Creole gumbo: acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley and gifted newcomer Martin Pousson write about separate gay lives in Louisiana. (books).

What I like about most Southern men is the baroque nature of their past," says novelist, playwright, and North Carolina native Jim Grimsley. "There's always a story."

Two new works of fiction certainly bear that out. Boulevard, Grimsley's fifth novel, mines the 46-year-old author's coming-out adventures in pre-AIDS New Orleans. No Place, Louisiana, by newcomer Martin Pousson, tells the semiautobiographical tale of a gay boy's Cajun family.

"When I moved to California from Louisiana to attend UCLA, I was initially ashamed of my Cajun past," says the 36-year-old Pousson, who now lives in New York City. "But someone said that I should be proud. At least I had a culture. That really struck me, and I suddenly became obsessed with my heritage."

Although the two books differ in tone--the action-propelled Boulevard is darkly comic, the narration-driven No Place elegiac and infused with longing--both offer characters rooted in a distinctly Southern literary tradition. Boulevard, about a naive boy named Newell who moves to New Orleans and encounters the eccentric, the secretive, and the dangerous, is reminiscent of the work of Flannery O'Connor, while No Place presents Nita, the sort of doomed, strong-willed female protagonist who would be at home in a Tennessee Williams play.

"I was fascinated with what it meant to be a woman in the South," says Pousson. "They are these fabulous people who seem to have no rights yet are such pillars of strength."

But perhaps the greatest similarity between both books remains an unavoidable preoccupation with race. Boulevard weaves actual slave histories into its tale of Newell's sexual awakening, while No Place refuses to shy away from its characters' learned racism and use of the pejorative nigger.

"In the South, a large percentage of the population is not white," says Grimsley, who now resides in Atlanta. "So I'm always suspicious of any stories set in the South without any black characters at all. In my earlier books, I used the word nigger because that's the way people spoke when I was growing up. But by the time I got to New Orleans in the late `70s, that wasn't a word you said at all."

For Pousson, failing to depict his characters' racism would be to whitewash his culture. "The racist messages I received while growing up were much stronger than the homophobic messages," he says, explaining that Cajuns, whose ancestors were brutally deported by the British from Acadia (now Nova Scotia) to Louisiana in the 1750s, have a long history of persecution and therefore seek another minority to malign. "In my culture it's more acceptable for me to date a white man than a black woman."

Even so, that doesn't mean coming out to his mother, an evangelical Christian, went smoothly. "For her, a Protestant, my homosexuality represented a fault that I failed to correct. Whereas coming out to mother was easier because he is Roman Catholic and believes we are all sinners in the eyes of God. I mean, his is a faith that accepts Mardi Gras as part of its ongoing church celebration!"

Bahr also writes for The New York Times, Time Out New York, and Poets & Writers.