1 - The Work of Literature in an Age of Queer Reproduction

Summary

Dustan and the Inscription of the Seropositive

Even if literature is no longer the dominant vehicle for the transmission of cultural values, it still functions to transport cultural values at a local level for emerging groups. Literature has been a vehicle for the expression of gay, lesbian, and queer cultures, and specifically, as they have developed over the past four decades and as they have gradually moved from having a marginalized and even taboo status to being simply minority discourses, and now ultimately part of mainstream cultural production, with no one (in the middle classes, at least) batting an eye simply because of sexuality alone. It is not that there was no figuration of the gay before 1968, even in mainstream literature, but gay literature and culture have developed rapidly since 1968, and literature has been a means of expressing this emerging culture, its discourses, its habitus, and its own inscription of the individual as a valid subject of enunciation. With two exceptions, the move to normalization of the gay in literature happened fairly quickly: little time passes between the explosion of Andrew Holleran's middle-brow work Dancer from the Dance, which celebrates what quickly become known as the gay lifestyle, or Renaud Camus's work Tricks, and Andrew Solomon's brilliantly written The Stone Boat, in which being gay is an utter non-event.