Queer Literature

[queerbychoice]

I can't believe I'm such a literature geek that I'm actually inventing a new queer literature meme, but, er, scanner_darkly hyperlinked in the comments section of this entry by donutgirl to the list of "The 100 Best Gay Novels," as published in the June 22, 1999 issue of The Advocate and selected by the Publishing Triangle, and I realized I've read sooooo very very many of them that I simply could not resist the urge to copy the list below and cross off all the ones I've read.

1. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
2. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
3. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
4. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust <--own, but havne't read yet
5. The Immoralist by Andre Gide
6. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
7. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
8. Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
9. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
10. Zami by Audre Lorde
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
12. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
13. Billy Budd by Herman Melville
14. A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White
15. Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran
16. Maurice by E.M. Forster
17. The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal
18. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
19. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
20. Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
21. The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
22. City of Night by John Rechy
23. Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal
24. Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller
25. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
26. Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
27. The Bostonians by Henry James
28. Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
29. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
30. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
31. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
32. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
33. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
34. The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
35. Olivia by Dorothy Bussy
36. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
37. Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw
38. Another Country by James Baldwin
39. Cheri by Colette
40. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
41. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
42. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
43. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
44. The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault
45. Young Rorless by Robert Musil
46. Eustace Chisholm and the Works by James Purdy
47. The Story of Harold by Terry Andrews
48. The Gallery by John Horne
49. Sister Gin by June Arnold
50. Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall by Neil Bartlett
51. Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram
52. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
53. The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
54. The Young and Evil by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler
55. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
56. A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan
57. Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
58. Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli by Ronald Firbank
59. Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman
60. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
61. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
62. The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
63. Lover by Bertha Harris
64. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
65. La Batarde by Violette Leduc
66. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
67. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
68. The Satyricon by Petronius
69. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
70. Special Friendships by Roger Peyrefitte
71. The Changelings by Jo Sinclair
72. Paradiso by Jose Lezama Lima
73. Sheeper by Irving Rosenthal
74. Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig
75. The Child Manuela (Madchen in Uniform) by Christa Winsloe
76. An Arrow's Flight by Mark Merlis
77. The Gaudy Image by William Talsman
78. The Exquisite Corpse by Alfred Chester
79. Was by Geoff Ryman
80. Therese and Isabelle by Violette Leduc
81. Gemini by Michel Tournier
82. The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White
83. The Children's Crusade by Rebecca Brown
84. The Story of the Night by Colm Tiobin
85. The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) by Jean Cocteau
86. Hell Has No Limits by Jose Donoso
87. Riverfinger Women by Elana Nachman (Dykewomon)
88. The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon by Tom Spanbauer
89. Closer by Dennis Cooper
90. Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac
91. Miss Peabody's Inheritance by Elizabeth Jolley
92. Rene's Flesh by Virgillio Pinera
93. Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai
94. Wasteland by Jo Sinclair
95. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton
96. Sea of Tranquillity by Paul Russell
97. Autobiography of a Family Photo by Jacqueline Woodson
98. In Thrall by Jane DeLynn
99. On Strike Against God by Joanna Russ
100. Sita by Kate Millett

(In the future this will become my gift wish list for all holidays. :p)

Comments

[donutgirl.livejournal.com]

Call me dim, but I'm totally not getting how Little Women is queer.

I just realized I should totally add Rimbaud, and Verlaine as well. I forgot all about poetry...

[djpekky.livejournal.com]

Neither do I!

Peace!

Pekky

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Well, Jo's a baby dyke, right? And there's the level on which it's about female children finding their way in the world outside of male protection/direction---having an autonomy of sorts that bucked gender roles.

I understand a fair amount of Louisa May scholarship has a queer/gender focus. I confess I've not read any of it.

[donutgirl.livejournal.com]

perhaps under an extreeeemely loose definition of dyke. I always thought of Jo as more incestuous than anything... she was clearly in love with her father, and could only get married when she found a father substitute. But is that what we're supposed to think of lesbians these days? That kind of explanation seems a bit old fashioned to me...

