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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 81
t the end of the spring 2012 semester, four students in their first year at
my two-year institution asked me to teach an independent study course
on the contemporary gay male American novel the following fall. I’d
always wanted to teach such a course, and one of the more malleable
selections—English 283, A Figure or Figures in Literature—allowed for such
development. But as I began designing the course, an intimidating list of authors,
novels, and perspectives came to mind. After considering many options, I started
with three landmarks: Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), James Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978). Then
I floundered, for I’ve read many such novels, but I wasn’t sure which merited
teaching. Indeed, particular lists of authors and texts determine the content of
many survey classes, and history and tradition argue that little disagreement exists
over the notion that some works and authors are considered more indispens-
able than others. Still, instructors are also impelled to seek out texts that test
or extend standard assumptions about the nature of literature and the literary,
such as for more specialized courses including those on lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender/transsexual (LGBT) literature. Is it possible, then, to speak of
a canon of LGBT literature? If so, who would be included in such a canon, and
what are the themes and theories driving the selection of these texts and writers?
During its short and rather tense history, LGBT studies has infiltrated
discussions of what it means to queer text selection, pedagogy, and curricula
by means of questioning hegemonic practices, binary oppositions, and absolute
truths. Since these discussions began in the 1960s and 1970s alongside calls for
College English, Volume 79, Number 1, September 2016
LGBT Literature Courses and
Questions of Canonicity
A
John Pruitt
John Pruitt, NCTE member since 2005, is associate professor of English at the University
of Wisconsin-Rock County and editor of Wisconsin English Journal. His essays on LGBT literacy
practices have appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and Library Quarterly, and he is
currently working on a rhetorical analysis of LGBT book review web sites.
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Copyright © 2016 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
82 College English
broader multicultural representations in literary, cultural, and social histories,
scholars have solicited and communicated a variety of “best practices” when
identifying and teaching these texts. At this time, in a presentation delivered at
the 1972 NCTE Convention, Rictor Norton detailed the syllabus of his course
The Homosexual Literary Tradition, offered through Florida State University’s
free university program in 1971. Norton included an extensive reading list
from the ancient Greeks through contemporary novels such as James Baldwin’s
Giovanni’s Room and John Rechy’s City of Night. He also divided the course into
units including The Pastoral-Mythological Tradition, Perversity, and Lesbian
Literature, for which he provided teaching strategies for those facing cynical
and defiant students. For example, he warns instructors to anticipate a politically
conservative enrollment seeking to undermine all course objectives and produc-
tive discussions. Therefore, on the first day they must “debunk the notion that
homosexual love is essentially inferior to or different from heterosexual love.
Encourage the students to express their opinions frankly; let a heated argument
begin; then debunk the whole argument” (678). On the second day, they must
“debunk the notion that homosexual literature is essentially inferior to or dif-
ferent from heterosexual literature. Try to lessen the influence of preconceived
critical theories just as you tried to lessen the influence of little-understood
moral theories” (678). From the beginning, then, Norton implores teachers to
disrupt generally accepted and unquestioned dominant heterosexual discourses
in order to provide alternative ways of reading and knowing.
Norton’s invitation to “debunk” more established schools of thought ex-
pands to a more reactionary rhetoric, for his emphasis on appropriate strategies
for teaching The Homosexual Literary Tradition stems from its own tradition of
censorship, scholarly suppression, and accusations of psychopathology. Shortly
following this publication, he and Louie Crew contended with this “homophobic
imagination” (272) as guest editors of the November 1974 special issue of College
English on “The Homosexual Imagination”:
In this particular issue of College English we have only obliquely exposed the lack
of professional standards exhibited by traditional scholarship on homosexual
literature, for at the moment we are concerned with the practical possibilities of
teaching what has not become lost, strayed, or stolen, but we must begin to ap-
preciate the extent to which academic publishing, research, and library services
have contributed to the excommunication of homosexual literary history. (277)
In order to comment on such homophobic activity, Crew and Norton lace
their introduction with venomous remarks. They scoff at the bewilderment of
uncovering gay references in the classics and suggest that “It would be a useful
and amusing dissertation project to document the rhetorical configurations
by which critics inadvertently reveal their surprise and wonderment upon dis-
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 83
covering the homosexual imagination” (281). They also audaciously comment
on the marital status and questionable sexual orientation of such scholars, for
“the critics most frequently cited as proponents of the view that Shakespeare
was not homosexual are preponderantly ‘bachelors’” (284). In the midst of such
bold statements, Crew and Norton uncover their own political purpose. Rather
than initiating productive dialogues about textual interpretation, they seek out
isolation from homophobic pedagogical and institutional policies, for “Quite
frankly, we sometimes would like to urge heterosexuals to hush up and move
aside” (285). Simple debunking, then, becomes hopeful solitude, the longing for
closed communities of gay scholars to undo centuries of entrenched heterosexist
readings and pedagogies.
The introduction of LGBT authors into literary culture, however, sur-
passed a basic transition to canonizing the noncanonical or queering the major
authors. With this growing emphasis on identity and representational politics
in the study of English and other fields, the burgeoning field of gay and lesbian
studies took issue with a conservative movement in the 1980s emphasizing the
importance of the “Great Books” of Western culture. According to this agenda
for educational reform, led predominately by Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the
American Mind (1987) and E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987), every Ameri-
can student must acquire the essential truths and ethical principles shared by all
literate Americans as the cornerstone of a truly liberal education. For Bloom
and Hirsch, the canon of Western literature belongs to a history of regulating
reading, to maintaining a list of serious literary texts asserting hegemonic values.
To their chagrin, universities instead embraced the progressive agenda of liberal
pluralism and transformed curricula to reflect developments in multicultural
scholarship, represented by the newly accredited field of gay and lesbian stud-
ies at the City University of New York in 1986 and the City College of San
Francisco in 1988 (Minton 1).
