely noted the fact of it. Still, fact is something, and sometimes it is quite something: consider Diderot’s indiscreet jewels, in 1748, or the many acts of hospitality rendered to Tom Jones, in 1749. (Outside respectable quarters, there were, of course, many authors who were candid about the mechanics, even in the early days of the novel; pornography flourished mightily during the Enlightenment.) As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, however, a “wonderful propriety,” as Henry James put it, took hold. “There came into being a mistrust of any but the most guarded treatment of the great relation between men and women,” James wrote in an 1899 essay, “The Future of the Novel.” James conceded that discretion had its charms. “I cannot so much as imagine Dickens and Scott without the ‘love-making’ left, as the phrase is, out,” he wrote. (The scare quotes, the italics, and the interpolated qualifying phrase are all his.) James was fairly sure, however, that if novelists persisted in the “immense omission,” as he called it, the art form would stagnate. “There are too many sources of interest neglected—whole categories of manners, whole corpuscular classes and provinces, museums of character and condition, unvisited.”

It may surprise those who know James only by reputation to hear that he wanted more sex in novels, but, in fact, he wrote a great deal about the difference that sex made to a relationship. “The Spoils of Poynton,” for example, is concerned with the mistake of restraining one’s greed for physical love (though it’s sometimes misread as a sermon preaching the opposite). Twenty years before the movie “Nosferatu,” James wrote about the sex lives of vampires in “The Sacred Fount,” a novel that is nearly impossible to read today without construing the title as a reference to the purported sanative effects of sexual fluids.

Still, it’s true that James wasn’t known for being explicit about, well, anything. Which illness is the heiress expiring of? Which widget is manufactured by the young man’s family business? A reader of James never learns. James the person doesn’t seem to have been heterosexual, and a need for disguise may have motivated his career-long experiment in omitting specifics. To succeed as a novelist, he had to find a way to universalize a sensuality that he knew to be particular. After all, the law isn’t the only force that one has to worry about when writing about sex. There’s also the marketplace. Long after gay novelists ceased to fear that a man-on-man love scene would send them to jail, they could still justifiably worry that it might cost them sales and literary status.

2.

But everything changed, right? Sexual intercourse began in 1963, as Philip Larkin has recorded, and, in the years that followed, some straight novelists became well travelled in the corpuscular provinces. Roth’s Portnoy violated a piece of liver in 1969; Updike’s Rabbit wiped another man’s emission off the face of his teen-age girlfriend in 1971. Such scenes may be a tad polymorphous, but it takes more than one or two chromatic notes to compromise a key signature. The heterosexuality of Roth’s and Updike’s novels is in no way disestablished.

Straightness matters because it seems to have protected Roth’s and Updike’s careers from any serious damage. An explicit gay love scene, on the other hand, would likely have had consequences: an obligation to shift from a mainstream publishing house to a specialty-interest one. A more limited readership. An unspoken sense among the arbiters of taste that, no matter how talented, such a writer is necessarily minor. (This essay, I should acknowledge, is going to focus on the perils of representing sex between men. Lesbian sex presents a different set of hazards, no less challenging to navigate, and those of trans sex remain largely uncharted.) Accordingly, the prose of gay writers, even in the sixties, was comparatively discreet. In 1963, when Grove Press published John Rechy’s “City of Night,” a novel about a male hustler, The New York Review of Books complained, in reference to the hustler’s love scenes, that “the full extent or the exact nature of his being had” was withheld from the reader. One doubts that Christopher Isherwood, to take another example, was any more squeamish about the human body than Roth or Updike, but, in “A Single Man” (1964), a novel in which an old professor regrets the resort of the young to “flirtation instead of fucking,” the old professor doesn’t actually get to do or be done by the handsome student to whom he preaches fucking. Auden wrote a beautiful account, in verse, of a blow job with a stranger, but it snuck into print, in 1965, only against his wishes, and he denied his authorship in order to keep it out of his canon.

Under the circumstances, a gay writer in those days could be excused if he found it a bit wearisome when moral courage was attributed to straight bawdiness. In “A Single Man,” Isherwood’s professor

remembers throwing this, or some other book like it, into the wastebasket, in the middle of the big screwing scene. Not that one isn’t broad-minded, of course; let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore, and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can’t these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes—such as, for example, boys?

