Not enough on the shelves ... Gay's the word bookshop in London. Photograph: Graham Turner
That Andrew Holleran's latest novel, Grief, has failed to find a British publisher highlights, for me, the problem Britain's publishing industry has with gay fiction.
Holleran's first novel, Dancer from the Dance, an instant gay classic, was published by one of this country's most distinguished literary imprints, Jonathan Cape, back in 1979 and remains in print today. Grief received ecstatic reviews on publication in America and beat The Night Watch by Sarah Waters to win the 2007 Stonewall Book Award for literature, but no British publisher wanted to take a punt on it.
Holleran's latest novel is a quiet book, unlikely, perhaps, to set the cash tills ringing, but I am still at a loss to understand why it was passed over by UK publishers. Nor is this a one-off. The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson, whose biography of Patricia Highsmith was shortlisted for a Whitbread prize in 2003, was rejected by every mainstream British publisher before finally being picked up by the an independent (Canongate). Yet the novel had already been sold to Simon & Schuster in America, notched up a clutch of foreign sales and attracted interest from several movie producers by the time Canongate made their offer. That Wilson found a British publisher at all was due largely to the perseverance of his heavy-hitting literary agent, Clare Alexander.
Why are so few quality gay-themed novels published every year in this country? It isn't because there aren't gay men in positions of influence within the British book trade. And yet when I worked in publishing, I noticed that gay men would pass on gay books crossing their desks. My late boss, the literary agent Desmond Elliott, rejected a manuscript titled Better to Reign in Hell by Dennis Pratt. It was subsequently published by Jonathan Cape in 1968 under the title The Naked Civil Servant.
American publishing houses such as St Martin's Press, Carroll & Graf, Suspect Thoughts Press and The Dial Press are bringing out books by promising, exciting gay and lesbian writers like Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Patrick Moore, John Weir, Patrick Ryan, Bett Williams, Glenn Belverio and Barry McCrea. In this country, you are more likely to discover exciting new gay writers in the blogosphere, or in queer literary magazines like Chroma, than on a publisher's list.
British publishers, it seems, are only interested in gay writers who will cross over to a mainstream market. But American publishers have shown that gay publishing can be a potentially lucrative market. The Back Passage by James Lear, the nom du porn of British author and journalist Rupert Smith, was turned down by every British publisher before it was snapped up by an American publisher, Cleis Press. The Back Passage, and Lear's follow-up novel, Hot Valley, are currently at numbers one and two on Amazon UK's lesbian & gay bestsellers list.
Perhaps it is wrong to lay the blame for the lack of gay and lesbian titles available to bookshop browsers at the feet of publishers, however. I think it's true to say that we get the books we deserve. And sadly most young gay men today are more likely to read celebrity airhead Paris Hilton's Confessions of an Heiress than a generation-defining novel like Holleran's Dancer from the Dance.