As a field extending from women’s and feminist studies and drawing from
the inspiration of the English translation of Michel Foucault’s The History of
Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction in 1978, gay and lesbian studies in the 1980s
challenged the constructs of normative and deviant sexualities and sought to
understand how such categories operate and are enforced. For example, in the
pivotal study Between Men (1985), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reads “male homo-
social desire” into canonical texts by Shakespeare, Sterne, Tennyson, Dickens,
George Eliot, and others, arguing, “It is one of the main projects of this study
to explore the ways in which the shapes of sexuality, and what counts as sexual-
ity, both depend on and affect historical power relationships” (2). As the field
evolved and took an interest in poststructuralist critical theory, scholars such as
Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, Lee Edelman, and Judith Halberstam
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84 College English
shaped and developed queer theory, a school of thought built upon challenges to
the idea that gender constitutes part of the essential self. Coined by Teresa de
Lauretis in 1991, the concept serves as a means of considering gay and lesbian
sexualities beyond the narrow rubrics of either deviance or preference, “as forms
of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant discourses
with other constructions of the subject in culture” (iii). In other words, queer
theory critiques the universalizing protocols of gay and lesbian studies that
neglect to position homosexuality “in relation to gender and race, with their
attendant differences of class or ethnic culture, generational, geographical, and
socio-political location” (iii–iv). Demonstrating the impossibility of a natural
or normative sexuality, queer theory contributed to identity and cultural stud-
ies by questioning and problematizing traditionally understood stable gender
categories and models.
Through these different lenses—the identitarian politics of Norton and
Crew and the deconstructing of defined, rigid categories by queer theorists—the
study of gender and sexuality in English pedagogy has evolved dramatically. In
particular, these schools of thought address esoteric discussions complicating
the intersections among gender, sexuality, and other identity constructs within
the classroom, given the perpetuation of heteronormativity in the educational
system. In order to parse out varying manifestations of oppression and outline
pedagogical theories emphasizing the social impact of queering texts, two
publications appeared simultaneously in 1995: Deborah Britzman’s “Is There a
Queer Pedagogy? or, Stop Reading Straight” and George Haggerty and Bonnie
Zimmerman’s landmark volume Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in
Literature. Together, they spearheaded the conversation encouraging teachers
to maneuver through social, cultural, and economic conditions generating the
educational environments and circumstances within which sexual identities occur.
Britzman, for example, accentuates the negative consequences of neglect-
ing queer theory when the educational setting itself, as a set of authoritative
discourses and practices, changes both culturally and historically, thus constantly
agitating the concept of normalcy. Setting queer theory, pedagogy, and psy-
choanalytic reading practices in tension in order to question the possibility of
reading normalcy as a queer reading practice itself, she argues that readers grow
to understand themselves as the Other. In this respect, “there are no innocent,
normal, or unmeditated readings and . . . the representations drawn upon to
maintain a narrative or a self as normal, as deviant, as thinkable, are social effects
of how discourses of normalization are lived and refused” (164). In other words,
through the lens of queer theory, reading practices become exercises in socializa-
tion shaped and constructed through educational systems capable of instilling
such schools of thought. For Britzman, “At the very least, what is required is
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 85
an ethical project that begins to engage difference as the grounds of politicality
and community” (152). Thus, discursive expressions of sexuality reconfigure
the relations between psychoanalytic and social constructions of the contested
subject, both in building communities and in resisting the dominant social order.
Such strategies for reading through intertwining sexuality with other
constructs allow instructors to interrogate and redefine queer identities both
inside and outside the classroom, that is, on both personal and institutional
levels. According to Haggerty’s own opening essay in Professions of Desire, these
strategies work not “to silence other oppressions” but to help LGBT students
in a variety of courses “learn about the politics of oppression in their own lives
as well as in the cultural context that, after all, determines what they mean
when they call themselves lesbian or gay” (“Promoting Homosexuality” 15).
Thus, acknowledging what it means for those marginalized to acquire an open
presence also gives occasion to those identifying as heterosexual to examine
both their privilege and their participation in the institutional essentialisms
that silence difference. Building on this premise, the contributors to William
Spurlin’s Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Teaching of English (2000) emphasize
that LGBT subject positions fracture heterosexist assumptions about pedagogy
and knowledge of the discipline, for “As long as heteronormative thinking . . .
is carried over and left unexamined in the classroom, we fail to acknowledge
the various forms of expression and lived experiences of lesbians, gay men, and
other sexual minorities that name, and possibly transform, the world” (xviii).
Thus Spurlin and his contributors believe it vital to interrupt familiar patterns
of thinking and thereby broaden possibilities for perceiving, interpreting, and
representing issues of power related to the teaching of language and literature.
According to Mary Armstrong’s more recent assessment, teaching in line with
these objectives contributes to a “conflicted practice,” a strategy of avoiding
essentialism, interrogating broad epistemics, and, at the same time, averting
“a fantasy of innocent students, instructors, curriculums and/or institutions
waiting to be educated about LGBT issues and unimplicated in heterosexual
privilege and the enforcement of heterosexual norms” (97). In this way, LGBT
studies not only occupies the vexed position of claiming a legitimate space for
LGBT populations while deconstructing the categories of gender and sexuality.
It also decenters the heterosexual experience, which many students, faculty, and
administrators reluctantly face.
These arguments broach a number of critical issues facing English pedagogy,
such as the application of current concepts of sexual identity to literary texts and
what and how students should read. In these courses, instructors must consider
how sexual politics pervades literary criticism and how the dissemination of vari-
ous close and critical readings implicate methods of pedagogy. In a recent linkage
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86 College English
between literacy and sexuality, Jonathan Alexander argues that compositionists
must develop a critical sexual literacy, which “asks us to take seriously the sexual
and sexuality as significant dimensions through which we can understand the
relationship between literacy and power” (17). Pedagogically, then, teaching
LGBT-focused literature demands that students learn multifaceted strategies
of approaching these texts. The first strategy requires an understanding of
content and the use of literary devices, and the second requires inhabiting a
queer discursive analytical perspective that reveals what might not have been
interpreted from a heteronormative or heterosexist world view. Through a
queer lens, identity categories remain unstable, experiences constructed, real-
ity imagined, and knowledge conitnues to provoke uncertainties and silences.
