Best Overall Non Fiction (1° place): The Golden Age of Gay Fiction edited by Drewey Wayne Gunn
You can face this essay in many different ways (guess what is mine?)...
- as one who was there and reading all the books and authors named in it, has that common feeling of "oh, yes, I remember that", or rather than, "wow, I almost forget that it was like that".
- as one who was not there, but that for all his life has loved and searched for the things from the past, a past that maybe seems better than the one he is living in. And all the vintage covers you will find inside the book will make your inner collector gone crazy, you will probably print copy the final references page, Index of Fiction Discussed, and start to doing the check, I have, I haven't.
- as one who did it, maybe it's even named among the authors, or maybe not, maybe he did not have the courage to do the same things those authors did, and now he is regretting the choice.
- as one who wants to understand better what was before, a newbie that, till last year believed that the gay romance was a recent phenomena, maybe even thought it was something who was fated to decline, and now realizes that it's only another roar of an old lion, who was only taking a nap.
Maybe the last one is not represented among the crowd of authors who contributed to this essay, but all the others are. There is love in this essay, love for an era that was your own one, or that you consider as inspiring. And there are different perspective: for example there is who love an author, and another one who thinks he was sugary and unrealistic, there is who dissects the genre trying to find an hidden meaning, and who, more or less, said that those paperbacks were the only flight from a reality that was not the one he wanted to live in.
There is not hate in this essay. Yes, maybe there is a bit of proud in the words of some authors, stating that, "hey, I was there way before someone started to speak of "Gay Literature"", but more or less, to everyone who contributed in the field of the Gay Fiction was given the right credit.
Who has to read this book? the newbie gay author who wants to write the Great American Novel? it could be useful, it's always useful to know who was before you. But most of all, this essay is directed to the questioning mind, to who is fascinated by those names, by those authors who have at least 20 pen names, who wonders, "how it was to live and write in a world where there wasn't internet?", when to find those novels you had to do miles and miles, maybe to that only bookstore you knew had in store the books you wanted. When you were judged not for who you were, but for what you read... Wait, Am I speaking of 40 years ago, or of today?! See time is passed, but things maybe are not changed so much. And so yes, you can still learn something from an essay like The Golden Age of Gay Fiction.
And no, I will not summarize all the essays inside it as maybe some of you are expecting, and I will not say who was my favorite: they are all my favorite, I love the presentation, the layout, all those little covers scattered around. I love the writers, they made me feel the love they have for the genre. And now I'm also damning them, since my "to read" list is bigger than ever!
http://www.mlrbooks.com/ShowBook.php?book=GOLDAGE1
Amazon: The Golden Age of Gay Fiction
The Rainbow Awards: First Week results: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/811346.html
Cover Art by Paul Richmond
And since I loved it, Victor Gadino's original cover for The Lord Won't Mind by Gordon Merrick:
Cover Art by Victor Gadino