Despite Isherwood’s joke, a member of a minority can never really turn the tables, partly because he knows too much to want to. All their lives, gays and lesbians read novels and watch movies about straight love affairs. Most of us have learned not to mind the occasional lapses into hydraulics and plumbing. In fact, most of us have learned to enjoy them on an aesthetic plane. Where the subject matter of love is concerned, even the most well-plowed field always deserves another plowing.

We may, however, be more sensitive than straights to the character and placement of the line that is being crossed. It’s relatively easy to see the difference between rhapsody over a beloved’s charms and an unseemly heating up of a writer’s personal engine, if your own engine isn’t wired that way.

3.

In 1960, the editor and memoirist J. R. Ackerley published “We Think the World of You,” a lightly fictionalized account of a love triangle involving himself, a working-class petty criminal, and the criminal’s German shepherd. Ackerley’s publisher feared a libel suit and required him to censor it, but he restored the cuts in an annotated copy of the book that he mailed to a friend. He explained in a cover letter:

I send it to you now in what I believe is called a “definitive edition,” not for present action, which is not on the cards, but for your archives. It is how I would have liked the book to appear, and in case Raymond Mortimer [a critic who had praised the novel] should be right and, years hence, when I am under the sod, the book should become a “classic,” you now have the full text as I originally worked it out—so much better than my fakings—in your hands.

In the nineteen-eighties, Poseidon Press published a paperback edition with the text that Ackerley had wanted. Sometime later, the novel went out of print, as gay classics have a tendency to do, and it was rescued, in 2000, by NYRB Classics. Unfortunately, NYRB Classics reprinted the novel from its first edition—thereby, inadvertently, re-censoring it. In 2009, NYRB Classics updated the cover, and one of the editors invited me to contribute a blurb. I no longer owned the Poseidon paperback, so I read the NYRB’s 2000 edition, and found myself paying attention to the discrepancies.

The difference between the version that Ackerley wanted and the one that he settled for is, in some cases, remarkably subtle. The three-word sentence “I kissed him” is all that was sacrificed, for example, in the first scene of the novel, when the narrator visits the young criminal in jail. In a later scene, Ackerley wanted to write that, after a tryst, the young man “put on his clothes to go,” but was obliged to write instead that the man “put on his coat to go.” When the narrator described sharing his bed with the German shepherd, the original text made clear the bed’s erotic history:

It was a double bed, bought to contain Johnny as well as myself, and sometimes she [the dog, Evie] would curl up at my feet, but mostly against the pillow, laying down her head where his head used to lie.

Decorum required erasing the memory of the young man’s presence:

It was a double bed, and sometimes she would curl up at my feet, but mostly against the pillow, laying down her head beside my own.

The loss in such changes is evident, but it was not a loss of anything lurid. Even during the book’s sexual climax, there is nothing in Ackerley’s uncensored version that would raise an eyebrow today:

But the four hours—I managed to extend them to four—that he spent with me were so delightful, making up as they did, it seemed to me, for all the frustrations and sorrows of the past and whatever frustrations and sorrows were to come, that he could have had the very shirt off my back, which, indeed, soon joined his upon the floor. It was now, as the rest of our garments followed, that Evie began to exhibit an increasing perturbation as though whatever was happening before her eyes was having, upon the confidence she had hitherto shown in the distinctness of our identities, a confusing effect. Uttering little quavering cries of doubt and concern, she sat first upon our mingled clothes, gazing at us with a wild surmise, then upon our mingled bodies, excitedly licking our faces as though she would solve her perplexing problem either by cementing them together with her saliva or by forcing them apart. She lay with us throughout the afternoon, her fur against our flesh, and we talked of her most of the time.

Well, maybe one or two eyebrows. But they’d be raised on account of the dog. (The current NYRB Classics edition, with a photo of two Englishmen on the cover, now prints the unexpurgated text.)

4.

In the twentieth century’s final two decades, the taboo on gay sex in mainstream literature was at last broken. In 1982, Edmund White’s “A Boy’s Own Story” opened with a cornholing and, in 1988, Alan Hollinghurst rang nearly all the imaginable changes in “The Swimming-Pool Library.”

Gay fiction boomed. With the débuts of such writers as Michael Cunningham, David Leavitt, and Stephen McCauley, and in the following decade, of Alexander Chee, Dale Peck, and Scott Heim, it seemed that, for the first time, uncloseted writers who wrote about gay men’s lives were being taken seriously by the mainstream. I was a teen-ager in the closet for most of the eighties, but I recall feeling, in the early nineties, that there was something politically significant about gay writers getting dirty in print. If straights were ever to get used to us, candor seemed a reasonable means. Not all the fiction published during the boom of the eighties and nineties was sexually explicit. But boundaries were being tested. I remember receiving as a birthday present in those years a gay novel from a commercial house with a man’s pecs emblazoned in closeup on the cover. The nipples were embossed.

