LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing books that have made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any book that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a Kosmail to Chrislove.
I have a lot of books.
Quite a few of those books could certainly be considered “staples” of the genre known as “LGBT Literature”: novels and essay collections written by James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, the diaries of Christopher Isherwood and Virginia Woolf, a couple of Alan Hollinghurst novels, a couple of Reinaldo Arenas novels, biographies of John Rechy, Joe Orton, Lytton Strachey and the philosopher Michel Foucault...and, yes, you can throw in my copies of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae and Vamps and Tramps, a collection of essays by John Preston...you get the picture.
And then there’s the matter of the classic essay collections of noted cultural critic Susan Sontag; a few of them quite LGBT-related and Ms. Sontag, herself, was openly bisexual later in her life...but LGBT Literature? In some cases, certainly but in others?
Somewhere around the house, I have F.O. Matthiessen’s wonderfully written and curated collection of writings by the James family, titled The James Family: A Group Biography, Together With Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Senior, William, Henry and Alice James (one of my favorite essays in Matthiessen’s collection is the young Henry James’ incredibly catty review of Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps...but I digress...although I will come back to the subject of Henry James!).
We know that Matthiessen, in his lifetime, was a closeted gay man who committed suicide, possibly because of the escalating Red Scare but perhaps also because of the death of his lover, Russell Cheney. Today, a LGBTQ professorship has been rightly established at Harvard in Matthiessen’s name and while, yes, I did catch slight homoerotic undertones in some of his readings on Henry James and there are, perhaps, homoerotic undertones in Matthiessen’s other works, is this “LGBT Literature,” proper?
And while we’re on the subject of Henry James (and I have long wanted to write about James in this very space) possibly no 19th century author’s sexuality has come under more scrutiny than James. There’s the “love letters” that James wrote to various young men, including the sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen, letters which have now been collected and published in a couple of volumes after having been suppressed by James’ biographers (including Matthiessen?) for decades. And while the letters that James exchanged with Andersen (and others) certainly have a “steamy” quality to them (at least the ones that I have read) and while James has certainly served as an inspiration to canonical LGBT writers like James Baldwin and Colm Toibin, can Henry James’ vast output of work fit under the umbrella of “LGBT Literature?”
Then there’s the very different cases of Clive Barker and Chuck Palahniuk; both openly gay men, both “genre” writers. I do know that quite a bit of Barker’s visual artist work (paintings, photographs, comics) does have LGBT themes but in the (admittedly few) works of Barker’s horror fiction that I have read (and it’s been awhile!) I don’t recall detecting any LGBT themes. Of Palahniuk’s work, I’ve read Fight Club and a collection of his essays where he brings the gay theme up. But I generally think of Palahniuk as writing about these wonderfully….weird or (if may say it) queer people that totally relate to...regardless of who they sleep with.
And then there’s the case of noted philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Certainly, there’s nothing that I can sense that’s “gay” about Wittgenstein’s philosophies (to the extent that I can even understand them at all). Yet it is quite well known that Wittgenstein had several relations with men and women. Yet one of my favorite literary passages actually involves a fictional relationship that a fictional Wittgenstein had with a man.
The scene comes near the end of Bruce Duffy’s novel The World As I Found It as the Nazis are rolling through Vienna following the invasion of Austria in 1938. Wittgenstein’s sister, Gretl, is living in fear of the approaching Nazis when she hears a knock on the door, opens, and there stands a SS soldier.
The soldier turns out to be Max, a former lover of Wittgenstein whom Gretl had befriended, had liked, and had told that her family, including Ludwig, was, in fact, Jewish. Basically, Max warns Gretl hat she and her family needs to leave Vienna within a week and that he will do all that he an to insure their safe passage out of Austria. Max then writes Ludwig a letter stating his intentions.
There’s a certain melodrama to the passage that I have always found, for some reason, to be strangely...romantic. Certainly I have wondered if there were similar scenes that happened repeatedly throughout 1938 Vienna and, indeed, in many of the places subsequently overrun by the Nazis.
As far as I know, Bruce Duffy is a “straight” man. But his portrayal of Ludwig Wittgenstein (controversial as it was) is as sensitive a portrayal as I have ever read.
Is Bruce Duffy’s The World As I Found It “LGBT Literature”?
I don’t know, but it certainly moved me.
And it certainly convinces me that maybe this category called “LGBT Literature” is, in some ways, less defined by the author or the content and defined even a bit more by the reader.
And it’s not even as limited as I thought it was.