Interesting piece in Salon on the development of gay literature – focussing mainly on US output – since WWII.

Like feminist literature, or other forms of literature that writes from the perspective of a repressed and/or marginalised group, gay lit has found a way to become part of the mainstream, to the extent that the genre itself is dissolving. Gay characters are accepted and “gay” story-lines are relatively common.

There’s good and bad in that I guess, especially if you’re gay and like being treated as special, but it marks the inevitable march of arts into mainstream culture, which is really what art should be doing. The pay-off is that the more exciting and out there elements of the output may be lost. But, they too will find their new underground which may in turn, in time, feed into the mainstream.