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.