The thrilling sensation of doing something you really wouldn't want your mother to catch you doing. I speak, of course, of the first time you picked up a book and discovered characters like you, living lives you had only guessed at. I was a speccy teen gay cliché who sick-noted out of PE for the library. There, on a normal looking shelf, was Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. It was like finding Narnia in the back of my wardrobe.
Maupin was daringly new to me but he was working a trail blazed long before, as a pioneering catalogue of the earliest known gay fiction now reveals. Available exclusively at Natalie Galustian Rare Books, They Were What They Were, written and compiled by Neil Pearson, is a literary landmark bringing together just over a hundred works published between 1862 and 1960. Yes, Wilde is there – you can pick up a signed copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, number 199 of 250, for £33,000. It's the most expensive item. The cheapest, at £10, is a copy of Horizon magazine from 1944 featuring a short story by Denton Welch in which a boy thrills to the attentions of his older brother's university friend. As with most items in the catalogue, there's no bumming, only chumming. You still have to read between the lines.
"The earliest book we have is from 1862, but much earlier exist," says Pearson. "There's a 17th-century Italian book called Alcibiades the Schoolboy in which a scholar defends sodomy in an attempt to seduce his pupil. It's thought to have been written by Antonio Rocco who, it won't surprise you to learn, was a libertine priest. It's impossible to find."
The titles which stand out from the catalogue's pages include For the Pleasure of His Company by Charles Warren Stoddard, The Transgressor by Julian Green, The Gay Year by Michael De Forrest and the intriguing Other Man's Saucer by Keith J Winter. What? Who? Exactly. "Most of these authors were writing undercover in their lifetimes and have remained undercover ever since," says Pearson. "Before the Chatterley trial, gay fiction was incredibly hard to find. As literature it rarely passed muster, but as a unifying force for lonely, isolated men it was invaluable." There are lots of inclusions in the catalogue by Anonymous. All are by men and there's very little poetry (Ginsberg's Howl is a notable exception) or drama.
"I asked lots of gay readers and writers of both sexes if they saw the development of gay and lesbian writing as two pieces of the same story. Nobody did, so I focused on men this time. I excluded most poetry because: a) there's a vast amount of it, poetry being a good way to write cryptically, deniably, about taboo subjects; and b) almost all of it is appalling."
Pearson is best known as the actor from Drop the Dead Donkey who went on to play Bridget Jones's sexist boss. "I've been an actor for 30 years," he says. "I still enjoy it, but it's always been what I do when I'm not doing the rest of my life." The rest of his life is books – especially banned ones.
He first found smut and sedition in the Seventies. "The Little Red Schoolbook did the rounds at school. It came from Denmark and was a manual about sex and drugs and how to hone your revolutionary instincts. It was very popular and quickly banned." Pearson was hooked. "Peter Hitchens accuses it of contributing to the decline of Western civilisation. Praise indeed."
Indulging his passion for the provocative, in 2007, Pearson wrote Obelisk, a lively scholarly history of the Paris-based press which dared to publish Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.
He and Galustian spent a year sourcing books for They Were What They Were, including trips to America. "The thrill of the chase is the most exhilarating part. Because no one had heard of them, they were difficult to find but cheap when you did. The story these books tell only becomes apparent when you put them all together."
Some of the books in the catalogue are only gay if you look very closely at the relationship between two friends (often soldiers or schoolboys). Sadly, few have much gaiety. The Story of a Life, by Claude Hartland, is written as a medical monograph – the only way, in 1901, that it could be published. It's actually the heartbreaking autobiography of a gay Christian family man whose life is destroyed by impulses he can't understand or accept.
"A happy ending for 'perverts' was simply not an option if you wanted to be published," says Pearson. "A glorious exception is The Young and Evil by Charles Henri-Ford and Parker Tyler, published by Obelisk in Paris in 1933. Since it was published in France, it was free to be itself. It's a happy, modernist hymn, not just to being gay but to being young, set in the gay bars and drag joints of Twenties New York. It's not a polemic or plea for understanding but a fully realised work of literature whose characters are unapologetic and happy. It signals a real shift, and although it took a while to gather momentum, I think it started here."
Half a century later, I found Maupin. The Story of a Life is a well-crafted tale of struggle and ultimately triumph. It is also, happily, now history.
Is it now reductive to describe Alan Hollinghurst or Colm Tóibí* as "gay writers"? Pearson thinks so: "The sexual orientation of an author, or their characters, is now only important in terms of narrative, not social politics. That's a fantastic achievement and was won for us all by the people featured in this catalogue."
Pearson himself is straight: "There were times when I was tempted to reach for a copy of Razzle, just to remind myself who I was. But in the end it wasn't the gay sex that did for me so much as the pervading air of unhappiness in so many of the books. Young gay men and women owe their predecessors a great debt."
Indeed we do. And the very least we can do is to read their stories.
From 'An Unknown People' By Edward Carpenter (1897) (Item 28, £425)
"It is beginning to be recognised that the sexes do not or should not normally form two groups hopelessly isolated in habit and feeling from each other, but that they rather represent the two poles of one group – which is the human race; so that while certainly the extreme specimens at either pole are vastly divergent, there are great numbers in the middle region who...are by emotion and temperament very near to each other."
Copies of the catalogue (£8) are available from Natalie Galustian Rare Books, 22 Cecil Court, WC2N 4HE (0207 240 6822) nataliegalustian.com
Comments