In the years following World War II, a small group of gay writers established themselves as literary power players, fueling cultural changes that would resonate for decades to come, and transforming the American literary landscape forever.
In EMINENT OUTLAWS, novelist Christopher Bram brilliantly chronicles the rise of gay consciousness in American writing. Beginning with a first wave of major gay literary figures-Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, and James Baldwin-he shows how (despite criticism and occasional setbacks) these pioneers set the stage for new generations of gay writers to build on what they had begun: Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, Tony Kushner, and Edward Albee among them.
Weaving together the crosscurrents, feuds, and subversive energies that provoked these writers to greatness, EMINENT OUTLAWS is a rich and essential work. With keen insights, it takes readers through fifty years of momentous change: from a time when being a homosexual was a crime in forty-nine states and into an age of same-sex marriage and the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
About Christopher Bram
Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including Gods and Monsters (originally titled Father of Frankenstein), which was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Bram was a 2001 Guggenheim Fellow and received the 2003 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in New York City.
Editorial Review
The author, gay himself, does not say much about his own career here—just a couple of modest asides—but he does pay homage to those he considers the godfathers of gay writing, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin and the “fairy godfather,” Gore Vidal, to whom Bram returns continually throughout. The author also slams those critics who could not see the literary merit of stories with gay characters and behavior—principally Stanley Kauffmann, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Midge Decter, though Bram points out that writers from Norman Mailer to Andrew Sullivan have at times had “issues.” Bram follows the careers of the godfathers, but he also looks at other important novelists, poets and playwrights, including Christopher Isherwood, Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Mark Doty, David Leavitt, Michael Cunningham and many others. Often he pauses for plot summary, analysis and judgment. The author also points out writers he believes have not received sufficient attention, among them Paul Russell, Mark Merlis and Henry Rios. Bram pauses occasionally to rehearse key events in gay cultural history—the Howl obscenity trial, the Stonewall riots, the televised 1968 clash between William F. Buckley Jr., and Vidal, Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade, the devastating effects of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s and beyond. Bram also flashes some attitude here and there, and not just toward the enemies of gay writers. He sometimes chides Vidal, shines a harsh light on Capote and calls Edmund White’s novel Caracole “a complete dud.” – Kirkus Reviews
Writers at the Ramparts in a Gay Revolution
The New York Times Book Review – February 2, 2012 (Excerpt)
When Joseph Papp, founder of the Public Theater, first read “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s sprawling 1985 play about the early days of the AIDS crisis, he thought it was a mess. “This is one of the worst things I’ve ever read,” Papp said. But the play so moved him that he added, “and I’m crying.”
Papp’s language echoes some of my feelings about Christopher Bram’s new book, “Eminent Outlaws,” a critical and biographical survey of America’s gay writers in the second half of the 20th century.
This book is not a mess, exactly. It’s argumentative and often resonant, and lit from below by a gossipy wit. But its power is less sentence by sentence than cumulative. You don’t realize how much the details of these writers’ books and difficult lives have touched you until the book’s final chapters.
Mr. Bram is a novelist, best known for “Father of Frankenstein” (1995), which became the film “Gods and Monsters.” With “Eminent Outlaws” he has filled a gap in our critical literature. [Read the full article...]
Literature Comes Out - Christopher Bram’s ‘Eminent Outlaws’
The New York Times Book Review – February 24, 2012 (Excerpt)
What makes a book a gay book, or a writer a gay writer? Walt Whitman, for all his sizzling erotic verses about men, insisted to the end that he was interested only in women. Gore Vidal, who has made no secret of his attraction to men, writes sparingly about gay characters and has asserted that there is no such thing as a homosexual, only homosexual acts. James Baldwin’s novels typically repose on bookstores’ African-American shelves, rather than their gay and lesbian sections — even “Giovanni’s Room,” which centers on a relationship between two white men.
Christopher Bram, who calls himself a gay novelist (his “Father of Frankenstein” was the basis of the movie “Gods and Monsters”), assumes the task of herding the gay American male writers who emerged after World War II into a coherent history, beginning with the coded innuendo of Tennessee Williams’s “Glass Menagerie” in 1944 and peaking with Tony Kushner’s luminescent “Angels in America” in 1991. In between, Bram writes, a growing stream of gay-themed novels, plays and poems, some bolder than others, prefigured or hastened sweeping changes in the culture at large. “The gay revolution,” he writes, “began as a literary revolution.”
As the title suggests, “Eminent Outlaws” is mainly a reverie for a time past, seen through a romantic lens. No one would think of a gay writer now as an outlaw, at least until David Sedaris starts robbing banks. Even the category of the gay novel or play, once embraced as a liberating break from the closet, now seems more a straitjacket. In a 2005 essay in the Book Review, David Leavitt celebrated the emergence of “post-gay” fiction, in which sexual identity, while important to the characters, neither defines them nor drives the plot. While Allan Gurganus’s best-selling “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” features love and embraces between two men, it is not a gay novel in the way that, say, Christopher Isherwood’s “Single Man” or Larry Kramer’s “Faggots” is. [Read the full article...]
“ Eminent Outlaws : The Gay Writers Who Changed America” by Christopher Bram
The Washington Post Book Review – February 24, 2012 (Excerpt)
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden famously announced, shortly after arriving in America in January 1939. Christopher Bram disagrees, and his new book, “Eminent Outlaws,” which breezily combines literary criticism and social history, is subtitled “The Gay Writers Who Changed America.” Bram sees this process starting in January 1948, when two novels, Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and Truman Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” were published within a week of each other. Alfred Kinsey’s “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” came out the same month, and when all three books were reviewed together in the Hudson Review, it was not under “Recent Fiction” but in a column headed “Recent Phenomena.”
Many early commentators wrote about what eventually became known as gay fiction as if they were dealing with pathological case studies rather than literature. Bram contends that in an era when homosexuality was more or less invisible, these books “gave journalists an opportunity to discuss a forbidden topic with a wide readership,” which meant that even hostile reviews served a useful purpose. The gradual, though far from universal, shift in attitude toward homosexuality has many causes, but Bram persuasively argues that “literature itself was an agent of . . . change.” [Read the full article...]
The Indigo Bird
An Erotic Novel by Max Markham
James Graveney, a young Major in a respectable regiment, is outwardly conventional. In private James is bisexual, with a strong urge for his own sex. Gay sex, however, is illegal in the Army, so he is discreet about this.
James’ world is turned upside-down when he meets Lieutenant Richard Finch. Richard is intelligent, charismatic and exceptionally handsome. He doesn’t mess around. He gets what he wants, and is completely unscrupulous about how he gets it. Richard will stop at nothing to achieve this, including Machiavellian deception and a cunning and brutal murder. James starts responding to Richard, cautiously at first, then gets swept along on the great love affair of his life.
The Indigo Bird is a rollercoaster of surprises set against backdrops varying from the jungles of Belize to London, the English countryside, and Ireland, and the scene is set for more shocks and adventures. [Read more...]
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
