Send me your historical gays

January 22, 2022 9:02 AM

Please recommend great queer literature written before 1960. I just read The Haunting of Hill House and it blew my mind.

I had somehow absorbed the idea that Hill House had "some lesbian subtext" and was shocked and delighted to discover that it is fully and obviously ABOUT a queer relationship, like, I cannot imagine what straight mental gymnastics were required for some people to avoid that reading. Now I desperately need to read more queer books written before the sexual revolution. Genre unimportant, flavor of queerness unimportant, but I do want:

-The queer characters are central, not peripheral
-They are treated as fully developed characters, not stereotypes
-For the purposes of this question I am definitely not looking for books written after 1960 but set prior to 1960. Written before but published after is fine.

I might pick up The Charioteer by Mary Renault next. What else should I look into?

posted by showbiz_liz to Media & Arts (27 answers total)

The Bostonians.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 9:15 AM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room was published in 1956, so it just makes your cut-off. I thought it was brilliant. (I'm a cis female - I bring that up in case I am missing something about the book that would be obvious to someone who is not.)

From the Wikipedia description:
Much of the integral plot of Giovanni's Room occurs within queer spaces, with the gay bar David frequents being the catalyst that not only drives the plot, but allows it to occur. The bar acts as a mediator for David, Baldwin uses this setting to bring up much of the conflict of the novel, however, it remains a place that David returns to. Baldwin's novel is one of the most accurate portrayals of LGBTQ+ people navigating the public and private sphere of its time. It negotiates the behaviour of publicly LGBTQ+ people alongside those who are still "closeted", like David, and how these differing perspectives have an effect on the individual as well as the community that they navigate.

William Burroughs also comes to mind, but I personally find him unreadable. He wrote a book called Queer in the early 1950s, but it wasn't published until 1985.
Note about Burroughs from Wikipedia:
In the words of Jamie Russell he has "been totally excluded from the 'queer canon'". According to Russell, Burroughs's life and writing suggests a gay subjectivity which has been deeply troubling to many in the gay community.
posted by FencingGal at 9:20 AM on January 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers is a Lord Peter mystery in which the victim is an elderly lady who lived a full and happy life in what was obviously a queer relationship (and who was absolutely not murdered because of her queerness or anything.) There is some homophobia in the modern part of the story, but it has always read to me as being a trait of a particular (well-meaning, not at all hateful) character, and not supported by anything else in the text.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:24 AM on January 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.
posted by vanitas at 9:37 AM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872 gothic vampire novella. I first encountered it via The Toast
posted by lizard music at 9:44 AM on January 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

Maurice by E. M. Forster. Written in 1913-1914, published in 1971 after the author's death. The main character is textually gay; the book is mostly about his quest to come to terms with that and to find personal happiness in his romantic relationships.

The reason it wasn't published until after Forster's death, IIRC, is that he believed it would not have been well-received due to the fact that it had a happy ending, which he refused to change. The ending is indeed amazingly happy and every time I read it I marvel at the fact that it was written in 1914.
posted by sineala at 9:55 AM on January 22, 2022 [6 favorites]

Well they are tragic and trashy but I enjoyed Ann Bannon.
posted by latkes at 9:55 AM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (also all the Ripley books)
Torchlight to Valhalla by Gale Wilhelm
The Well of Loneliness by Radcylffe Hall
Maurice by E. M. Forster
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Passing by Nella Larsen
Gentleman Jigger by Richard Bruce Nugent
Anything by Christopher Isherwood
Cecil Dreeme by Theodore Winthrop
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

(why yes, this is what I teach. I could add more but this is turning into a syllabus)
posted by dizziest at 9:59 AM on January 22, 2022 [11 favorites]

The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100–1200 BCE) - here are some new partial translations that emphasize it's more than a matter of subtext, particularly in the 3rd link: 1, 2, 3, 4. For comparison, the same translator has a bunch of other Akkadian translations tagged #queer history.

The Story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville (1695) - a charming queer and/or trans romance story from the late 17th Century.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:00 AM on January 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

Was just coming in to recommend The Well of Loneliness. So instead I'll second it!
posted by saladin at 10:32 AM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

A Scarlet Pansy (do make sure to get the edition I linked to, which is the original 1932 text reissued recently, and not the weird 1990s edition of "The Scarlet Pansy" by "Anonymous" which was edited into a pulp novel about cis gay men.)
posted by needs more cowbell at 10:45 AM on January 22, 2022

Edward II and to a lesser extent Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe (In Faustus the queer relationship is implicit; in Edward II it is textual)

Shakespeare's sonnets from around 15 through 126 or so

Galatea (or Gallathea) by John Lyly - 2 girls disguise themselves as boys and fall in love with each other; gods solve everything at the end by offering to transform one of them into an actual boy (restoring heteronormativity but adding transness)

Diana: Now, things falling out as they do, you must leave these fond affections; nature will have it so, necessity must.

