A History of Gay Literature (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

A HISTORY OF GAY LITERATURE: THE MALE TRADITION is an extremely comprehensive attempt to chart the course of gay literature through history. Author Gregory Woods has clearly succeeded in identifying the persistence of the homoerotic imagination over time and among cultures, and in this judiciously weighted, persuasively argued critical study he not only describes the extraordinarily wide range of texts that fit within this tradition but proposes a new and provocative definition of what in fact constitutes gay literature. Though he certainly includes works by identifiably gay authors and works that contain gay characters or themes (whether by gay authors or not), his theoretical position is that gay literature is any literary material that is “amenable to gay readings.” What Woods then proceeds to do is provide just such readings—“queering the canon,” as he says—by looking at canonical texts from a gay point of view.

Woods has an enormous number of texts to work with, from ancient Greek pastorals to medieval Arabic elegies, Renaissance dramas to Victorian pornography, modern European novels to African friendship verses and contemporary AIDS journalism. In all of his commentary on these historical works he is careful not to apply anachronistic assumptions that would result in distorted readings. He is acutely aware, for instance, of the elaborately coded gender system of Periclean Athens which both celebrated the love of men and boys but which also dictated strict roles for their amorous behavior. Indeed, any “pre-homosexual” text—any text, that is, from before the late-nineteenth century when homosexuality was being reconceived as a distinct human identity category—is treated with a clear sense of the cultural understandings of sexuality and gender that surrounded its production.

In chapters that are models of scholarship which is solid yet never intrusive or pedantic, critical commentary which is constantly revelatory yet always accessible, Woods moves his discussion to more contemporary literature that reflects the gay experience under Nazism, gay lives inside (and outside) of families, the changes in gay life and culture during the exhilarating years of post-Stonewall liberation as well as the alteration in the gay community during the tragic years of the AIDS epidemic. An important, if understandably controversial book, this is a significant contribution to gay studies.

Sources for Further Study

The Advocate. December 22, 1998, p. 63.

Kirkus Reviews. LXVI, January 15, 1998, p. 102.

Lambda Book Report. VI, June, 1998, p. 12.

Library Journal. CXXIII, April 1, 1998, p. 90.

The New Republic. CCXVIII, April 6, 1998, p. 36.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, February 9, 1998, p. 88.

The Times Literary Supplement. May 8, 1998, p. 25.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, March 22, 1998, p. 9.