/lit/ - Literature

Pic related

>>23235316
Burn it.

>>23235316
Confessions of a Mask
Forbidden Colors
The Satyricon
The Eclogues (2nd)
The Decameron
Death in Venice
The City and the Pillar
The Throne of Saturn
A Single Man
Myra Breckinridge
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Notes of a Desolate Man
Alcibíades the Schoolboy
Leaves of Grass
The Awakening
Fanny Hill
Ode to Aphrodite
Carmilla
Nightwood
Rubyfruit Jungle

If I write a book with a gay main character, will it be regarded as a "gay book" and mostly ignored by heteroids regardless of quality?

>>23235782
It doesn't get pegged like it used to. You'll have a more limited audience, but a more interested one.

>>23235795
>It doesn't get pegged like it used to
Idk if this is the whole truth. Today's culture is less homophobic, but on the other hand marketing in general seems to be more niche-oriented and there's also more gay idpol which doesn't help in this regard. What I'm saying is that in the past a book with a gay character might've been seen more as an artsy, faggy book that has some fag shit in it (ala Proust or Mann). But nowadays it'll be marketed as a homosexual book for homosexuals and it'll go to LGBT shelf, which might scare away potential hetero readers

>>23235782
if the protag is a funny edgelord, I think most straight people would still read it. But fucking or extensive thirsting needs to happen in the 2nd book at the earliest.

it's like with gilf fuckers. You might not have moral qualms about somebody shagging a geriatric, but you'd get derailed if you read a fantasy adventure novel and mid-way the protag started to obsess over Marsha's gelatinous bat wings. Later on, readers will assimilate the core of what the story is, let's say adventure, and won't get trolled as easily. But they need to at least digest a portion of it, which is usually one book. You may not like it, but while hitting some niche you need to make sure you're getting broad appeal in it.

>>23235919
Conversely, what was originally clocked as gay lit is being republished for a more general audience. In the wake of intersectional and poorly disguised political bullshit, some of the old gay lit comes off as conservative, palatable, or blends in with the milieu contemporary to it.

I think if it's not about being gay, or if the gayness is treated in a novel way that is not entirely the focus, you can score a spot in the velvet library while still having a more mainstream appeal. I've been playing around with the idea of a young undercover cop who became one because he likes cheap thrills and spent most of his life hiding who he really is.

I'll be honest and say that the best fiction with fags doesn't make us look good, but speaks to our concerns and airs the dirty laundry. For all the rigmarole and pearl clutching on here, the truth is that enough squares either don't care and only hate the fetishistic parts because it's always gross when it's not your fetish, or are attracted to aspects of the other side of things in a private, exploratory way that they don't talk about very often. The repressive cultural damper has lifted a little and it's not so forbidden, though it still isn't open conversation in male circles. Women self insert and eat that shit up.

I shouldn't talk about it and ruin the mojo but I've been working on a coming of age kind of novel where the protagonist has an adolescent homoromantic tendency and an accompanying low resolution sexuality, because one of the themes is coming to know what you want from life and the consequences of it. It's not outright gay, but there is a bisexuality (and the wedge issue of teenagers fucking, on or off-screen) in question that will alienate the same kind of squares. Fuck em.

The sun is gay and you're Icarus.

>>23235316
Wingmen

>>23236096
>the protagonist has an adolescent homoromantic tendency and an accompanying low resolution sexuality
I've seen the flame wars that kind of statement produces, it's spicy. Do you think that presenting an alternative allows people to contextualize their own sexuality? It sounds like you do.

>>23235919
>But nowadays it'll be marketed as a homosexual book for homosexuals and it'll go to LGBT shelf
This didn't happen to A Little Life.

>>23235782
There are gay books for gay people, and gay books for straight people.

The former are read exclusively by gays.

The latter are mostly read by women.

If the gay character could be replaced by a straight white woman without changing the plot much, your book will be read by straight w*men.

>>23236287
It really depends. Gays are either looking for validation (go figure) or a kind of recognition that their experience exists and is, if not normal, real. It's a life in isolation and why 90% of the literature is about the first 5 minutes of the lived experience of it. Some rather alternative fags I agree with, they don't have any interest in that at this point and prefer more complex stories with established and confident characters who know what they are and face other problems.