At stake is reconceptualizing reading practices to emphasize the disruptive and
discomforting rather than the affirmative function of reading, the decentering
of one’s own subjectivity (see Bacon, Kumashiro, and Luhmann).
In the context of these approaches to and purposes for reading literature
queerly, I contribute to these discussions by investigating what occurs in the
contemporary LGBT literature classroom at the college level by reviewing
the syllabi of forty-five of these courses taking place in the United States since
2005 and interviewing thirty-two of their instructors by phone, email, or Skype
at least once in order to discover the rationales behind text selections, course
objectives, and teaching methods in light of the arguable existence of an LGBT
literary canon. Arguments posed by Paul Lauter and others advise “a greater
emphasis on the ‘what’ of the syllabus,” that is, discussing with students the
historical and cultural clashes that have dismantled the canon (“Contexts” 110).
For a canon of literature, according to John Guillory, is “an effect of the sylla-
bus as an institutional instrument” (Cultural 19), thus implying that instructors
determine the value of the required texts. These arguments about “pedagogical
canons”—those texts appearing on a syllabus (see Eaton and Gallagher)—stem
primarily from questions and debates about the expanding canons of epochal and
national, especially Western, literatures, but similar controversies surface when
instructors consider text selection in courses emphasizing identity categories and
ways of reading. I suggest looking into entire courses in order to understand
how instructors complicate identity categories and introduce difference in the
context of teaching LGBT literature, and how they assess this learning. In other
words, I accept the charge proposed by Martha Marinara and her co-authors
for more extensive or substantial empirical studies that “give us a sense of how
seriously—and even if—our discipline is considering LGBT/queer identities,
issues, and topics as a subject matter worthy of discussion” (271).
I’d like to emphasize that my purpose here is not to debate with these instruc-
tors, to agree or disagree with their justifications for text inclusion, to question or
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 87
support their assessment activities. Rather, I bring these voices together in order
to draw attention to the various means by which we all, as English instructors,
struggle to measure the worth of literary texts, include them on or exclude them
from required reading lists, and present them as teachable texts.
Is a n LGBT Ca n o n P ossIBLe?
The publication of LGBT fiction, drama, poetry, and creative nonfiction is
proliferating, and LGBT literature as an area of study and course offering con-
tinues to thrive. Ellen Louise Hart urged her CCCC audience in March 1989
to continue developing these courses in order to cultivate a thriving LGBT
student body: “[F]or lesbians and gay men whose experience has been taboo,
who have never had a consistent oral tradition on which to depend for informa-
tion, literacy is fundamental to identity, culture, and survival” (1). Currently, the
course appeals to more than LGBT students, and as argued earlier, the areas
of LGBT studies and queer theory have developed their own peculiarities and
interpretive reading strategies.
The very nature of how to define and read LGBT texts means that the
range of authors and materials taught is more fluid than in more established
areas of literary study, and the potential list is growing as the “canon” becomes
more elastic in the absence of a general theory justifying the canonization of
any particular work. Separate publications appearing in 1991 by Wendell Har-
ris, Paul Lauter, and Jan Gorak recognized a shift in the academic zeitgeist from
conceptions of the canon as the unique literary achievement of a nation to this
more flexible concept, for “Canon can become a focus for debate in any period
in which artists, critics, philosophers or theologians try to match an inherited
body of texts, practices, or ideas to their perceived present and future cultural
needs” (Gorak 4).
When these “cultural needs” turned to what academic circles argued best
represented and served LGBT literary history, Sedgwick’s influential Epistemology
of the Closet introduced the idea that reading from the traditional “master-canon”
presupposes reading gay literature. In her oft-cited adaptation of Saul Bellow’s
question “Is there . . . a Tolstoy of the Zulus?” she considers the possibility from
a gay perspective:
Has there ever been a gay Socrates?
Has there ever been a gay Shakespeare?
Has there ever been a gay Proust? [. . .]
A short answer, though a very incomplete one, might be that not only have there
been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust but that their names are Socrates,
Shakespeare, and Proust; and, beyond that, legion—dozens or hundreds of the
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88 College English
most centrally canonic figures in what the monoculturalists are pleased to call
“our” culture, as indeed, always in different forms and senses, in every other.
(51–2)
In other words, Sedgwick encourages not unearthing obscure texts in the struggle
to broaden representation and dismantle the master-canon, but “reading rebel-
liously within” it as a means of “making salient the homosocial, homosexual, and
homophobic strains and torsions in the already existing master-canon” (50–1).
Thus Sedgwick finds a language to reveal what may be hidden or masked in,
rather than absent from, these texts. Framing reading practices through such a
queer lens provides an analytical basis for interrogating and interrupting nor-
mative representations of sexuality and gender in these traditionally read and
taught canonical works.
Is there, then, a need to define a separate canon of LGBT literature? Sedg-
wick does suggest the existence of “a potentially infinite plurality of mini-canons”
(50) designated by theme, structure, or other determining factor, the mini-canons
that shape our course reading lists. Like Sedgwick, Haggerty recognizes that the
male homosexual tradition in Western literature identifies closely with the tradi-
tion in all of Western literature, thus questioning the rationale behind defining
a canon at all. But it does happen. He cites Guillory’s persuasive argument that
“[i]f the pedagogical form of the canon always assumes (as well as activates) an
ideology of tradition, that ideology collapses the history of canon formation into
an autonomous history of literature.” Thus, Guillory continues, “The critique of
the canon fails to overcome this ideology, and thus it has consistently fallen back
on notions of tradition, in the form of various countertraditions of noncanonical
writers” (qtd. in Haggerty, “Gay Canon” 286). Framing Haggerty’s argument
is the simultaneous 1998 publication of Gregory Woods’s A History of Gay Lit-
erature: The Male Tradition, Robert Drake’s The Gay Canon: Great Books Every
Gay Man Should Read, Byrne Fone’s The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature:
Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day, and Reed Woodhouse’s Un-
limited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995. In his review of these four
texts, Haggerty argues that they inaugurated “the ‘coming of age’ of gay studies
in literature,” for these authors and editors “invoke the spirit of canonization to
legitimate their enterprise” (“Gay Canon” 284). Applying the sacrosanct term
canon to a collection or list of texts lends credence to the endeavor. In other
words, canonization affirms the reading and teaching of the most pertinent gay
texts according to these authors and editors.
