John Waters once said, “if you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” Guys, if he has any of these books on his shelf, he’s probably a keeper.
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City is a series of 8 novels (I suggest you start at the beginning) which began life as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle, following the lives of a group of young and beautiful people in 70s San Francisco. Though the protagonist, Mary Ann Singleton, is a straight woman, many of the supporting characters are gay men. Granted, their lives are sometimes hedonistic and sensational, and a contemporary reader is haunted by the impending catastrophe of AIDS (which the later novels address), but Tales of the City is ultimately a beautiful and honest story of gay lives lived openly. My mother gave this book to me when I was 12. I wonder what she was trying to tell me...?
Via amazon.co.uk
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is Evelyn Waugh's most famous novel. Written during the war as he recovered from a parachuting accident, Waugh's (some say autobiographical) narrative is told by Charles Ryder, a world-weary soldier stationed at Brideshead, an imposing country house. Charles remembers his long relationship with the house's owners, the aristocratic and staunchly Catholic Marchmain family, which began more than 20 years previously when he befriended Lord Sebastian Flyte, the youngest son of Lady Marchmain, at Oxford. The kiss between Charles and Sebastian in Julian Jarrold's (terrible) 2008 film adaptation is a liberty he has taken, but Waugh's beautiful prose hints at far more between the two men, and his ultimate message is spelled out early in the novel: "to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom".
Via penguin.com.au
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Much of James Baldwin's work is known for its social critique of mid-century America, reflecting his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. His second novel, Giovanni's Room, however, is set in France. Baldwin charts the tumultuous relationship between David, a young American who is engaged to a woman back home, and Giovanni, a fiery Italian man who works behind in the Parisian gay bar in which they meet. Their relationship is doomed, blighted by David's refusal to accept his sexuality, but the room of the title speaks of the private spaces in which gay men can be entirely themselves.
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
All of Hollinghurst's novels explore queer themes in some way (for a terrifying story of homosexual desire, check out the Folding Star), but The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004, is perhaps the most accomplished of his novels, and the first I read. A kind of Thatcherite Brideshead, the novel charts the life of Nick Guest, a young, middle class, gay man who finds himself lodging with the family of Gerald Fedden, a Tory MP. The politics of 1980s Britain during the AIDS epidemic are a stark contrast to his first forays into homosexuality, and are brilliantly juxtaposed in a passage where, having just snorted copious amounts of cocaine, Nick dances with Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady's shameful attitudes to homosexuality decide the fate of many of the novel's characters.
Via waynflete.org
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