My Year in Gay Novels

And other kinds.

Well, it’s time for yet another end-of-year reading post.

Instead of an exhaustive inventory, I’ve chosen a thematic selection from the novels I read this year. I read fiction in part to answer my own questions, and this year’s list circled around a loose set of them: What is desire? How do we know what we want, when it can be so fluid and protean? What does it mean to try to live by one’s desires—what does it do to us as individuals, to our social relationships, in society as a whole? How do we reconcile desire—so unruly, so wild and shattering—with the limits of what other people can give us, with our responsibility to be good? How do we stand living only once in a world that will never be enough?

This selection also conveniently serves as something of a mission statement for next year, of themes I will probably explore further in later readings and writings. If you want to pressure me to do so—or, to be honest, afford me the time—I will not complain at all if you become a paid subscriber.

The gay canon and its héritiers

Gay novels have made up most of my organized “reading program” the past few years; developing a connecting to something like a canon of “my people” has been a source of solace and inspiration.

I’ve returned the last few summers to Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978, re-released this year with an introduction by Garth Greenwell)—for me the cornerstone of post-Stonewall gay literature, the aesthetic and philosophical bar against which I measure everything else. Many have noted its double-sidedness: it is simultaneously a silvery, romantic celebration of the 1970s “circuit,” with its dancing, drugs, and promiscuity, and a moralist critique of its fantasies. (“You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality.”) The more I read it, the more its “argument” appears to be that gay men need to “grow up,” to recognize the unreality and emptiness of their collective adolescent romanticism and find a way to integrate the values of commitment, domesticity, and family. The rest of Holleran’s books, which are all closely autobiographical, feature a version of himself who takes that path by moving to Florida and caring for his paraplegic mother. But as beautifully and poignantly rendered as the story is, Holleran seems to remain stuck in a binary where homosexuality stays cordoned off from life, shadowed in shame. (He never comes out to his parents, and his character lives an increasingly insular, etiolated existence.)

His most recent novel, The Kingdom of Sand (2023) is the climax of that project: the narrator, now in his 70s, living alone in an all but preserved-in-amber version of his family home, tending a shrine to his dead parents and watching his only friend die of old age. I found it astonishing, at first, that Holleran retells the story of the previous novels, often in exactly the same words. But The Kingdom of Sand has its own kind of understated majesty: the least sentimental of Holleran’s books, it acknowledges that there were other possible lives his character could have lived, but that he chose the bounded rootedness, however lonely, of this one—the pitiless beauty of inexorable change, registered in the slow advance of aging, the shifts in the sociology of his neighborhood, the changing climate-ravaged Florida landscape, and the growing dilapidation of his family home. From one angle it is relentlessly bleak, a stoic anticipation of death. But there is something liberated, almost worshipful about it, a celebration of how perception expands when the last of the self is given up, when all hope and expectations are surrendered: the face of Time itself. (It’s capitalized in the book.)

Though Holleran’s novels are a well of still-unresolved gay questions, his project is so narrow that it’s hard to accept him as anything like an interpreter of “gay life” in general. It was revelatory to read these two alongside Robert Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir (1983), an elegantly written family novel about a character who comes out to his wealthy Italian-American parents, integrates his partner into their family life, challenges his father’s homophobia, and cares for his dying mother. It is, in other words, about a character who does what Holleran exhorted gay men—and one imagines, himself—to do in the final pages of Dancer. Love only appears as stylized fantasy in Holleran, whose novels are all but devoid of depictions of gay relationships or sex that is not shadowed and sordid; Ferro shows that a more socially integrated gay life was possible even then.

