Forster, 'Maurice' and 'The Longest Journey' and the stories collected in 'The Life to Come' Here's the stuff from the last hundred years I tend to teach in my courses on gay fiction that I find my students find really important and useful and enjoyable:Į.
The trouble with a lot of contemporary gay fiction is that a great deal of the stuff that passes for arty gay fiction is extremely narcissistic, highly mannered and self-consciously 'exquisite': that would be my problem with most of Edmund White's work and Aciman's 'Call Me By Your Name' and Neil Bartlett's 'Ready to Catch Him if He Falls.' There is an argument that that's part of a Western gay aesthetic (stretching back through Proust and Wilde and Henry James), but I just don't think Edmund White is nearly so smart nor as sympathetic a writer as Proust or James I love Aciman's memoir 'out of Egypt' (which is not gay themed), but I found 'Call me By Your Name' unbearable
