Modern Love

Men attracted to other men have long contributed to the cultural canon of Western society—even if they have not always either acted upon that desire or written about it. But the formation of organized LGBT communities in the liberalized post-Stonewall era led to an outpouring of cultural dispatches directly concerned with the lives of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. And as the subset of that community with the most comparative political and cultural capital, gay men articulated their experiences and identities through the medium of fiction at a rapid rate—sometimes through the new vehicle of gay-specific publishing houses, such as Regina’s Stubblejumper Press of the 1970s or the Gay Presses of New York in the 1980s.

Common themes emerged and shifted over time. The earliest stories were rooted in an anguished experience of difference: John Rechy’s 1963 landmark City of Night enumerated a young man’s sexual awakening with a prescient...