Though I’m constitutionally and aesthetically seduced by Holleran’s mournful romanticism, one appreciates the comparatively well-adjusted counterpoints of Ferro and, in a different vein, Edmund White. I’ve been finishing out the year with White’s The Farewell Symphony (1997), a fictionalized memoir that covers the 1960s through the AIDS crisis across New York, Rome, and Paris. It’s easily the best of White’s books I’ve read so far; his chirpy confessionalism can sometimes grate, but his autofiction is also a genuinely vulnerable, self-probing project. Where Dancer is an almost ethereal transfiguration of a moment, The Farewell Symphony benefits from hindsight. As opposed to Holleran’s transfiguration, which features few actual characters, White is relentlessly concrete, accreting layers of detail, stories, relationship dynamics, and voices. Holleran can handle at most one other character besides himself at a time, usually a subject of distant fixation; White is avidly curious and relational, handing over his narrative even to minor characters for pages at a time. If Holleran writes the gay soul, White writes the gay body, the gay collective body, and the latter’s openness to experience gives The Farewell Symphony more widely relevant things to say about the possibilities and limits of homosexual life.

I tend to be less impressed with younger contemporary gay writers, and even question whether they are writing gay fiction at all—a subject for the future. There were several new ones I didn’t get to, but I enjoyed a couple of attempts released this year. Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry (2024), a loose modernization of Shakespeare’s Henriad, is a wickedly funny book whose main character is the gay failson of a down-on-their-luck family of British nobles. The voice is distinctive and assured, even if I did feel the narrative dissolved into something of a weak-tea trauma plot and left a light imprint on my mind. The real revelation was Daniel Lefferts’ Ways and Means (2024), about a boy from a Rust-Belt town who majors in finance at NYU, determined to make his widowed mother a fortune. He ends up the third in the ailing relationship of an artsy, 30-something gay couple and embroiled in an elaborate financial scam that is (spoiler alert) connected to a fascist plot. It’s a deep inquiry into the nature of value (financial, artistic, relational, existential), a family-drama-cum-political thriller that “queers” Jonathan Franzen’s inventories of relational dynamics with reflections on topping and bottoming, couples and threesomes, all with a humor that belies its philosophical—religious?—seriousness. In parallel with its depiction of right-wing politics, Ways and Means approaches the politics-of-desire questions that so dog gay men and concludes, “In fucking there is only ever unfairness.” If the basic criterion of the gay novel is an intellectual curiosity about homosexuality itself, Lefferts may prove a worthy heir to Holleran, Ferro, and White.

The politics of desire

The politics of desire are taken up even more bracingly in

Naomi Kanakia

’s The Default World (2024), a fierce page-turner about a trans woman named Jhanvi who comes up with a scheme to scam a group of ultra-woke, polyamorous San Francisco tech employees into paying for her transition surgeries. The Default World asks: what if the rules of alternative sexual spaces—the utopianism of honesty and boundaries—were extended to everyone? What if beautiful people were forced to admit their disgust for the ugly, to acknowledge their investment in social hierarchy? What if we even said there’s nothing wrong with those feelings as long as we’re honest about them? The Default World is a sharp political novel that sees both sides of everything, including how progressive ideas can serve as a cover for the privileged and, at the same time, also nudge them toward greater openness and sympathy.

Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service (2022) might be the book one of The Default World’s hot girls would write after taking up its challenge of radical honesty. It’s a thrilling, boldly intellectual novel that unwinds every contemporary sexual piety: that sex should be carefully bounded and “safe,” that it should always be equal and transparent, that it should never involve “power differences.” Fishman’s narrator starts as a queer feminist with a commitment to “political lesbianism,” but watches her cherished principles unwind as she discovers an unsettling sexual sublime with a dominant man. “It was as if all the questions I care most about, and inside which I felt most alone—desire, sex, gender, attention, intimacy, and power—were placed for display on a table…I could study them like fruit in a bowl.” Acts of Service sees sex as a path to a kind of enlightenment “beyond good and evil,” whose power cannot be separated from compulsion, abjection and exclusivity. Desire defies politics. But it’s worth noting that Fishman’s experiment still depends on a carefully concocted scenario in which, even if “comfortable doesn’t have anything to do with sex,” no one is truly harmed. The bigger political question is: What if everyone did this? What kind of container does this vision of life have to be put in to be practicable? As Jhanvi puts it in The Default World: “You can have excitement or security but not both…community comes with rules.”