These volumes present the elusive nature of gay canonicity at this “com-
ing of age” and what this concept of “pertinence” entails to both academic and
nonacademic readers. For Fone, a pioneer in gay studies and author of promi-
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 89
nent books, articles, and novels, this pertinence surfaces from his selections’
“significant contribution to the history of homosexuality” (xxvii, emphasis added).
Furthermore, he continues in his short preface, “If one purpose of this book
is to reveal a hidden heritage of lost or unfamiliar writing, another purpose of
such a historically structured anthology is surely to present a broad selection
of the essential materials of the history it intends to chronicle” (xxvii, emphasis
added). To the extent that it inscribes and collates a particular literary history,
Fone’s anthology, published by a reputable university press, contains exem-
plars organized into successive traditions similar to those established by Rictor
Norton thirty years earlier. Spanning from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and
Rome through the 1990s, Fone’s Columbia Anthology neatly categorizes literary
paragons defining gay male identity framed by a history of ideas, politics, and
sexuality deemed fundamental to an academic understanding of expressions of
desire among men in terms of the culture and epoch in which they functioned.
In the words of David Halperin, who recognizes the many complications in-
volved in historicizing discourses of specifically male homosexuality, scholars
must “inquire more closely into the modalities of historical being that sexuality
possesses: to ask how exactly—in what terms, by virtue of what temporality, in
which of its dimensions or aspects—sexuality does have a history” (87). In such
historical anthologies, the editors often base their selections on the attempt to
define, categorize, and decode the ambiguities. As Lillian Faderman argues in
her introduction to Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from
the Seventeenth Century to the Present, “Lesbian literature has been in constant
metamorphosis” (xiv), that is, difficult to define because it reflects the social
attitudes of the eras in which it was written. Thus, while Faderman presents
readers with authors from the master-canon including Aphra Behn, Christina
Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein, she encourages “decoding” these
texts by seeking out ambiguous pronoun references, flexibility in gender roles,
and suspicion of heterosexual institutions (446). Informed by the deconstructive
strand of queer theory, Faderman suggests a destabilizing analytic approach that
expands traditional reading practices in order to disrupt gendered and hetero-
normative constructions.
Through the selection and editing processes, more personalized ap-
proaches to the LGBT canon inspire questions about the editors’ aesthetic
criteria and organization, about inclusion and exclusion, and about depth and
breadth. They also embody varying aspects of sexuality and sexual orientation,
facilitate debate, and illuminate a wide variety of experiences across extenuating
personal circumstances. For example, in Unlimited Embrace, Woodhouse raises
questions about canonicity based on the syllabus for his “Gay Male Fiction”
course by wondering “Which books had to go on the syllabus? . . . What was
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90 College English
the essence of ‘gay’ fiction? Were the best books necessarily the gayest? Or did
a book’s ‘gay-density,’ so to speak, have little to do with its literary value?” (1).
In order to answer this question, he compartmentalizes his selections based on
“house” or category, with “ghetto” fiction “by, for, and about gay men” at the
center and various satellites extending from this core (1). Overall, his choices
align only with his own coming of age: “I have followed the broad historical
arc of gay fiction since World War II, but have been egotistical enough to see
in literary history my own roughly simultaneous history writ large” (13), from
the initial suspicion of his own sexual orientation through reflecting on those
past fifty years. Through this organizational scheme, he argues that this canon
makes “an argument about how to be gay—how to lead a good life as a gay
man” (13). Through Woodhouse, it is possible to consider how literary value
itself is often understood as a construct rather than an objective category that,
according to Terry Eagleton, will indicate only what “is valued by certain people
in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given
purposes” (10). From this perspective, the belief system of the reader is central
to meaning-making and, indeed, might reflect only the perceived values and
norms of a given social context.
So, despite their good intentions, Haggerty presents these gay canonizers
with a negative evaluation. Those attempting to expose readers to the gems of gay
literature (even excerpted and decontextualized) merit applause, he argues, but
“[t]he canon, after all, has been used to exclude and to marginalize undesirable
elements in culture, and these attempts at gay canonization do it again” (“Gay
Canon” 295). Particularly affronted by these editors “for giving the impression
that women’s writing does not matter” (“Gay Canon” 295), Haggerty suggests
that inclusion in an anthology may dissuade readers from pursuing more elusive
texts equally or more worthy of their attention.
This emphasis on text selection within the academy, however, excludes the
impact of common LGBT readers on canonicity. The interactive, collaborative
nature of many websites and blogs such as Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews and
Sistahs on the Shelf, each an online presence facilitating participatory informa-
tion sharing and collaboration, has transformed reading from a solitary, isolated
experience into a vivacious social activity for LGBT readers. In such a public
arena, the exclusion of a novel from a makeshift canon of “The 100 Best Lesbian
and Gay Novels” posted in 1999 by the Publishing Triangle, the Association of
Lesbians and Gay Men in Publishing, carried the contentious discussion about
canonicity into less academic territory. The first list on this website contains
those one hundred novels named by a panel of judges including Dorothy Al-
lison, Samuel Delany, Christopher Bram, and Sarah Schulman without overt
selection criteria. For comparison, visitors to the Publishing Triangle’s website
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 91
submitted their own list of eighty-eight best titles. Only two novels appear on
both: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the
Mermaids Singing.
Although the identities of the visitors who posted their titles is unclear, this
divergence suggests that each set of readers identifies the “best” gay and lesbian
novels through different criteria, whatever those criteria may be. One possible
explanation stems from the acrimonious series of responses to the judges’ list,
particularly because these professional readers overlooked Patricia Nell-Warren’s
The Front Runner (1974) while the visitors ranked this novel first. Gay author
Michael R. Gorman “quickly boiled into anger”: “The Front Runner is not only
one of the most important gay novels ever published, it is a piece of our history
as a movement and as a social force. . . . How can anyone take an organization
seriously that would so ignore this incredible, monumental novel?” Anonymous
voices contributed to both sides of the debate:
Where is Patricia Nell Warren in your list of Top 100? I have to say, this truly
discredits any sense I have that you all know your history at all.
