A new Golden Age of LGBTQ lit?

Writing in the June 28 New York Times, Aaron Hicklin, a bookstore owner and former editor-in-chief of Out magazine, lays out a provocative thesis:

"It is not a stretch to call the past few years the richest period for queer fiction since 1978, when Andrew Holleran published Dancer From the Dance, Larry Kramer published Faggots and Edmund White published Nocturnes for the King of Naples." He goes on to assert that "This is not simply a story of representation getting its due. The audience for literary fiction has long skewed toward women and gay men. What has changed is the industry’s willingness to acknowledge that and the many straight women who are willing to read about gay characters."

I think Mr. Hicklin lays out a persuasive case, and Lord knows I want him to be right! Yet this paragraph, in particular, gives me pause: "According to data compiled from BookScan, sales of LGBT. fiction (excluding digital sales) were roughly $8 million in 2015, the year Hanya Yanagihara published A Little Life, heralded by Garth Greenwell as a great gay novel. By 2025, annual sales of LGBTQ. fiction had reached more than $80 million, a tenfold increase over a decade in which fiction more broadly has struggled. Over the same period, sales of literary fiction fell to around 33 million books per year from around 36 million."

Here's my question: Is being a bigger fish in a shrinking pool a sign of vitality or less competition? Or both? I encourage you to read the op-ed and decide for yourself.

The Guardian's readers weigh in

Back in May, I posted the results of a writers poll The Guardian conducted that compiled a list of "The 100 Best Novels of All Time."

Depending on how strictly one defines LGBTQ literature, between 10 and 15 of the novels would fit that rubric--including Virginia's Woolf's To the Lighthouse. wbich came in fourth. In fact, with five novels on the list, Woolf was the most-voted-for writer--beating Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, with four each.

Last month, the newspaper invited readers to nominate their favorite novels, and more than 3,000 of them did, producing this lineup. As one would expect, there is a lot of overlap between the two "top 100" lists, and the overall proportion of LGBTQ titles is also roughly the same. However, Woolf doesn't fare nearly as well here as she did in the previous poll, with only two titles represented (To the Lighthouse fell from #4 to #64). That may be a function of the fact that the readers' choices skew more late 20th- and 21st-century than the authors'.

On the positive side, this list includes three titles that were not in the first compilation: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (which we discussed back in 2015); Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (discussed in 2017); and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (discussed in 2021).

Finally, while the original poll put George Eliot's Middlemarch at the very top, the readers demoted it to #2 in favor of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Pride Month poetry, Part 1

As I noted in a previous post: In honor of Pride Month, the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter has devoted its June lineup to LGBTQ+ poetry. I've split those offerings up into three posts because there are so many of them. Enjoy!

Bildungsroman by Sam Sax (Note: He's the guest editor who selected this month's poetry; I've added this first set of poems from his oeuvre to the ones he actually chose for the newsletter :-).

Post-Diagnosis by Sam Sax

Pedagogy by Sam Sax

Objectophile by Sam Sax

Statement of Purpose by Kyle Carrero Lopez

At the end of the world, you tell me about the bees by Muriel Leung

Alexa for Seniors in Easy Steps by Alexis N. Garcia

Fidelity by William Ward Butler

Do You Know What Today Is? by Danez Smith

Bildungssonnet by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Summer City by travis l. tate

Pride Month poetry, Part 2

Here is the second set of LGBTQ+ poems disseminated this month via the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter. Enjoy!

Position Paper #53: National Archivist by Andrea Lawlor

Lube, Ars Poetica by Lan Lesmeister

Afterwards by Eva Candelaria Sosa

Gertrude Stein by Mina Loy

In Memoriam [±That after all this I have still chosen life.] by Jimin Seo

An Erasure of Senate Bill 111 by Moncho Alvarado

My earth which is mine will always make more of itself by Kamelya Omayma Youssef

I Was Born Again the First Time I Lost Time Watching a Woman by Shira Erlichman

The Shoes My Mother Hated, in Fairness, Were Ugly by Ariana Brown

Six Love Songs by Edward Powys Mathers

[last summer I folded my dresses into storage] by Isa Borgeson

Pride Month poetry, Part 3

And here is the third and final set of LGBTQ+ poems disseminated this month via the American Academy of Poetry's Poem-a-Day newsletter. Enjoy!

Deluxe Mourning Package by Rachel McKibbens

A Song [I was want] by Jos Charles

for goldfish that remember seaworld by D’mani Thomas

1915 by Robert Graves

I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer by Angel Nafis

[i love them still] by Fatimah Asghar

Nocturne by Oliver Baez Bendorf

New Moon Newton by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Dysphoria by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Evergreen by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf

It's a small world after all...

David Mendler attended the Queer Writer's Salon in Arlington this past Thursday and reports that Dominique Dickey, one of the contributors to Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, was there. Dickey lives in D.C. and read a section of their story, "Forever Won't End Like This," which we'll be discussing on Wednesday.

As David comments, "It was cool to be able to see a local author read their work a week before we are about to discuss it!"

Scientific American's alien book picks

In anticipation of this coming Wednesday's discussion of the first set of stories in Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, I found this article from Scientic American quite timely.

In it, the magazine's staff recommend 24 books that "have kept us curious about alien life and encounters with it that could change us as humans." Although I've always loved the science fiction/fantasy genre, I've only read a few of these (though I have read other works by some of these authors).

Only a handful of them have an LGBTQ connection, such as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which we discussed in 2024, but one in particular intrigues me: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which the staffer who nominated it describes as follows: "This is the multispecies future I want to live in. A lovable crew of diverse aliens and humans work together to understand each other and the universe."

I plan to order it, and if it lives up to that description, I'll nominate it for our next reading list.