Gay Literature
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one on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and also apparently selling without
comment, is The Gay Canon: Great Books Every Gay Man Should Read, an
Anchor Book published by Doubleday in 1998. Its editor/author, Robert
Drake, is a novelist and editor of other anthologies who has won the
Lambda Literary Award. Like the Penguin anthology edited by Leavitt,
Drake's book too strives for canonical status, aspiring to offer a
roadmap to the most important texts of gay history.
As it turns out, several of the texts that editor Drake thought worth
including feature scenes of man-boy sex — again, what most of the rest
of the public calls abuse or molestation. One work is something called
The Carnivorous Lamb by Agustin Gomez-Arcos, described as a book about
an incestuous relationship between a boy and his older brother (to
Drake, "the best, most complex yet satisfying novel of filial love
ever written"). Another text, this one by writer Matthew Stadler —
described as the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for his first
novel — is called The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee. This book, says
editor Drake, "is an operatic adventure into the realms of love,
personality, ambition and art . . . a pure joy to read." Its
protagonist is "a pedophile's dream: the mind of a man in the body of
a boy." Drake also excerpts and discusses William S. Burroughs's
nightmarish The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, the pederastic violence
of which defies description. Yet this work, according to Drake, "tears
straight to the heart of one of the greatest sources, community-wide,
of 1990s gay angst: What to do with men who love boys?" [4]
Still another example of how standards are being lowered by a major
publisher and respected writer—this one from academia and available at
Borders — is A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition,
published in 1998 by Yale University Press. This book, "the first
full-scale account of gay male literature, across cultures, languages
and from ancient times to the present," is authored by Gregory Woods,
described on the jacket as "the foremost gay poet working in Britain
today." It includes a longish chapter on "Boys and Boyhood" which is a
seemingly definitive account of pro-pedophile literary works, ranging
over texts from the platonic Death in Venice to the noir likes of the
aforementioned Tony Duvert. Nothing is questioned, much less
condemned, in the course of Woods's account of these works. The only
moral ambiguity that occurs to him concerns not the boy but the man in
the equation. Woods concludes: "By playing [i.e., having sex] with
boys, the man remains boyish. Whether you regard this as a way of
retreating from life or, on the contrary, as a way of engaging with it
at its most honest and least corrupted level, depends on which writer
you consult at any given time [emphasis added]."
More at:
http://www.ipce.info/ipceweb/Library/01jun12c_eberstadt_article.htm