Oh my God! Have you lost your collective minds? First and foremost, you totally
missed the boat by not including The Front Runner (Patricia Warren.) This book
changed my life. It was given to me in high school by an English teacher and
immediately became such a vital part of my reckoning with sexuality.
I’m writing in response to a letter I saw asking people to write to complain that
The Front Runner was not included in the 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels list. I
say good for you. Someone’s finally omitted this title from a “best of” list—and
rightly so. I found it poorly written and tedious to read. So many people im-
mediately, and unthinkingly, place this novel into “must-read” lists for gay and
lesbian people when it definitely does not warrant being there.
One book I’m glad you resisted: The Front Runner (it’s a good read when you’re
19, but luckily we all grow up).
According to these respondents, a laudable gay novel must act as an important
social and historical document, while others seek out quality prose and intrigu-
ing plot. Here, both qualities appear mutually exclusive.
Still, is a professed gay icon such as The Front Runner entitled to a spot on
an LGBT literature syllabus as part of a pedagogical canon? Basing her defini-
tion on Guillory’s concept of the imaginary canon—imaginary because no defined
body of works comprises it (Cultural 30)—Susan VanZanten Gallagher defines
the pedagogical canon simply as “texts that are taught in college and university set-
tings [and] made up of the most frequently taught texts, a list that is empirically
verifiable” (54). As one instructor I interviewed suggested, “There’s a certain
set of texts well-read and recognized and often assigned, if that’s the definition
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92 College English
of a canon, and that takes the pressure off me to do justice to LGBT literature
because the students get only this one course.” This instructor appears to agree
with teacher-scholars such as Beverly Peterson, who observes, “In constructing
a syllabus, teachers and professors may act as if the choices had been made for
them, sanctioned by tradition” (380). A look at the required primary texts on
the forty-five syllabi speaks to this argument about tradition. Of the 130 dif-
ferent titles, I include here the ten most popular and the number of syllabi on
which they appear:
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (22)
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (18)
Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (15)
Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches (14)
Radcliffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (12)
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (10)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (9)
Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (7)
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (6)
Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (6)
While I withheld supplemental readings from this list, most instructors also
included poetry by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Constan-
tine Cavafy, Adrienne Rich, Sappho, and Shakespeare. The popularity of these
titles and authors suggests that instructors often defer to particular names when
plotting out their courses, for a broad survey of only fifteen weeks leaves little
space for experimentation. It is often proposed that a canon of primary works
is necessary for teaching, that is, for helping students enter into a conversation
in their discipline or field, and that a shared corpus is helpful long after the
teaching ends. Implying that academics have both the authority to shape and
the influence to perpetuate such canons, one instructor suggested, “There’s a
body of texts simply understood to be included, the ones that show up in our
research.” Indeed, literary scholars teach and publish on what they know best,
for pedagogical canons often parallel current theoretical and critical trends: The
Academic Search Complete library databases uncover more than fifty schol-
arly articles, books, and dissertations scrutinizing, interpreting, and critiquing
representations of sexuality in Fun Home, Giovanni’s Room, Zami, and Oranges
Are Not the Only Fruit and more than one hundred doing the same to Angels in
America and The Well of Loneliness. Therefore, it seems that scholarly attention
and advances in scholarship contribute an official testament to institutional
prestige and perpetuation.
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 93
Perhaps the operative term here is institutional. As Guillory has recognized,
“An individual’s judgment that a work is great does nothing in itself to preserve
that work, unless that judgment is made in a certain institutional context, a set-
ting in which it is possible to insure the reproduction of the work, its continual
reintroduction to generations of readers” (“Canon” 273). A shared corpus and a
shared set of works carry great merit, but the canon takes the onus of evaluating
the importance of a piece of literature from the academic, who cedes control to
an unseen, collective, disciplinary force. If the number of academic publications
equates with academic prestige, The Front Runner failed to gain traction, for the
Academic Search Complete databases uncover only one scholarly piece on the
novel, Trudy Steuernagel’s “Contemporary Homosexual Fiction and the Gay
Rights Movement,” appearing in the Journal of Popular Culture in 1986. Addi-
tionally, because The Front Runner appears on only three of the syllabi, it seems
that instructors agree with the Publishing Triangle’s panel of judges and its
supporters that the novel has fallen from grace. Of those who teach that novel,
one responded to my request for an interview:
It’s one novel representative of the 1970s in my contemporary LGBT novel class
but the students think it’s too, well, maudlin, because they usually want some-
thing more gritty from the sexual revolution that was the ‘70s, so I also teach
excerpts from [Kramer’s] Faggots to talk about the urban gay sexual revolution
after Stonewall. I’ve also taught [Maupin’s] Tales of the City, which isn’t gritty
but they like his style more than The Front Runner’s. [Holleran’s] Dancer from the
Dance or [White’s] Forgetting Elena and maybe [Rechy’s] Rushes could be good if
I feel like changing again. Those are fun reads, camp that’s almost over the top.
These selections interest me because scholars have paid little attention to these
titles, with fewer than ten academic publications for each. For this instructor,
regardless of lack of scholarly appeal, novels earn a place on a syllabus as repre-
sentative of an ideological principle—gay American cultural identity—framed
by the history of events and ideas taking place, in this case, during the decade
following the 1969 Stonewall Riots, commonly understood as the start of the
gay civil rights movement. Through this approach, social and political concerns
plus entertainment value eclipse textual authority, thus privileging reading and
pedagogy over the scholarly reputation of the artifact itself.
