AfterElton’s 50 Greatest Gay Books

AfterElton’s 50 Greatest Gay Books
You can read the summarys of the books here: http://www.goodreads.com/lis...erElton_s_50_Best_Gay_Books_

A description:
AfterElton.com readers like novels. Of the top 50 books in
the poll, all but seven are works of fiction, and of the seven non-fiction
books, five are memoirs. And the Band
Played On by Randy Shilts and The
Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo are the only two non-memoir non-fiction
books to make the list.

A number of authors made the list twice, including Michael
Chabon, Michael Cunningham, Mary Renault, Jeffrey Round, Alex Sanchez, Jim
Grimsley, and Alan Hollinghurst. (Readers voted for the other books in the
series that begins with Armistead Maupin’s Tales
of the City, but that’s the only book that made the top 50.) No author made
the list more than twice.

Unlike AfterElton.com’s recent gay movie poll where most of
the selections came from the last two decades, this list includes many books
much older than that. Almost half were published before 1990, and four were
published before 1970. The oldest book
was The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar
Wilde’s only novel, published in 1890.

And while we enjoy good literary fiction and the classics,
we appreciate genre fiction as well, with six works of young adult fiction on
the list, four of historical fiction, three mysteries, two fantasy novels, and
even a play, Angels in America.

As with our poll of movies, most of the books on the list
are by white authors writing about the experiences of white characters (albeit
often surrounded by supporting characters of color). Exceptions include Giovanni’s Room, written by an African
American, James Baldwin (though the book tells the story of two white
characters); Call Me By Your Name by Egyptian-born author André Aciman; and Rainbow Boys and Rainbow High, two young adult novels written by Latino author Alex
Sanchez.