I haven't queried many straights on the matter but women seem to identify with the Other and a kind of sexual (in the sense of masculine in expression, as much as the freedom and consequential shunning) experience that is mostly closed to them. They engage in roleplay too, it's weird what kind of men women identify with and self-insert as. The female brain makes no sense to me.

The few straight guys who are secure enough to interface with it tend to use it to validate their own sexuality, the formation of it, and respond well to when an author recognizes how (no)homo male relationships are, without jumping to everything being gay. Point out that tweens are horny and gay for male attention, like turbo fucking gay about it, and your teens through early 20s are full of a kind of jealous and openly romantic series of friendships that come and go and they don't disagree with you. It's more about the presentation and familiarity with the feelings involved. Men pursue men in a hilarious and touching way.

I feel like I'm writing, in part, a veiled psychospiritual sex ed fable for a generation like mine that has too much ideology and social cruft occluding what I see as both deceptively simple, and at times completely alien to my own composition, developmental process that has, in a way, contributed to the prolonged adolescence that has become epidemic.

>>23235316

>>23235316
>Jean Genet
>Dennis Cooper
>Mishima
>Christopher Isherwood
>John Rechy
>Djuna Barnes

>>23235316

>>23235316
https://archiveofourown.org/works/31781515/chapters/78671893

>>23236661
one of the few modern masterpieces.

>>23236358
It happened at first when the chick was praised as groundbreaking, then the media turned on her.

>>23236661
>>23236665
It's misery porn slop.

>>23236696
Unironically, the worst kind of gay fiction.

>>23235782
Yes. I won’t read yukia mishima because he was a faggot

>>23236461
>The female brain makes no sense to me.
it makes more sense, when you realize womens' imagining of the lives men lead is complete pie-in-the-sky fueled by political talking points.

>>23235316
this is an honest masterpiece in the original, hopefully the english also renders the gayness well.

>>23235316
Mishima lol

>>23236799
>Aldo Bussy
A bit on the nose, don't you think?

>>23237174
Dildo Fugginz was already taken

>>23236563
God I need to get back to the gym

>>23236799
What makes it so good?

>>23235316
Edmund White

>>23236096
>>23236461
good posts

I fucking depite most known gay books being written by women, and then if they're not they're the most annoying modern fag's with current year political brain rot, I wish there was a better way to find fag books that resonate better with me

>>23236661
my favorite book of the 21st century. what does /lit/ think of yanagihara?

>>23239925
I loved her book when I was suicidal and in a mental institution.
Now I think it's good but not really a masterpiece.

>>23235795
>pegged

Why is /lit/ filled with fags?

I’m a bisexual male, so I’m not complaining, but I’m baffled why it seems to be so common for queer guys to gravitate towards literature.

>>23242414
It's the only unfiltered, uncensored outlet remaining and often speaks to marginal experiences that validate the existence of lonely introverts with a 3 digit IQ. Where the degenerate underworld depicted by artists is a novelty to most, it's a lived experience for us. We permeate the other arts but don't have a voice there. I think being excluded from the woke cult while still being the major creators of culture also has a role, but that doesn't play into your question other than why we're all on here.

And 4chan has always been kinda gay, at least moreso than other outlets. R*ddit has isolated corners, but the site culture as a whole ignores fags on the level of shunning, about as much as it sucks tranny dick. I got no small amount of negative feedback pointing out that the inclusive, intersectional contingent permeating contemporary fantasy is, while not quite empty wish fulfilment, serves little purpose as it doesn't represent a lived experience and that gay lit for men does what they screech for, but no one cares or reads it. I was downboated and ignored. Here, anon just calls you a faggot and talks about touching dongs with his vidyabros.

There's nowhere else for us. Many of us were outmoded in the campaign against men or grew tired of being a political pawn, and while I loathe the term queer, I think it's accurate in that we don't fit so neatly into the little boxes they want us to and are the only ones making meaningful content for ourselves. Even our native furfags are unlike anywhere else. Hiding in a VN about trying to hold hands with the Minotaur is an excellent magical realist detective story, some absolutely unhinged shitposting, and a personal mission to write exclusively gay content instead of going for broader appeal.

So, I don't really know. I know why I'm here but not why we all end up here for different reasons and from different backgrounds. I think it may be as simple as literature dealing with Otherness and interiority, which let's be honest, most people don't know shit about.