The question follows about instructors justifying these selections to those
held accountable for reading them. From a pedagogical perspective, many I
interviewed do discuss text selection, for classes often fall short of communities
of like-minded readers who have found one another and the books they enjoy
discussing, as might occur in a book club. Thus these conversations become
teaching moments:
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94 College English
We have discussed the topic of the texts belonging to the “gay canon” in class, and
we established that most of the books [on the syllabus] belong there. However,
each semester we read and enjoy Blackbird, by Larry Duplechan, knowing that
while most of the students love the book, it would not be canon worthy. But it is
class worthy because it represents the time period better than any other book I
have found, many of the students make a personal connection with the narrator,
and it’s a fun read.
Here, a bildungsroman about growing up black, gay, and Baptist in southern
California in the 1970s both meets course objectives and offers a captivating
read while falling outside of canonical boundaries represented by Radcliffe Hall,
James Baldwin, and Jeanette Winterson on this same syllabus, texts recogniz-
able to the students as serious and scholarly, thus “canon worthy.” Such is the
argument posed by David Fishelov, for “the source of a literary work’s perceived
greatness lies in the dialogues it generates with readers, authors, translators,
adaptors, artists and critics” (ix).
The emphasis on entertainment value alongside ideological value speaks
to the most important criteria for text selection among my interviewees, who
often maintain that texts in courses marked as identity-specific must resonate for
the self-selected groups of students who enroll. Reinforcing Charles Schuster’s
proposal that the purpose of literacy lies in “the way in which we make ourselves
meaningful not only to others but through ourselves to others” (40), these in-
structors use the readings to generate pleasure and convey a sense of cultural
solidarity. For example, expanding beyond the classroom, one instructor defines
her “Gay and Lesbian Literature and History” course as
a way for all students to become culturally literate, form social connections, un-
derstand the everyday world, and especially keep reading, so my brief response
is that I want a variety of texts that provide thought-provoking discussions,
multiple viewpoints, and debate and even some controversy. Canonical works
or not, it doesn’t matter.
In other words, the book and the conversation intersect to allow these students
to investigate their interests, differences, and political allegiances via progres-
sion through narrative terrain. In this context, what constitutes a quality reading
experience is no longer confined to the reading of canonical literature.
Th e LGBT Ca n o n a s I n T e r d I s C I P L I n a r y and r e C o v e r a B L e
Instructors uneasy about fostering a deferential relationship to a specific list of
LGBT titles face a series of pedagogical challenges. As fields of study intersect and
questions of identity politics intensify, they seek out and experiment with means
of helping students understand the blurring of disciplinary and area boundaries,
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 95
and to appreciate the complexity of an interdisciplinary, sometimes intertextual
project. In fact, of the forty-five course syllabi I reviewed, thirty are cross-listed
with women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies, LGBT studies, and similar
interdisciplinary programs facilitating research and course development about
gender-related issues. Thus these programs house frameworks of student learning
objectives—objectives contributing to the shaping of courses within particular
disciplines—that emphasize identifying and analyzing the intersections among
categories of difference including gender, sexuality, identity, and power within
broader historical and geopolitical contexts. For these instructors, the literary
often becomes interdisciplinary as they consider LGBT texts within and against
various traditions, an approach recognizing the complexity of an LGBT writer’s
positioning within a wide range of cultures and subcultures.
In order to represent gay cultures as energetic, spirited, and malleable, the
classroom acts as a site for joining various literary traditions with their cultural,
social, and political contexts. This pedagogy broadens the notion of a “literary
tradition” in terms of a text’s formal and aesthetic relationship with preceding
and succeeding traditions and with distinctive vehicles of creative expression
including AIDS memorials, gay pride parades, the visual arts, theater perfor-
mances, music videos, television and film, and other representational modes.
These perspectives require establishing how sexuality dialogues among genres
and texts and determining whether those modes reinforce, revise, or challenge
those interpretations. For example, one instructor focuses on what he identifies
as canonical LGBT short stories and novels and their cinematic adaptations,
from smaller productions such as Ivory’s adaptation of Forster’s Maurice and
Deitch’s adaption of Rule’s Desert of the Heart to more mainstream productions
including Spielberg’s adaptation of Walker’s The Color Purple, Hitchcock’s ad-
aptation of Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, and Lee’s adaptation of Proulx’s
“Brokeback Mountain.” For this instructor, “We have to take into account how
our media-saturated students gain exposure to certain canons, and in this class
we look at how literary production, publication, and reception of depictions
of sexual orientation change when they submit to the power and influence of
Hollywood.” In this course, engaging with the process and understanding the
motivations for an adaptation facilitates an understanding of how the film industry
alters literary character, plot, and themes in order to address sexual orientation
and simultaneously appeal to a mass audience.
Together, much of this work fosters intellectual ventures crossing boundar-
ies of popular and high culture, thus portraying how texts argue rhetorically by
confirming or disconfirming an ideology associated with the LGBT community.
For example, the instructor of LGBT Representation in Contemporary America
advocates for “a deep understanding of how many texts working together can
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96 College English
persuade by empowering and disempowering gays and lesbians by conveying
different messages.” Emphasizing the rhetorical power of the “transgressive
movement” of the 1970s to reinforce and perpetuate formulaic depictions of
“gay men as flamboyant, promiscuous, cross-dressing or leather-clad pederasts
and lesbians as motorcycle-riding, flannel-wearing misanthropes,” this instructor
finds meaning at the confluence of different mediated genres. With Gore Vidal’s
Myra Breckinridge and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle at the center—“novels
that I think are central for so many of us, so canonical, to an understanding of
gay and lesbian identity at that particular time”—this unit challenges the students
to imagine the process and progress of a developing gay American culture im-
mediately following the Stonewall Riots through the visual arts: John Waters’s
film Female Trouble; covers of gay and lesbian pulp novels; Robert Mapplethorpe’s
photography; the artwork of second-wave feminists Kate Millet, Judy Chicago,
and Miriam Schapiro; and glam rock performances, particularly David Bowie’s
androgynous persona of Ziggy Stardust. In this eight-week unit, this instruc-
tor looks for ways that history and culture can inform a reading, can establish
a relation between present and past, and share how sexuality functions across
time and geography.
