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, the protagonist, Angie, and her boyfriend, Jack, go to a club to hear a musician who is portrayed as stereotypically gay: "With his eyes still closed, the colored man leaned back on the bench, way back, one hand limp at his side. Both titles were published as adult novels, and as Christine Jenkins notes in her illuminating article "From Queer to Gay and Back Again" (Library Quarterly 68 298- 334), both also featured incidental treatments of homosexuality. Two of its best-known early practitioners, Maureen Daly and Madeleine L'Engle, published their first novels in the 1940s. The new homosexual consciousness that appeared during and after World War II coincided with the first stirrings of what has come to be called young adult (YA) literature. (Hilda Doolittle), Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Natalie Barney were not only published abroad, but they also lived abroad as expatriates.
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The same can arguably be said of lesbian literature indeed, such writers as H. Previously, as Joseph Cady argues, while there was "frank and affirmative gay male American writing from the century's start" (most of it now forgotten except by literary historians), it was either published abroad or issued in this country by marginal publishers" (30). Second, they were issued by mainstream publishers-Random House and E.
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First, they were works of serious fiction by writers who would become vital forces in American literature. Only three years after the end of the war, two important adult novels with gay themes appeared:īy Gore Vidal. It did not take long for art to catch up to what Martin Duberman calls this "critical mass of consciousness" (76). Volunteer women who joined the WAC and the WAVES experienced an even more prevalent lesbian culture" (78). Earlier in that decade, however,World War II had brought together "the largest concentration of gay men ever found inside a single American institution.
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Why? In part, because homosexuality was traditionally regarded, in Lord Alfred Douglas's words, as "the Love that dare not speak its name." And so, as cultural historian Charles Kaiser has noted, homosexuality did not become a public issue in American life until 1948 when the Kinsey Report on human sexuality was published. Have followed, a woefully inadequate average of four to five per year to give faces to millions of teens (the precise number of GLBTQ teens at any given time is, of course, unknown).Īs we will see, this situation is gradually beginning to change for the better, but to look first at the context of literary history, the homosexual as a character in American fiction (for both young adults AND adults) has been a largely absent figure. (Harper & Row), the first young adult novel to deal with the issue of homosexuality, no more than 150 other titles Since the 1969 publication of John Donovan's When the reading in question is that of young adult literature-the quintessential literature of the outsider-I would suggest there is a fourth reason: the lifesaving necessity of seeing one's own face reflected in the pages of a good book and the corollary comfort that derives from the knowledge that one is not alone.Īnd yet one group of teenage outsiders-GLBTQ youth (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning)-continues to be too nearly invisible. Eliot offered three "permanent" reasons for reading: (1) the acquisition of wisdom, (2) the enjoyment of art, and (3) the pleasure of entertainment. Notes on the Evolution of GLBTQ Literature for Young Adults