>>23235316
literature is inherently gay

You gays ever get big ball of shit stuck on your cock?

>>23242869
No. You ever get some leftover fetus from her last abortion on your cock?

>>23235316
Google search: "deworming"

>>23235316
If you want splatterpunk, you can't go wrong with Exquisite Corpse, by Poppy Z. Brite

>>23239925
A fujoshi with a misery fetish.

>>23242414
>The gays, good heavens. A full 35 or 40 percent of major western author from the beginning to the present day might have been gay. Would be very safe to assume.
https://youtu.be/S9ieF7LVbyI?t=323

I see this mentioned quite a bit, but never discussed. Not that I know how to discuss it either, it's very symbolic and weird. Geryon is a cute spergo but the real star is Herakles, who I find to have a more recognizable psychology. It's something I needed to read years ago but still enjoyed having read it recently.

Thom Gunn, Andrew McMillan, John Ashbery

>>23243152
If you enjoy it at all, and the format and how cringe it can be isn't to everyone's taste, it's a novel you come back to. Very strong similes and there's a subtext that the essays outline, but figuring out how they're related is part of the fun.

pic related

>>23235393
>The Decameron
anon, that's one of the straightest books ever written

>>23235316
>>23235316
>>23235316
This is a work in progress

>>23243152
This is the most cringe book I have ever read. Everything about it so fucking attention-seeking and forced. It's like going to an undergraduate slam poetry event where everybody is being as quirky as possible. It's like the millennial "I did a thing" personality but in a pompous literary form. Her "translations" are even worse. Only in America would someone as talentless and awful as Carson even be published.

>>23244822
Thank you for making this (if it is yours)!

>>23244822
In Early Modern, does anyone know where to read 'Uranian love'? I searched around a bit on libgen/anna's archive but found nothing; I really want to read it.

>>23244822
Add Colm Toibin

>>23245588
any particular one

>>23244822
How do you explain that a sizeable amount of them are dialogues on pederastry or pederastic fantasies?

>>23245619
so was a lot of heterosexual love poetry in those eras. Heloise and Abelard etc. Most Greek girls got married age 13

>>23245617
Story of the Night or The Blackwater Lightship are particularly gay
The Line of Beauty should probably be in there too

>>23236563
Kek

>>23244822
Definitely add Exquisite Corpse, by Poppy Z. Brite. Every single character except for one (someone's dad) is a gay man, and it focuses on the gay scene in the 80's and the AIDS crisis, while also being a splatterpunk novel. It's beautifully written, and I highly recommend it.

>>23236563
>tfw no sub bottom bf who has a huge ass thanks to SS

>>23244813
It does have a gay story in it. The two painters of the church in the one story are gay caricatures of the time. I gotta reread that book and get back to the specific context of it though.

>>23246708
there's also the story where the husband and wife both fuck the twink

>>23235316
This is for all the guys out there who want a protagonist so gay that he's misogynistic and insists on only interacting with other men (including a twinky Italian teen)

>>23236563
This book gave me huge quads and glutes. Now I need to work on my upper body (doesn’t look as developed)

>>23246736
Ser Ciappalletto too! The very first story is about a homosexual rapist and thug who goes to France to collect debts. His homosexuality is relevant to the text because when he tells the confessor priest that he never touched a woman because he is so pure it is supposed to be an ironic half truth the reader only is in on.

>>23247042
You're just one of those trex guys now. That's what you are.

>>23247042
Im the opposite and I would trade with you

Any books about being a slutty bottom who has lots of hookups and feels dead inside?

>>23235393
>A Single Man

Film is better than the book for this one.

>>23242854
I'm one of those native furfags attempting to sublimate that homoeroticism away from sex for largely religious reasons (its actually super easy since you're right about most male stuff being "gay"; that's why Baki is a hit). The only rough spot is the ritual life-force transfer, but I think the struggle to emulate another man's virtues likely fills that role when you take into account the role of ascesis in divinization. Homosexuality is largely redundant and a shortcut that (like all modern sexuality) immanentizes religious impulses and immortality-feelings to the lizard brain.

You say interesting stuff but if I hear "lived experience" one more time I'm going to blow a gasket.

