The question of whether gay writers should occupy separate sections of bookshops and libraries, or have separate reading lists devoted to them, comes round fairly often.

It's our own little subcultural version of "Is the novel dead?". Of the hardline positions - 'I write only for my community' and 'Good writing is good writing whoever produces it' - the first has lost any political value it may once have had, and the second always sounds pious and evasive. The middle ground is the place to be, but not in some on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand sort of way.

I'm delighted to be filed in any gay section anywhere - delighted to be in print, come to that - but I'd like to be strictly alphabetised in the fiction or essay department too.

If this comes too close to megalomania, then I have to trust in booksellers and their command of cataloguing to connect readers with what they're looking for, to prevent the niche from becoming a cul-de-sac.

Society has changed, and information technology has changed even more.

When I went to my local library in Camden in the 1970s, looking for a book that could inform me about my desires and how they might work, the best I could hope for was a shelfmark. In that section of Sociology, I found a book called Roommates Can't Always Be Lovers.

If I read it now I can't guarantee I wouldn't throw up at its empowering Californian ickiness, but at the time it was exactly what I needed, and I couldn't have located it without negotiating the slightly demeaning grid of categories.

In the 1980s, when Gay Men's Press and Brilliance Books started to solicit the pink pound (with funding help from the Greater London council), I still felt an electrical qualm when I bought something they published. It felt like a statement - not a lifestyle acquisition but a homoeopathic political act.

I don't feel that any more, now that mainstream publishers can cheerfully sell books with a sexual content which Gay Men's Press would never have risked. But then I don't look to literature these days for confirmation of my identity. Readers with that hunger are better targeted now, and it's still not exactly an easy process.

There is, though, a strange compensation. I don't believe that repressed people make the best lovers but I do think that people still partly in the dark about themselves, who need to be led to water before they can drink - make the most intense readers.

I got a little shock when I first saw the American edition of my novel The Waters of Thirst. On the page giving Library of Congress data it was classified under Gay Men: Fiction and also Kidney Diseases: Fiction.

My first reaction was to think, Thanks, matey, for giving away the plot point I spent a third of the book working up to. But then I thought, if someone did want to read a novel featuring kidney disease, why shouldn't it be mine? How else would they get to it?

· Adam Mars Jones is an author and critic