Gallathea: I will never love any but Phillida. Her love is engraven in my heart, with her eyes.

Phillida: Nor I any but Gallathea, whose faith is imprinted in my thoughts by her words.

Neptune: An idle choice, strange, and foolish, for one Virgin to dote on another, and to imagine a constant faith where there can be no cause of affection. How like you this, Venus?

Venus: I like well and allow it. They shall both be possessed of their wishes, for never shall it be said that Nature or Fortune shall overthrow Love and Faith.

posted by Pallas Athena at 11:44 AM on January 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
posted by Melismata at 12:09 PM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

The City and The Pillar (1948) by Gore Vidal

Confessions of a Mask (1949) by Yukio Mishima (also Forbidden Colours)

Also, I was a bit surprised when I finally read Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) by T.E. Lawrence. Much of what I assumed would be coded (his attractions to young men) seemed pretty openly stated. In loosely related, various J.R. Ackerley memoirs are similarly not queer-focused but fairly candid about his queerness.
posted by ovvl at 12:22 PM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp is mid-60s, but it's his autobiography so it's about a lot of the pre-60s years
posted by Geameade at 12:34 PM on January 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood has some wonderful chapters about four young men living together in a rented house on an island in Greece. It never says they're gay, and I'm sure it went right past a lot of readers when it was first published. But they are obviously and beautifully gay, and it's wonderful seeing the dynamics of their relationships playing out in the 1930S.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 12:40 PM on January 22, 2022

Response by poster: Much of what I assumed would be coded (his attractions to young men) seemed pretty openly stated.

This was what I found so stunning about Hill House as well. It seems like there are a lot of cases where mainstream readers were so unwilling or unable to contemplate the idea of homosexuality that they HAD to interpret it as “very close platonic friends” even when doing so makes the narrative make way less sense (at least to my modern gay self).

These answers are great, I’m excited to read these!
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:44 PM on January 22, 2022

Perhaps of interest, Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965 by Katheirne Forrest is a guide to more lesbian fiction including and beyond Highsmith and the Ann Bannon novels.
posted by lhauser at 1:08 PM on January 22, 2022

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote (1948).
posted by merriment at 1:17 PM on January 22, 2022

Someone has already said The Price of Salt, but: it's SO good.
posted by Jeanne at 3:18 PM on January 22, 2022

You mention Mary Renault but not her historical novels so I'll suggest The Last of the Wine . It starts like this:

When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me.

You will say there is nothing out of the way in this. Yet I daresay it is less common than you might suppose; for as a rule, when a father decides to expose an infant, it is done and there the matter ends. And it is seldom a man can say, either of the Spartans or the plague, that he owes them life instead of death.

It was at the beginning of the Great War...

You probably already know this book, but I'm adding this answer just in case you don't or in case someone else following this thread doesn't. MR's treatment of the relationship between Alexias and Lysis is just so matter-of-fact. See also The Mask of Apollo.
posted by kingless at 4:25 PM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

if you're willing to expand to pre-stonewall: Valerie Taylor
posted by brujita at 8:09 PM on January 22, 2022

If you don't mind that it's (fairly strong) subtext - Witching Hill by EW Hornung. It's on Gutenberg. I found this through an interview with Rose Lerner on Smart Bitches - transcript. She also talks about Raffles, but it's decades since I read those so am confining my recommendation to Witching Hill.

Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner - technically, subtext again.

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles.

Olivia, by Dorothy Strachey.
posted by paduasoy at 5:25 AM on January 23, 2022

Oh hey, synchronicity! I was just thinking about this because I was reading the excellent PM Press Sticking It To The Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, which has a couple of relevant chapters. That led me to Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps, which I have on order but which appears to be about both your standard softcore pulps and your more ambitious novels and has some history/theory.

Anyway:The Beebo Brinker Chronicles were published in the late fifties through 1962.

Finisterre has a tragic ending (imposed by the publisher IIRC) but is an important book so probably of interest as part of a systematic read.

The Heart In Exile is a detective story first published in 1953. (There are lots of interesting gay detective series from the sixties/seventies/eighties if you ever want those.)
posted by Frowner at 6:59 AM on January 23, 2022

Tangentially related to your question, you might appreciate images of men in love between 1850 and 1950. I found them to be extraordinary, both because of the love and affection they show, but also because of the awareness of the context in which these men lived their lives. Despite the hatred and rejection of the world, they found this place of joy.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 12:21 PM on January 23, 2022

"A Separate Peace" by John Knowles - coming in just under deadline in 1959, set in WWII. More specifically, a coming-of-age story set in a boys' boarding school, and the uneasy friendship among the two main characters.
posted by Occula at 11:32 AM on January 24, 2022

You've got to read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and I'm surprised it's not been mentioned yet. And of course, much by Wilde fits your bill, but especially his nonfiction, check out his prison writings.
posted by panhopticon at 8:36 PM on January 25, 2022