Benoit Denizet-Lewis has recently asked LGBT authors and literary figures to contribute a list of “five books that every LGBT person should have on his bookshelf." I have made a list of five books to share in no particular order with an annotation.
Published in 1956, James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room, about an American expatriate and his sexual exploration and contradictory desires with an Italian bartender in post World War II Paris was risque for its time. David, the protaginist can be compared to Ernest Hemingway's Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. In David, Baldwin has created a character who remains, ostensibly, detached from the world; both men with a veneer of invincibility and hard assurance. Some people have cited that Badlwin's other works like Another Country or Go Tell It On The Mountain being much better. But the homosexual content is much more subtle in them. The novel suggests, that the loss of innocence, if accepted, can be the beginning of a journey that leads to knowledge. The novel's title is well chosen. Giovanni's room, which he shares with David is confining, unkempt, grim, and threatening. The room also acts as a metaphor for love create that David and Giovanni have for one another and the possbile ramifications of it. Baldwin allows us to witness a doomed affair of the heart and it is this atmospheric, eloquently written, that adds to the sense of the inevitable isolation that makes this a great novel.
A Separate Peace by John Knowles. The novel takes place at the ficitious Devon, an elite all boy New England prep school (which is a thinly-veiled representation of Knowles' own alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy), in the summer before World War II. Gene Forrester is a successful, amiable student. Gene is always overshadowed by his best friend Phineas or "Finny". By comparison, Finny is faster, stronger, more flashy and handsome. They form a complex relationship that draws out the best and worst of each boy and leads ultimately to violence, a confession, the betrayal of trust and redemption.There are a few standout instances of the homosexual subtext in the novel and the intensity of the feelings that Gene and Finny share. From their wrestling scene, to their night on the beach, their admiration for each other's physical beauty. In A Separate Peace these young men attend school, bond with peers, lose their innocence, encounter hate and ignorance. Each one inevitably struggles to develop a sexual identity and otherwise. As the world continues to change around into their adulthood, so do their emotions and feelings.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Set in rural Georgia, The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a impoverished fourteen-year-old Black girl. The novel depicts her early life, being abused and raped by her stepfather and having two children by him. Then Celie is married off to a man referred to simply as "Mr." when her father refuses to let him marry her prettier sister Nettie. Nettie later escapes to escape from Mr.'s advances. Celie writes letters to God, and later to Nettie. These letters are the outlet for her to express her dreams, feelings and desperation. A special aspect of the novel is the relationship that Shug and Celie develop. Celie is downtrodden, somber, while Shug is a jovial, worldly and independent. While Shug is much more sexually experienced as Celie, she lacks the sexual and emotional experience of intimacy in a relationship that Celie seems to crave. Before having Shug's love, Celie never have much thought to her needs and desires. Both these women help better understand themselves. Through Shug, Celie sees within herself the power to leave Mr. and create a better life for herself. Walker writes lesbianism empathetically, without placing the lesbianism above before any other parameter.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham. The novel deals with three generations of women affected by a Virginia Woolf novel. The first is Woolf herself writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1923 whilist dealing with mental illness. The second, Laura Brown, reads Mrs. Dalloway in 1949 as she prepares her husband's birthday party. The third is Clarissa Vaughan, a lesbian, who in 1998 plans a party to celebrate a literary award won by her good friend and former lover,who is dying of the AIDS virus.'The Hours' concerns three generations of lesbian-bisexual women. Virginia Woolf was known to have affairs with a number women; Laura kisses her neighbor Kitty in her kitchen, and Clarissa Vaughn is in a committed relationship with Sally, but was previously Richard's lover. The Hours also examines the freedom that which successive generations have been able to express their sexuality freely, to the public, or even to themselves. As such, a definable sexuality for the characters of Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown are hard to ascertain. For Virginia and Laura it would have been extremely difficult to be openly gay or bisexual. Such visibilty would have meant extreme consequences by their respective societies.
Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent by Bruce Nugent. This anthology shows glimpses one of the lesser known Gay icons. Nugent wrote and thrived artistically during the Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance. He was a close friend of friend of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Nugent was the first Black writer of the time to be openly homosexual in print. The excerpts of Nugent's writings span a fifty-year period, the most predominantly coming from the 1930s. Nugent has often been relegated to only a footnote and a provider of anecdotal stories about the Harlem Renaissance and its leading canonized figures by researchers and biographers past and present. Nugent deserves the right to be back in the forefront as a pillar of the Renaissance. It should be pointed out that Nugent, like Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, Wallace Thurman were all proud to be black. But again, like Hughes, Hurston, and Thurman, Nugent understood that black Americans are a multicultural people of mixed bloodlines no matter the complexion of skin and the race of either parent. But to Nugent, it was better to be openly proud of one's sexualty, no matter the ramifications.
--Fredi_Washington.JPG)