>>23248449
I'm going to just post here what I did on /trash/:

1/2

It's no coincidence that Walt Whitman wrote Calamus in the mid-to-late 19th century, right at the birth of the contemporary secular world. He wrote (somewhat zestily) about comradeship in a time where depth of purpose (and really purpose at all) was leaving the world. Of course he'd also be arguably one of the first "gay" men as we understand that term today. How couldn't he be?

At the end of "Leaves of Grass" (the deathbed edition), he wrote about how sexuality in his poetry was there to add a sense of life-force, and that he thought the West of the time would have to rethink how they approached sexuality. He was right, of course—men had ceased to struggle towards immortality together in the West nearly 400 years prior at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and the actual Christian mystical tradition had been lost to the Latins centuries before then. Foucault (I'm not a fan, but he's onto something here) traces the beginning of the Western obsession with sexuality to the Counter-Reformation in the Roman Catholic world.

Sex is deeply associated with immortality and the overcoming of death in the human mind. The primary way that peoples across the earth have attempted to defeat death is through the bearing of children—the continuation of the self through the line. Even without that knowledge, though, sexual energy is understood as life-force-potency. Non-Christian mystical traditions (such as Kundalini yoga and Taoist chi cultivation) manipulate these sexual energies in order to attempt to reach some form of immortality or divine state. It is my current hunch that the West's sexual obsession is a semi-unconscious attempt to develop its own version of such a tradition in the absence of any living native mystical tradition or means of reaching ultimate Truth/immortality.

2/2

The greatest dynamic between two people, and especially men, is the mutual pursuit of immortality/truth—not just in a general way, but in a fashion and according to a specific focus that resonates with something unique in the both of you, and that only a few like-minded can pursue together.

In the materialist/physicalist slave-world of the late-19th-to-early-21st centuries, this can only really happen through art and sexuality. We are a civilization that has given up on immortality—instead of asking "how do we defeat death", we ask "how do we defeat our fear of death". Thus a giant portion of the population is on SSRIs and kept constantly distracted with entertainment that everyone knows is of an increasingly low quality. Many gravitate to fantasy (the "fantasy" being that in these worlds, with their alternate metaphysics, real meaning is actually possible).

The search for the grail has moved from the world to the lizard brain. When I goon with other men, I feel that pursuit for a moment. That's the main appeal, outside of the base pleasure-habit that could just as easily have been cigarettes or over-eating.

It's unnecessary though because none of that materialism shit is true, it's just propaganda for slaves

Burroughs
Genet
Cooper

>>23248354
I think the film boasts too much Hollywood glamour. The book is realistically middle-class.

>>23248535
prolly because a fashion designer made it. nocturnal animals was underrated though

>>23242414
I feel very isolated here being one of the few straights

>>23236767
You should try asking why women fetishize certain aspects of men and you’ll never get an answer.

I'm so sick of books about AIDS

>Ctrl + F
>No Maurice
This broad has gone to the dogs.

>>23249313
Clive or Alec?

>>23249553
Alec, of course. Aside from the fact that this is also supported in-text, Rupert Graves is very cute while Grant is too quintessentially Bri'ish for my tastes.

>>23249313
How gay is it

>>23248968
Then dont read then sweetie

>>23243018
I read this some 15 years ago and I still remember feeling like complete shit at the end. I remembered about it a few days ago and it sent me down a rabbit hole of serial killers and stag films (couldn't find the gay one).

Pic related is an essential
>>23244822

>>23251647
The first is part is about Maurice dating a bisexual chud, the second part is about Maurice dating a gay gamekeeper. I thought it was mid because the transition between both parts is very abrupt.

>>23252323
What's it about?

>>23244822
>no moby dick

>>23248290

Yeah I can't remember the name of it. Maybe somebody else remembers? About a guy whose hustling in like NYC or something probably around the 1950s

>>23253700
lmao you're not talking about midnight cowboy, are you?

>>23253700
Is the cover of one edition two naked men in and around a penthouse pool? I also don't know the name but someone described it as a pre-aids depiction of sentimental hedonism, my own paraphrase so good luck searching for it in the archives.

>>23242881
Straightfags btfo

>>23236696
you got filtered

>>23253798

Midnight Cowboy. That's it.

>>23235316
>not even 100 replies in a week and it's still up

>>23254811
I'll consider reading it.