A detour back to the 2010s

Out of both a waft of nostalgia and a sense of forgetting everything I read, I revisited two novels I loved from the last decade. In Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), fantasies come to grief on Midwestern suburban streets and in the Middle East. College basketball star Patty marries Walter because he sees herself how she wants to be seen—dutiful, giving, good, rather than willful and horny for Walter’s self-absorbed rock-star roommate; Walter marries her because she’s out of his league. Unequal desire unravels them, but they piece it back together at the end of their illusions. Freedom has one of Franzen’s elaborate, farcical political overlays, which felt more indulgent this time than it did when I was young and amazed all that could be in a novel, but the way he satirizes his own progressive politics is still hilarious and admirable.¹ He’s one of the great psychologists of American fiction, and Freedom gives a masterful archaeology of self-delusion—unavoidable, the most understandable thing in the world, but deadly enough to ruin your life.

Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) was one of the buzziest literary novels of the 2010s, so if its moment that I wondered whether it would hold up a decade later. It does: it endures by being more like a 19^th-century novel than one typically written by the Brooklyn literati that populate it. Its funny, scathing-but-sympathetic account of Nate Piven, a rising star who thinks he’s nice to women but can’t seem to stop hurting them, was praised for getting inside the mind of the millennial male intellectual. Waldman is interested in whether men truly, as many of them claim, want relationships with strong intellectual peers or whether they actually prefer sexy subordinates.² After a whirlwind romance with Hannah, a writer whose mind equals his own, Nate gets cold feet and opts for Greer, a “girlish and high-maintenance” sex memoirist who openly disdains his intellect. Though Waldman doesn’t spare Nate’s emotional immaturity, she also doesn’t make him a villain. The final section on his relationship with Greer touchingly suggests only she had the strength to demand more of him, that he needed the frisson of friction and difference to pull himself out of self-absorption. Nathaniel P. holds all the interpretations open: that sexism shapes what men want from women, and that maybe men and women have always wanted different things out of love.

This is probably it from me for this year, so I will conclude with a word of gratitude to all of you have read and engaged with my work the past few months as I’ve geared up to take this more seriously next year. Thank you, especially, to my paid subscribers; while I don’t necessarily do this for money, your support does make it possible to write here as opposed to doing other kinds of side work. I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and look forward to sharing more work with you next year.

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1. The political backdrop of Franzen’s most recent novel, Crossroads (2021), is more effective for being subdued and historical, allowing oblique resonances between past and present.

2. Waldman later wrote an essay for the New Yorker on this theme, contrasting love in Tolstoy, Bellow, Roth, and Knausgaard with Austin, Eliot, Brontë and Ferrante. “Men have been, in a sense, the real romantics: they are far more likely than women to portray love as something mysterious and irrational, impervious to explanation, tied more to physical qualities and broad personal appeal than to a belief—or hope—in having found an intellectual peer. … In literature, the desire to find an equal, and the belief that love in its ideal form should comprise a meeting of minds as well as bodies, appears to be a much greater psychological driver for women than it is for men.” Nathaniel P. clearly stages a conflict between these male and female literary versions of love, though to its credit refuses to make an easy choice between them.

To make a perhaps flimsy connection to my other selections, contrast with White’s observation of a gay man who believed “there was no way sex and friendship could be made compatible” and “longed for true love with an intellectual inferior and physical superior” (The Farewell Symphony, 150). Or Holleran’s verdict that “the vast majority of homosexuals are looking for a superman to love and find it very difficult to love anyone merely human” (Dancer, 229). Are gay men uniquely aesthetic and romantic, as these writers sometimes suggest—or just men?