Rather charmingly, Nicholson Baker even worried, in his 1991 book, “U and I,” that gays might take over the novel. After naming books by Isherwood, White, and Hollinghurst, Baker wrote that

you feel their creators’ exultation at having so much that wasn’t sayable finally available for analysis, and you feel that the sudden unrestrained scope given to the truth-telling urge in the Eastern homosphere has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well, as if they’re thinking to themselves, Well, fuck it, while I’m humming along at this level of candor, why should I propagate all the other received fastidiousnesses? Truths are jumping out at me from every direction! My overemphasis on sex is leading me back toward subtler revelations in the novel’s traditional arena of social behavior, by jingo!

Comeuppance followed. In 1993, Leavitt published “While England Sleeps,” a story of gay love between Englishmen against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. The sex was graphic, a departure for Leavitt, who had previously been described by critics as “unthreatening.” Leavitt was sued by the poet Stephen Spender, whose romantic friendship with a working-class man had been one of Leavitt’s inspirations. “I resent my biography being mixed up with David Leavitt’s pornography,” Spender wrote in the New York Times. Spender had described his romance decorously in a 1951 memoir, “World Within World.” In somewhat coded language, he had even suggested that he had made an effort to leave homosexual love behind: “While I never lost the need to identify myself with someone who recognized himself in the same situation of life as myself, I found that the relationship of identity could be dangerously destructive.” Spender doesn’t seem to have left gay love behind in 1951—the diaries of his friend David Plante, published last year, suggest that he had a “love relationship” in the nineteen-sixties with the man who was to become Plante’s boyfriend—but in the nineties Spender was married, and he argued in the Times that “Knowledge of what people do when they are in bed together may be true, but it is not true to what we know or wish to know about them.”

Did Spender have a right to his privacy? Was he being disingenuous? As a matter of law, it hardly mattered. Sex had little to do with Spender’s suit, which was for infringement of copyright in his memoir and in any adaptations of it. He accused Leavitt of lifting “literary structure, character development, dialogue and plot”; his lawyer listed seventeen parallels. Leavitt maintained that the parallels were the sort of real-life details that the author of a historical novel customarily borrows.

The real crux seems to have been whether Spender had a right to privacy in Leavitt’s novel, as well as in his own memoir. In other words, was “While England Sleeps” an adaptation of “World Within World”? My own impression is that it’s doubtful, but a court might not have agreed. No court got a chance to decide the question, because Leavitt’s publisher withdrew the novel. Two years later, after a vetting by Spender’s lawyer, another publisher issued a paperback that retained the sex scenes, but it revised details that might link it to Spender’s memoir.

5.

Perhaps because the copyright issues didn’t lend themselves to journalistic shorthand, sex was the cudgel most often used against Leavitt in the court of public opinion at the time, as a 2001 article by the scholar Drew Patrick Shannon observes. Leavitt’s mother “should have washed his mouth out with soap,” the Boston Globe wrote. The Washington Post regretted the “clinical, often scatological, detail.”

To judge by the vehemence of the attacks, the boom of the gay novel had provoked animus and envy in some corners of publishing. New kinds of literary success usually do, but, in retrospect, it isn’t evident that gay writers needed to see a cautionary lesson in the scandal. After all, the relationship between sexuality and copyright is an oblique one. In the end, it was probably no more than coincidence that, during the next few years, the gay novel crashed.

The causes were probably economic rather than political or literary-critical. After all, homosexuals went on to flourish on television, to become ubiquitous on the Internet, and to prosper in the courts. It was only in novels that their profile was lowered. I should make it clear that I’m describing a subjective impression; I haven’t researched sales figures. But I’m not the only person who has observed this. “Gay novels don’t sell,” I heard a friend of mine who works in publishing say last year, in an attempt to explain the problem to some clueless but sympathetic straights we were having a drink with.

