“When gay people everywhere can marry, will that mean the end of gay literature?” I was regularly asked this question last spring while on tour for my most recent book, an account of how novels and plays in the years after World War II shook up sexual attitudes. This was months before President Obama announced his support for gay marriage; the subject was already very much out there.
But the question confused me. Why would a valuable piece of social progress close a literary door? Nobody thought women would no longer be a good subject for fiction once they got the vote. Nobody argues that African-American literature ended when Obama was elected.
I soon developed a handy response: “Oh, no — gay marriage is going to give us a whole new subject to write about.” But since then I’ve been thinking it over more closely, wondering just how same-sex marriage might affect literature, about what could change and what may have been there all along.
Full Story from The New York Times
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