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

In his Notes Towards the Definition of tillage T. S. Eliot offered three "permanent" reasons for reading: (1) the acquisition of wisdom, (2) the gratification 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 insinuate there is a fourth reason: the lifesaving necessity of seeing one's hold face reflected in the pages of a advantageous book and the corollary comfort that derives from the knowledge that single is not alone.

And at the same time 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 obtain 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 through year to give faces to millions of teen (the precise number of GLBTQ teen at any given time is, of course, unknown).

As we will diocese this situation is gradually beginning to change for the better, on the contrary to look first at the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of literary history, the homosexual as a character in American fiction (for the pair 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 have affection for that dare not speak its name." And with equal reason as cultural historian Charles Kaiser has noted, homosexuality did not become a public issue in American life until 1948 when the Kinsey Report upon human sexuality was published. Earlier in that decade, however, World War II had brought together "the largest concentration of gay men at any time found inside a single American institution. tender women who joined the WAC and the WAVES experienced an plane more prevalent lesbian culture" (78)

It did not take drawn out for art to catch up to what Martin Duberman calls this "critical mass of consciousness" (76) alone three years after the extremity of the war, two important adult novels with gay themes appeared: Other Voices, Other expanses by Truman Capote and The City and the Pillar through Gore Vidai. They are significant for sum of two units reasons. First, they were works of serious fiction through writers who would become vital forces in American literature. next to the first 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 omit by literary historians), it was either published abroad or issued in this land by marginal publishers" (30). The same can arguably be said of lesbian literature; indeed, similar writers as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Natalie Barney were not sole published abroad, but they also lived abroad as expatriates.

The fresh homosexual consciousness that appeared during and after World War II coincided with the first stirrings of what has draw near to be called young adult (YA) literature. sum of two units of its best-known early practitioners, Maureen Daly and Madeleine L'Engle published their first novels in the 1940 Daly's Seventeenth Summer appeared in 1942 while L'Engle's The Small Rain was published in 1945 the pair titles were published as adult novels, and as Christine Jenkins notes in her illuminating article "From unusual to Gay and Back Again" (Library Quarterly 68 [July 1998] 298334) the pair 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, advance to a club to hear a musician who is portrayed as stereotypically gay: "With his organ of visions still closed, the colored man leaned back upon the bench, way back, single hand limp at his side . . 'Look, Jack,' I remember saying, 'He has r 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 meeting is reported. Like Seventeenth Sammer and The Small Rain, this volume was also published for adults on the contrary was claimed by succeeding generations of young adults as their have a title to In this title the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has a-to him-disturbing clash with a favorite teacher when he stays overnight at the man's apartment:

What he (the teacher) was doing was, he was sitting upon the floor right next to the recline in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me upon the goddam head. Boy, I'll bet I skip overed about a thousand feet. "What the hellya doing?" I said. "Nothing! I'm simply sitting here admiring"-"What're ya doing, anyway?' I said above 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 advance anyway," I said-boy, was I nervous! I know more damn make an ill use ofs at schools and all, than anybody you at any time met, and they're always being perverty when I'm. around." (192)