The Gay Canon

The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay Man Should Read, By Robert Drake, Doubleday-Anchor, 1998

The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature: Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day, Edited by Byrne R. S. Fone, Columbia University Press, 1998

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, By Gregory Woods, Yale University Press, 1998

Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995, By Reed Woodhouse, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998

In his introduction to Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), Lee Edelman theorizes the radical potential of gay writing. His "homographesis" explores the ways in which "homosexual identity" is determined through its assimilation into the "tradition of Western metaphysics," and by extension into the tradition of Western culture more generally (9). He goes on to show the ways in which gay writing can deconstruct "the binary logic of sexual difference on which symbolic identity is based, effectively disrupt[ing] the cognitive stability" of culture itself (12). For Edelman, in other words, gay identity is something to be mobilized in resistance to the rigorous heteronormativity of the Western tradition. It does this best, of course, from within this tradition itself. Writing holds this radical potential, Edelman argues, because it is only within writing, or textuality, that homosexuality is culturally produced in the first place. What this suggests to me is that the disruption that gay writing enables, its true subversive potential, may be lost in the attempt to separate out the works that might themselves constitute the gay canon. Does gay literature really need to be canonized to do what it does best? In an important new essay, Barry Weller reminds us that "gay or queer criticism has signaled, from the outset, that its project entails not the examination of a circumscribed canon of gay-centered or gay-identified texts but a rereading of the way in which the entire body of Anglo-American literature--and beyond--delineates among other things the boundaries of sexual identity, the norms of sexual behavior, the grotesque and classically desirable body, and the terms of social inclusion and exile" (279). If this is true, then what sense does it make to talk about a gay canon?

Well, I suppose it is inevitable that we are talking in terms of a gay canon now. All the writers and editors of the books reviewed here invoke the spirit of canonization to legitimate their enterprise, and their volumes signal something that might be called the "coming of age" of gay studies in literature. For despite some overly defensive rhetoric, it does seem that the publishing world is ready to take gay literature seriously and to offer a number of different approaches to the topic, at least as many different approaches as these very different volumes represent and probably a great many more. The canon that is being established in this way is presented as an alternative canon--an alternative male canon, to be sure (the gender issue is one to which I will return)--as a rectification of an error of literary history that has ignored the gay canon in favor of what we might call a heterodetermined canon that excludes gay writers in a way parallel to the ways that black, Chicano, or other minority or women's writing has been excluded from the traditional Western canon. Let us set aside the question, only for the moment, of whether or not this would be a useful project and ask ourselves what canon we are talking about.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts the case most succinctly. In discussing the ways in which "the keepers of a dead canon" ask rhetorical questions "with the arrogant intent of maintaining ignorance"--questions like Saul Bellows's "Is there . . . a Tolstoy of the Zulus?"--Sedgwick posits various ways in which this question might be asked and then imagines asking it from a gay perspective:

From the point of view of this relatively new and inchoate academic presence, then, the gay studies movement...