Who is a Gay Author? What is a Gay Book?

This the topic Christopher Bram and I will discuss at my reading/signing at Barnes and Noble next week (Weds. 11/3 at 7:00 p.m., store at 82nd and B'way; for complete info please look here). The character of Bob the Book is, after all, a gay book, born out of the old joke, "A gay book is a book that is attracted to other books of the same gender" - a joke Chris says gay writers make out of anxiety over the whole issue of being pigeonholed. You want to think your writing is for the widest possible audience. Chris's definition for a gay book is a book written by, for, and about gay men. He then immediately points out that the prepositions here are slippery, especially "for." All this happens, by the way, in Chris's excellent nonfiction collection Mapping the Territory, a consideration of gay life and letters that will teach you much about reading, writing, perception, community, and relationships. You can check out "Mapping" here, and of course check out "Bob the Book" here.

Until my preliminary discussion last night with Chris, I would have said a gay book is a book that it could only possibly be of interest to gay men or women. Theroretically, gay literary writing can and should be of interest to everyone, so the definition above would have to narrow the field of what writing is really and truly "gay" down to gay erotica. But, though neither is terribly explicit, the M/M and yaoi genres open the door to somewhat eroticized gay romance that is, in the first case, written by straight women, presumably for at least some other straight women; and in the second case, consumed by tweener girls, primarily in Japan. (I have seen some yaoi animations on YouTube that were quite compelling. A thesis could be written - and I am sure some have - on what 13-year-old Japanese girls are getting from seeing slightly older Japanese boys in the throes of physical love. There are also these things called yaoi paddles that the girls go around whacking each other with. No, really. Sometimes they get out of control and whack people outside their circle.)

So that leaves flat-out porn. With some odd exceptions, hard-core gay porn should be the one kind of "gay book" of interest exclusively to gay men. Everything else should be up for grabs. Unfortunately it is not. Some straight male friends of mine have read Bob the Book. But Bob, being a book, is sexually nonthreatening. More on my straight male friends' reaction soon.