The brilliant writer Alan Hollinghurst said at the Hay festival this weekend that the gay novel was dead and had had its day. The author, who won the Booker Prize in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, said that though he, of course, welcomed the liberated times we lived in, they offered less creative nutrition for storytellers than the decades battling for acceptance did.
He’s right, of course, to a degree. It’s ironic that the creative opportunities offered in years past, could not, on the whole, be expressed. For every EM Forster (whose one gay novel was published after he died), think how many others remain hidden, lost or simply untold through fear, self-loathing or the belief they wouldn’t be published. In the period since, writers such as Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Christopher Isherwood, James Baldwin, Maureen Duffy, Armistead Maupin and others used their keyboards to punch through the restrictions of the time. But even now, our stories aren’t often told because of prejudice, lack of interest and a feeling there is very little market for them.
Gay stories of growing liberation and bumpy journeys towards self-acceptance come from a time when gayness itself was the issue. That may be changing now but there are still matters that affect LGBT people in specific, different or disproportionate ways.
Homelessness; HIV (in the west); the way app culture and HIV-prevention drug PrEP are ushering in a new age of sexual liberation; growing hate crime; marriage; the experience of black, Asian and minority ethnic people; transgender people living through hostility in the media reminiscent of the tabloid beating lesbians and gays took in the 80s; the list is endless … And the legacy of gay shame that still leaves LGBT+ people with statistically higher levels of addiction, depression and suicide is only now being aired. Hollinghurst rightly points to Aids as one of the most powerful subjects for gay storytellers. But for many people, as I heard one young person say recently, the toll drugs are taking on our community feels like “the new Aids”.
In the world of LGBT fiction, the working class is as good as invisible. And, of course, all of this comes from the luxury of a western perspective. There are countries where being LGBT can still get you imprisoned or even killed. All of these offer equally fertile ground for storytellers as anything that came before.
Hollinghurst raises an interesting and valid point, but it’s also important that publishers and producers of film, TV and theatre know this isn’t the whole story. They’ve never fallen over themselves to produce work about our lives. Surrounded by leftwing people in big cities, often sprinkled with middle-class gay people with good lives, they don’t have much experience of coal-face LGBT lives and so stories remain untold.
As brilliant as Angels in America is, it’s sad that the National Theatre has produced so little British gay theatre that it marked the 50th anniversary of partial decriminalisation in England and Wales last year by staging a revival of Tony Kushner’s celebrated American play. Writers Patrick Cash and Peter Darney both addressed the current drug crisis, for instance, in their fringe hit plays The Chemsex Monologues and 5 Guys Chillin’, which have played internationally but garnered little interest from new writing companies in the UK.
Film is the place where, for the first time, our stories are really being told. The Moonlight effect is blooming. The clue to what LGBT audiences really want now can be found in the success of Call Me By Your Name, God’s Own Country and Love, Simon: positivity, romance and a long overdue exploration of intimacy. Gay stories have so often been about our fight just to exist. Now they are evolving into telling tales of our lives and loves. Netflix’s thriving gay programming – it is currently rebooting the classic Tales of the City – shows that though people may not hunt down hidden art-house cinemas or LGBT sections on the 18th floor of bookstores, with easy access, audiences gay and straight, will eat them up. The success of A Very English Scandal, a perfectly told gay story that captivated the entire nation, proves it.
The truth is we have only scratched the surface of stories about LGBT lives. There are countless out there. But those with the power to commission stories – in print, on screen or on stage – need to be inclined and interested enough to let us tell them.
• Matthew Todd is a former editor of Attitude magazine and the author of Straight Jacket: How to be gay and happy
