What a Wonderful World: Notes on the Evolution of GLBTQ Literature for Young Adults

ALAN Review, Winter 2004 by Cart, Michael

In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot offered three "permanent" reasons for reading: (1) the acquisition of wisdom, (2) the enjoyment of art, and (3) the pleasure of entertainment.

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.

And yet one group of teenage outsiders-GLBTQ youth (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning)-continues to be too nearly invisible. Since the 1969 publication of John Donovan's I'll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip (Harper & Row), the first young adult novel to deal with the issue of homosexuality, no more than 150 other titles1 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).

As 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.

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. Earlier in that decade, however, World War II had brought together "the largest concentration of gay men ever found inside a single American institution. Volunteer women who joined the WAC and the WAVES experienced an even more prevalent lesbian culture" (78).

It did not take long for art to catch up to what Martin Duberman calls this "critical mass of consciousness" (76). Only three years after the end of the war, two important adult novels with gay themes appeared: Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote and The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidai. They are significant for two reasons. First, they were works of serious fiction by writers who would become vital forces in American literature. Second, they were issued by mainstream publishers-Random House and E. P. Dutton, respectively. 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). The same can arguably be said of lesbian literature; indeed, such writers as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Natalie Barney were not only published abroad, but they also lived abroad as expatriates.

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. Two of its best-known early practitioners, Maureen Daly and Madeleine L'Engle, published their first novels in the 1940s. Daly's Seventeenth Summer appeared in 1942, while L'Engle's The Small Rain was published in 1945. 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 [July 1998] 298334), both also featured incidental treatments of homosexuality.

In The Small Rain a gay bar is used as a setting, while in Seventeenth Summer, 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 . . . 'Look, Jack,' I remember saying, 'He has red nail polish on! Isn't that funny-for a man?'" (193-195)

Jenkins further notes that in J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, another brief homosexual encounter is reported. Like Seventeenth Sammer and The Small Rain, this book was also published for adults but was claimed by succeeding generations of young adults as their own. In this title the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has a-to him-disturbing encounter with a favorite teacher when he stays overnight at the man's apartment:

What he (the teacher) was doing was, he was sitting on the floor right next to the couch, in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head. Boy, I'll bet I jumped about a thousand feet. "What the hellya doing?" I said. "Nothing! I'm simply sitting here admiring"-"What're ya doing, anyway?' I said over again. I didn't know what the hell to say-I mean I was embarrassed as hell. "How 'bout keeping your voice down? I'm simply sitting here-"

"I have to go, anyway," I said-boy, was I nervous! I know more damn perverts at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when I'm. around." (192)