As a way to empower students to devise their own path through these texts
and traditions without the rote guidance of a prompt simply requiring close read-
ing, many instructors have turned to a more arduous task of assigning projects
requiring the use of both digital and physical archives. During early discussions
of the impact of electronic media on English studies, Randy Bass contemplated
how the “Story of English”—the chronological unfolding from Beowulf to the
present—might change with the more open access to texts once relegated to the
bastion of the scholarly archive (660). This “Story,” he argues, has spun a series
of interrelated stories, “that thing we call the canon, the idea of a privileged
text, the unitary literary history and anthology, and the rationalized syllabus”
(660). Now, more democratic access to digital archives and the corresponding
“leveling between story and archive” (660) have changed who tells the Story,
how the Story is told, and the nature of the Story itself. Citing Robert Scholes,
who prescribes for the discipline a shift from a “canon of texts” to a “canon of
methods” (667), Bass anticipated great strides in constructivist pedagogy in a
“restructured discipline, where students regularly perform the design, selection,
and construction of their textual/cultural readings” (668).
Bass’s energy seems to reverberate through the LGBT literature classroom,
for instructors have enthusiastically integrated archival work into their courses
in order to foreground the process of text selection and to connect to recent
critical developments in literary studies. To increase undergraduate research
in the humanities, Ann Schmiesing and Deborah Hollis suggest that educators
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 97
treat archives as “a research laboratory in which students polish their archival
research skills and learn techniques for writing for diverse scholarly and public
audiences” (465). The characterization of the archives as laboratory or workshop
creates an experimental space making possible firsthand experience in analyzing,
asking questions of, inquiring about, and telling stories with primary source
documents. For one instructor:
I don’t require it, but I showcase Fone’s anthology in my graduate seminar be-
cause of what he wrote in the introduction. He said that “this book is a modern
recovery, re-possession, and re-reading of the past.” I thought that that idea was
interesting, so I started asking my students to do their own recovery work and
make it relevant to, appraise it for future readers and students interested in how
sexual orientation functioned in different times, places, and contexts, and specify
what it means to classify a text as “LGBT.”
From the 200-level survey to the graduate course, the driving question of these
assignments centers on how or whether a particular text fits into, subverts, or
augments what the students have come to know as the canon of LGBT litera-
ture. As Randy Laist proposes, “To teach a survey course in any discipline is,
almost by definition, to construct and propagate the kind of grand narrative of
history that has been discredited by postmodernism, deconstruction, multicul-
turalism, and in fact, by most contemporary theory” (50). In other words, the
survey course participates in the construction and even buttressing of a canon,
but the canonicity of the survey course need not reflect a hegemonic classroom.
Rather, Laist claims, “it is the pedagogical approach to texts that will determine
the degree to which they will be characterized as transcendent and inviolable
or contingent and provisional” (51). This pedagogical approach, practiced by
teacher-scholars such as Dawn Vernooy-Epp and co-authors Joseph Morgan
and Todd Thompson, often manifests as archival research. For example, in her
course on Romanticism, Vernooy-Epp writes that a recovery assignment stem-
ming from unearthing the writers listed in Mary Darby Robinson’s Letter to the
Women of England “inspires students . . . to begin addressing the dilemma of the
contemporary debates surrounding the definition of a canonical text, the purpose
of canonical texts in literary studies, the process by which those texts are deemed
canonical, and the vehicle by which those texts are provided to students” (28).
To this end, students and their instructors debate about whether, why, and how
particular texts should be recovered, contextualized, and taught.
In light of the often suspicious nature of canon formation as a conservative
endeavor put forth by anthology editors (among others), historical anthologies
such as Fone’s and Faderman’s do have their benefits. Although none of the
syllabi for this project required an anthology, these collections served as excep-
tional reference tools, as reported by one instructor speaking for many: “While
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98 College English
an anthology cannot give a full/adequate picture, it does help demonstrate that
this literature is not limited to a few writers or to one time period or genre.” In
fact, these gaps can become the theme of a course. As Linda Garber discovered in
her own search for texts to include in a course on Asian gay and lesbian cultures,
while most literary collections and scholarly monographs on gay Asia included
primarily male writers and perspectives, “[t]he very problems presented by the
sources become a theme of my course, as queer historiography shares equal
billing with queer history” (44).
This is often where recovery work comes into play: rifling through archives
in order to fill these spaces. Twelve instructors who assign recovery projects re-
quire visits to physical LGBT archives, advantageously on or near their campuses:
•theLGBTCommunityCenterNationalHistoryArchiveinNewYork
•theQuatrefoilLibraryinMinneapolis
•theHormelCenterattheSanFranciscoPublicLibrary
•theGerber/HartLibraryinChicago
•theONEArchivesattheUniversityofSouthernCalifornia
•theLatinoGLBTHistoryProjectinWashington,DC
•theGayandLesbianArchiveofMid-AmericaattheUniversityofMissouri-Kansas
City
•theJuneL.MazerLesbianArchivesinOakland,California
•theTucsonLGBTQMuseum
According to one instructor of a course on Queer New York,
My contacts at the LGBT archives around the city hold full-class orientations on
site, so I’ve gotten fascinating projects on feminist bookstores, gay and lesbian bars
and sports teams, bath houses, drag balls, the Violet Quill, AIDS, just amazing
work that helps us work with books like [Larson’s] Passing and the Beat poets and
John Rechy and Rudnick’s Jeffrey and, let’s see, Sarah Schulman, and other books.