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

This conversation is making me wish I remembered all the details of Little Women much better than I do. I read all of Louisa May Alcott's books, but I was 12 when I read them and that was 15 years ago.

[donutgirl.livejournal.com]

Well, it was a long time ago for me too... but I really loved those books.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

One could argue that the expansion of the meaning of "queer" is decidedly new-fashioned.

[donutgirl.livejournal.com]

So now it's transgressive now to say any girl who acts a bit "masculine" is a dyke? I'd just as soon explode these stupid gender myths, personally. I never thought Jo acted like a boy, I thought she acted like a human being, unlike her simpering sisters. If only all women had that privledge...

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

One could argue that choosing to act like a human being is a first step toward choosing to be queer . . .

[donutgirl.livejournal.com]

yes, I suppose one could argue that. Not sure that leaves "queer" as a very useful term, though... but I suppose it's no great loss.

yeah, what SHE said

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Indeed!

[the-moonshiner.livejournal.com]

How are they picking these novels? At what point are they queer "enough?" IIRC, Mrs Dalloway had like a paragraph and a half about Mrs. Dalloway's childhood crush on a girl.

recommend me 3 or 4 really good ones?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

That's asking me to narrow it down really a lot, so I'm going to only recommend ones about female queerness just because that helps me to narrow it down further.

10. Zami by Audre Lorde
18. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
41. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
55. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
100. Sita by Kate Millett

Okay, that's five but they're all too good to not recommend. :p

[oranjehair.livejournal.com]

How about Jeanette Winterson?

[djpekky.livejournal.com]

You read my mind! Sexing the Cherry is my current favourite book!

Peace!

Pekky

[djpekky.livejournal.com]

Oh, nevermind. They had it, but for Oranges are not The only Fruit.

Peace!

Pekky

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

They listed her, and I crossed her off because I've read her.

[iadork4life.livejournal.com]

lol, To Kill a Mockingbird?
I've read that book at least 4 times...Is scout a bit queer? I can't really determine what the queerocity of this book is, but oh well.
I'm glad this is here, i'm in the middle of Naked Lunch and The Picture of Dorian Grey.
I always want more gay books :)

[princesswitch.livejournal.com]

I just re-read the Bostonians a few months ago, and once again felt completely justified in arguing to my 11th-grade English teacher that Olive was lesbian, Verena was bisexual, and they had a romantic relationship. Trying to teach kids the Bostonians while stripping it of its queerness is really rather stupid, you know? May as well try to teach Gone With the Wind without talking about the war part.

I don't get why Little Women is on this list, either, even though I loved it.

[asrai-d.livejournal.com]

Wasn't little women a kids novel? Why should there be projected sexuality into a children's novel?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

It was a young adult novel, like for junior high/high school kids, not prepubescent ones. And anyway, there's always *some* implication that sexuality exists in the lives of the characters in kids' novels, or else nobody would ever have been conceived and there wouldn't be any characters.

[yay4pikas.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I have read very few of those, and the ones I have read I can't call queer lit, or even subtextual (and I managed to scrape enough subtext out of Pride and Prejudice for a paper). I'm rather puzzled -- did they post their selection criteria anywhere?

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Not that I can find, unfortunately. I have to agree that many of their choices are awfully unqueer.

Incidentally, who's that in your David Bowie-themed icon, since it clearly isn't David Bowie himself?

[yay4pikas.livejournal.com]

Er...it's me, from high school. For some Spirit Week thing (I had very little school spirit, but any excuse to dress up as Bowie). I did the makeup backwards, but it's one of the better costumes I've done, I think. :)

'Course, most people thought I was a) a drag queen, or b) KiSS.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Mistaking David Bowie for Kiss is sacrilege!

It's a great costume. I love it.