In the late-20th century, gay literature had earned a place at the British and American literary tables, spawning its own constellation of important writers and winning a dedicated audience. This collection of probing interviews represents an attempt to offer a group portrait of the most important gay fiction writers.
The extraordinary power of the interviews, originally set down from 1987 to 1997, brings to life the passionate intellect of several voices now stilled among them Joseph Hansen, Allen Barnett, John Preston and Paul Monette. Others such as Scott Heim, Brad Gooch, Lev Raphael, Alan Hollinghurst and Michael Lowanthal were just tasting fame, even notoriety and have gone on to richly deserved acclaim. Published near the height of mainstream accolades for gay fiction as a category, Edmund White, David Plante, Andrew Holleran, Michael Cunningham and Christopher Bram had already enjoyed wide readership and two decades of scrutiny and broad readership.
Many of the pieces are accompanied by portraits from Robert Giard who set out, with urgency during the mid-1980s AIDS crisis, to capture gay artists in their prime; these images make a unique and profound contribution to this collection.
Philip Gambone, a wise and insightful questioner, draws out incredible detail, emotion and personality in a context which still makes for compelling reading thirty years on. The author includes a 2022 update welcoming new readers to this indispensable resource.
"A welcome compilation of interviews Gambone has conducted with 21 gay writers since 1987, this collection amounts to a compelling portrait gallery of many influential figures. Gambone's knowledge of each writer's work and his sensitivity to the craft is impressive ... his carefully probing interviews provide insight into the working methods and aesthetic, personal and social concerns of a varied group, including such well-known writers as well as those who emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. The book amounts to a broad overview of the 'breathlessly rapid' development of gay fiction and its themes, from early coming-out novels to more complex visions of a world. Many of the writers stress how important it is for them to feel the freedom to depict their world honestly." - Publishers Weekly
"Gambone's collection of interviews is a valuable addition to the ever-growing corpus in gay studies / queer theory. It poses far more questions than it does answers and relishes in the contradictions that emerge in intellectual conversations with writers and their craft." - Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature
"A rich collective portrait of some of the most important and interesting gay writers of the last three decades." - Montreal Mirror
"Gambone's interviews reveal the human side of authors it is often too easy to think about only in terms of book titles and awards received, and remind us that those who write about our world inhabit it themselves." - Michael Thomas Ford, Lambda Book Report
"Gambone, an award-winning essayist, journalist, and fiction writer, elicits animated, revealing, and even warm answers to his questions about their writing lives; eschewing gossipy topics, he sticks to literary matters, particularly opinions of, and notions of their own place in, the gay literary movement." - Brad Hooper, Booklist