Or maybe what my friend said was “Gay people don’t buy novels”—my memory is unclear. Neither statement is literally true, of course. Gay novels do sell, and gay people do buy novels. But capitalism is a numbers game. Self-identifying homosexuals are not an enormous population, and, in general, they don’t buy literary fiction about themselves at a rate that would compensate for their small numbers. It can’t have helped that AIDS decimated the generation of gay men who, in the nineties, would have been in their forties, fifties, and sixties—prime ages for reading and buying books. It might also be the case that AIDS brought the attention of straights to gay voices in the eighties and early nineties, according to the principle that John of Gaunt set forth in “Richard II”—“O, but they say the tongues of dying men  / Enforce attention like deep harmony”—and that interest in the gay novel faded in tandem with journalistic coverage of the AIDS crisis. Whatever the cause or perceived cause, I suspect that, nowadays, a mainstream publishing house rarely takes on a gay novel unless an editor believes that the book will find straight readers, too. Because some straights still find homosexuality disgusting (cf. comment trolls across the Internet) and a larger number fail to find gay characters “relatable,” a gay novel faces steeper odds from the start. “It’s a non-homosexual world, and the majority of those who are buying, selling, and reading literature are non-homosexual,” the journalist Tyler Coates wrote for Flavorwire last summer, in an article that riveted my attention because it happened to appear the week before the release of my own novel, “Necessary Errors,” whose main character is gay. Or, as Cunningham put it, even more trenchantly, in 2000, while reflecting on the success of his novel “The Hours,” “I can’t help but notice that when I finally write a book in which there are no men sucking each other’s dicks, I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”

As the post-retrovirals cohort of gay readers matures, the pool of gay men in late middle age will be replenished, and the economic potential of the gay novel may shift. The pool of gay-friendly straights may also be growing; there are signs that younger straights are more willing to take an interest in and even identify with gay characters. But the crash of the gay novel is well preserved in publishing’s institutional memory, and, for now, I suspect that some version of my friend’s pessimistic statement remains, very quietly, the consensus. It sticks in my mind that Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty,” for example, came close to not being published in America. “Editors in New York who had been asking to see my new novel for years turned it down flat,” Hollinghurst said in 2011, when my husband, Peter Terzian, interviewed him for The Paris Review. Why editors turn down books is a mystery, of course, which even their own statements seldom clarify, and homosexuality might have had nothing to do with it. But it is hard for me to imagine what other reason there could have been to turn down the book, which was published in 2004. The novel went on to win the Man Booker Prize and is, in my opinion, one of the best to have been written in English in the past quarter century.

6.

I began this essay by asking how much gay sex a novel should have. I seem to be ending it by wondering about the fate, under capitalism, of an artist with a minority sexuality. What I’ve been trying to suggest is that, if a writer who happens to be gay is at all ambitious, he will have fairly complicated opinions about sexual arousal in prose.

Even today, critics turn the question into a problem for gay writers in a way that they almost never do for straights. Surely no gay writer has proved better than Hollinghurst how willing he is to write forthrightly, but when, in his latest novel, “The Stranger’s Child,” he chose to cut away from sex scenes, so many critics claimed disappointment that Slate titled its roundup of the novel’s critical reception “Where Has the Sex Gone?” To be fair, the Slate article turned out to be more thoughtful than its headline and came close to agreeing with my own, somewhat exasperated opinion: Shouldn’t the way a sex scene is written, or isn’t written, depend on the aesthetic effects that a novelist is aiming for? After all, if the choice were determined instead by a stereotype that the mainstream has of gay identity, the novelist wouldn’t be functioning as an artist. He would be functioning as a minstrel, acting out a caricature in order to entertain and, perhaps more important, to reassure his mainstream audience.

I’m not arguing that a true artist doesn’t keep his audience in mind. Maybe, on the contrary, it’s an artist’s willingness to challenge his audience that shows that he does. Though stereotypes are static, audiences are subject to the forces of history, and they continually change. A friend who works in television told me last month that he recently declined a proposal for a sex-themed show aimed at young people not out of prudery but because his network’s research department had discovered that the Internet has made porn so readily available that the topic alone isn’t a draw anymore for that age group. If that’s true of young viewers, then young readers aren’t likely to pick up (or, for that matter, put down) a novel on account of unreserved sexual language, either.

Perhaps, even if critics and publishers don’t know it yet, the twentieth century is (nearly) over and the writer is (almost) free. How much gay sex should a novel have? A suggestion: as much as it takes to tell the story. And to tell it—and here one finds oneself resorting to a Jamesian adverb in its Jamesian sense—“beautifully”: that is, with indifference to uncharitable interpretation.

Caleb Crain is the author of the novel “Necessary Errors” and a contributor to the magazine.

Above: Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum. Middle: Castro Street, 1980. Photograph by Paul Fusco/Magnum. Bottom: Photograph by Leonard Freed/Magnum.