OUR GAY MALE ROOTS.

PAGE BY PAGE, THESE OUTSPOKEN MEN PUT OUR STORIES ON PAPER FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

AND A CENTURY OF GAY WRITERS

1996 The gay American humorist as everyman begins his reign with Frank DeCaro's A Boy Named Phyllis, which is quickly followed by David Sedaris's Naked (1997) and Michael Thomas Ford's Lambda Literary Award--winning Alec Baldwin Doesn't Love Me (1998) and That's Mr. Faggot to You (1999).

1993 In nonfiction, Queer in America (1993) makes a gay superstar of writer Michelangelo Signorile and spurs an onslaught of similar manifestos. Highlights include Andrew Sullivan's controversial Virtually Normal (1995).

1993 Post-AIDS authors come of age with stories of upper-middle-class suburban queer life that spawn literary stars like David Leavitt (While England Sleeps, 1993), Christopher Bram (Father of Frankenstein, 1995), and Michael Lowenthal (The Same Embrace, 1998).

1988 Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette and Robert Ferro's Second Son (arguably the first novel about AIDS) initiate a subgenre of books dealing with the AIDS crisis. Notable examples include David B. Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed, John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket (both 1989), Monette's Afterlife, and Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World (both 1990).

1984 Dennis Cooper's novels Safe and Closer (1989) help establish the so-called New Narrative Movement, typified in novels about disenfranchised, sometimes violent young gay men. The form is perfected by Scott Heim (Mysterious Skin, 1995) and continues to grow with Craig Curtis's Fabulous Hell (2000).

1979 Felice Picano's The Lure enjoys mainstream success and popularizes the coming-out novel, which is explored further by popular authors Paul Monette (Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, 1978), Ethan Mordden (the Buddies books of the mid '80s), and William J. Mann (The Men From the Boys, 1997).

1978 Andrew Holleran's Dancer From the Dance is the first post-Stonewall novel to cross over to a mainstream market, followed swiftly by Edmund While's Nocturnes for the King of Naples and Larry Kramer's Faggots.

1977 Novelist Felice Picano founds Sea Horse Press, which goes on to publish books by soon-to-be-famous gay authors Martin Duberman, Dennis Cooper, and Brad Gooch. Alyson Publications is established in Boston in 1980, followed by other small gay presses in the '80s.

1972 The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I'm Gay by the Rev. Troy D. Perry is the first clergy coming-out story, opening the door for similar autobiographies, most notably Malcolm Boyd's Take Off the Masks (1978) and Mel White's Stranger At the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America (1994).

1970 With Fadeout, Joseph Hansen kicks off his popular Dave Brandstetter mystery series. Gay mysteries are to be a popular subgenre, exemplified in series by Michael Nava and R.D. Zimmerman.

1968 Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant becomes virtually the only autobiography in which a homosexual is open about his sexual identity and creates a new category of gay literature: the gay autobiography, which sees its earliest mainstream success in The David Kopay Story (1977), a pro football player's memoir.

1964 Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man predates the gay liberation movement in presenting homosexuality as a human variation worth fighting for--a literary precedent that will inspire other writers in the coming decade.

1956 Howl by openly gay Allen Ginsberg draws his sexual life directly into poetry, beginning a tradition continued by poets Robert Duncan (The Opening of the Field, 1960) and Paul Goodman (The Lordly Hudson, 1962).

1953 James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room (1956) explore gay and bisexual interracial romance, paving the way for writers like Melvin Dixon (Vanishing Rooms, 1991), E. Lyn Harris (Invisible Life, 1991), and James Earl Hardy (B-Boy Blues, 1994).

1948 Truman Capote's sensational best-selling first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, introduces the drag queen as a sympathetic character in gay male fiction. She becomes a mainstay, notably in John Rechy's City of Night (1963) and memorably in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976).

1932 Christopher Isherwood's second novel, The Memorial, portrays a gay man's grief at the loss of his lover to war, a theme repeated in Gore Vidal's 1948 The City and the Pillar, the most talked-about gay book of the '40s.

1928 Christopher Isherwood's All the Conspirators indicts homosexual repression, subsequently addressed in 1933's Better Angel by Forman Brown (writing as Richard Meeker) and James Barr's gay-positive Quatrefoil (1950).

1925 Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales) by Robert McAlmon includes the first gay bar scenes in American fiction; the setting is revisited in 1933's The Young and Evil by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler and by every generation of gay writers since, most notably John Horne Burns (The Gallery, 1947) and John Rechy (Numbers, 1967; City of Night, 1963).

1906 Imre: A Memorandum by Edward I. Prime-Stevenson, a frank and affirmative gay novel, is published. Gay male fiction remains largely coded until Henry Blake Fuller publishes the gay-themed Bertram Cope's Year in 1919.