>>23252323
>In The Swimming-Pool Library, the narrator Will Beckwith recounts his leisured life as a 25 year old gay man in early 1980s London, a period he describes as his ‘belle époque’, a kind of prelapsarian golden age for gay men before it all went wrong.

>The Swimming-Pool Library continues to be regarded as an important text in depicting gay sexuality and desire for men, and is almost treated as a ‘coming-out’ case in itself. But for all the reviews which praise his defiance as a ‘gay writer’ showing ‘gay sex’, what is most exciting about Hollinghurst’s novel is its refusal to sentimentalise his characters, or feel pressured into depicting all gay men either as allies, heroes or victims of a common enemy, that is, the heterosexual world. In fact, there are remarkably few heterosexual characters in it, and nearly no women. What Hollinghurst achieves in shaking-off is what James Baldwin called the burden of representation.

>>23255289
meant for >>23252753

>>23255289
>>23255292
Neat. What'd you think of it, yourself?

>>23255367
I thought it was great. It was recommended to me by a friend reading it as part of a seminar. Short, filled with dark humour, finished it in 2 days. The "Golden Age" being the dirty London suburbs, filled with skinheads, racist graffitti, and immigrants. At times feels like looking into the mind of an evil twink with a lot of money and free time. Some moments were so racy I contemplated hiding the book when I'd visitors over.

Hollinghurst’s intention was to explore ageing. There's 2 narratives, one of the younger protagonist and one of an older mentor - the tension between the two shows what has changed and persisted across the 20th century for gay men. The novel will always stick out in my mind as showing how the selfish pursuit of youthful hedonism is nigh irresistable when an outcast from society, but will ultimately leave you as an old, lonely, dusty bohemian with nothing to live for but the past.

>>23255425
Neat. I'll give it a go.

I've read some raunchy things, but the most (and worst) was one set in 80's California, written by that French Paedo who wrote Special Friendships. The main character was hideously evil; he blackmailed a priest into giving him money (despite being rich) with entirely false accusations of rape. He hooked up with a druggie who then blackmailed him into robbing his family and blaming the, then fired, maid. His other fling, the police constable for all of LA then helps him kill the druggie, and then in his turn starts blackmailing the boy so as to keep having sex with him. The boy then murders THIS guy the cop, and gets away with it. Not to mention Cocaine sex with other highschoolers, ODs, etc., etc.

Honestly I prefer cutesy cuddly shit. The world's awful: why make it worse? Personally my happiest daydreams always involve nothing more than happily wandering hand and hand through Eden with someone.

I had a great time with pic related. Half a dozen short stories about the gay underworld written between the '40s and '80s. It's a short read and I suspect usually overpriced, but it's a nice edition and if you can get it cheap (in my case, free) I highly recommend.

>>23235956
>if the protag is a funny edgelord, I think most straight people would still read it.

Explain further

>>23256202
>>23256207
You must have felt very smart when you posted these.

>>23256051
I think he's talking about Patrick Bateman, specifically. More generally, there's a gay archetype that's snide and sardonic in a masculine way, a woman hater or rake. Slightly repressed and able to make cutting observations about himself and everyone around him. Those guys are funny without being mean about it. Unless they're being mean about it, then they're Oscar Wilde.

>>23256722

Writing a gay that has a masculine streak and doesn't get red-lighted by straights is a goal of mine. Anything that you could point to would be most helpful.

>>23235316
Pale Fire by Nabokov

>>23235316
>think I hate romance
>read grandmaster of demonic cultivation
>fall in love with it
someone rec similar books pls.

>>23257378
Have you read the author's other two novels?

harry potter 6 and 4

Any suggestions on gay erotica? Bdsm is a plus

>>23257901
yeah, but I didn't like the dynamic between the MCs very much- theirs was much more obsession than Lan Wanji's quiet devotion.

>>23258419
I have the perfect thing. It's not heavy on the bdsm, but it's definitely very there.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/31781515/chapters/78671893

>>23258436
Hmmm....try qiang jin jiu. It's not a quiet devotion dynamic but it's not obsession either, the feelings are more realistic and mutual between the couple. And just browse the novelupdates danmei tags to see if there's stuff more to your taste

>>23258437
What

>>23259229
you wanted gay sex with bdsm. there's 50 chapters of sex for you.