Those without access to physical archives turn to their subscription library
databases and free online databases, which enhance the learning experience by
enabling both students and scholars to engage with the materials traditionally
available only to those with the proper credentials and the ability to travel. One
instructor, a modernist by specialization who focuses strictly on early twentieth-
century writing in an upper-level LGBT literature course, sees “important con-
nections between recovery and LGBT studies because I can teach important
novels like Maurice, The Well of Loneliness, and Nightwood in a broader context
that the students uncover for themselves.” Because this instructor’s university
lacks an archive suitable for this project, her students meet with a librarian who
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 99
models the process of generating questions from a fictional narrative such as
Katherine Mansfield’s story “Bliss” and conducting relevant searches for primary
sources in databases such as ARTstor and the Gerritsen Collection: Women’s His-
tory Online, 1543–1945. By showcasing Broadview Press, Norton Critical, and
Bedford Cultural editions, which contain appendices of contextual readings, this
instructor found that the activity unveils the intertextuality of literary production:
They’ve collected literary and nonliterary resources, Freud of course, and also
names less familiar to them like Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds,
Charles Warren Stoddard, Natalie Clifford Barney, artwork by Una Vincenzo,
Romaine Brooks, and Tamara Lempicka, music by Aaron Copland and Cole
Porter, speeches by Emma Goldman (not a lesbian but an outspoken ally), Hart
Crane’s letters, homoerotic pictures from photography’s early days, and they
report to the class on that text’s usefulness as an object of literary and historical
study and how it influenced or was influenced by the canonical novels, plays, and
poems we’re reading.
These projects reveal what students often discover to be a broad range of themes
and aesthetic techniques that characterize their work. This intertextual bent
complements the broadening concept of textuality, extending beyond the printed
word to include art, music, film, and other forms alongside the literary. Judith
Still and Michael Worton’s assertion that “the theory of intertextuality insists
that a text . . . cannot exist as a hermetic or self-sufficient whole, and so does
not function as a closed system” (1) supports the idea that LGBT texts, like all
texts, exist within a complex network of literary, social, political, economic, and
cultural systems. Thus context itself has become more dynamic, for the literary
text engages with social forces complicating understandings of identity, thus
opening the canonical to further interpretation.
ho w My ow n In d e P e n d e n T s T u d y T urned o u T
Returning to my own dilemma about text selection—about what my students
should read and what they should do with these texts—I complemented Vidal,
Baldwin, and Maupin by seeking out reviews from both academic and common
readers and compiling a finalized list:
Nathan Aldyne, Vermilion (1980)
David Feinberg, Eighty-Sixed (1989)
Scott Heim, In Awe (1997)
Christopher Bram, Gossip (1997)
Alex Sanchez, Rainbow Boys (2001)
Dennis Cooper, The Sluts (2004)
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100 College English
Garth Greenwell, Mitko (2011)
Charles Rice-González, Chulito (2011)
Wayne Hoffman, Sweet like Sugar (2011)
Because I had never conducted a course with only four students, and because
my department classifies independent studies as unpaid and unevaluated course
overloads approved by the chair and curriculum committee, I decided that we
would avoid the institutionalized educational setting and sit in a local coffee shop
for two hours simply to discuss each novel. Like the instructors I interviewed, I
confirmed through my own subsequent readings that each novel would inspire
conversation and means of pursuing larger inquiries, thus I selected works as
means of illuminating important historical and contemporary matters: Cooper’s
transgressive sexual acts and fantasies via chat room discussions in an age of
ubiquitous electronic mediation, Bram’s defamatory look at gay involvement
in the Republican party in the context of a society obsessed with media and
political scandals, and Feinberg’s testament to AIDS culture in the 1980s. Thus
the course became not an immersion into a literary work that may or may not
raise interesting points for discussion, but an artifact communicating lessons on
values and issues illustrated by literary examples.
As I considered pedagogical approaches to these texts, I thought about how
the students might identify with or feel alienated from the gay characters. In
other words, I sought to educate them into new ways of thinking about homo-
and heteronormativity, about disrupting dichotomies, about the complexity and
diversity within the LGBT population, and, like Britzman, about problematizing
“normalcy.” In 1995, John Alberti announced his concern that the increasing
presence of women and racial minorities on course syllabi, accompanied by New
Critical strategies of close reading, drew attention from critical perspectives
emphasizing the way social, ethnic, and gender positions construct aesthetic and
cultural value. Such an approach, Alberti continues, may lead students to conclude
that a particular text by a woman or minority is representative in some way,
thus leading to reductionism and tokenism (xv). Following Alberti, most of the
instructors I interviewed acknowledged such a teaching approach. For example,
When I thought about the LGBTQ young adult novels that I might include, I
noticed how few of them were written by queer folks themselves. This led me to
really consider what kinds of theoretical and political questions arise when looking
at books by queer people, not just about queer people. My course description is
my answer to that, providing a methodological frame for the course, an answer
to what we are doing with these books written by queer people aside from the
“let’s be more accepting” lesson.
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LGBT Literature Courses and Questions of Canonicity 101
Interrogating the role of assimilationist novels does pose intriguing ques-
tions about an LGBT literary canon, as either contributors to its stability or
evidence of its instability. For when turning to the LGBT course syllabi, the
occasional title by a heterosexual author does appear, such as Allison Burnett’s
Christopher (2003), André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (2007), and young
adult novels by Ellen Wittlinger. In rather vituperative language, one instructor
adamantly refuses to adopt such a practice: “What I absolutely WILL NOT
DO is teach the work of heterosexual writers as if it were queer, even if they do
include queer characters and are nice guys. . . . If the writer didn’t have the cour-
age of his/her convictions, I don’t need to include him/her in my list.” Others,
however, take advantage of such teaching moments. One teacher of Call Me By
Your Name opens the discussion with the class as a whole:
When [Call Me By Your Name] received a thousand accolades and then won the
Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction in 2008, the gay blogosphere blew
up because Aciman is straight. After we discussed the book in class, I revealed this
to my students to see if it changed their perspective because they loved it, too. We
had an interesting talk about authenticity and credibility because of course gay
authors write straight characters as well. We have to think of the right questions
to ask when we analyze these texts.
Among my gay two-year college students reading these novels for the first
time, both the challenge of asking the right questions and exposing them to
a wide array of gay characters demonstrated that I have much to learn myself
about approaches to teaching these texts. Many of the novels seemed well out-
side of their purview as they queried the near psychopathic violence in Cooper
and Heim and contemplated the roles of gender, power, and access in Aldyne’s
gay rewriting of the hard-boiled detective novel. They also made compelling
personal connections. Hoffman’s portrayal of religious interventions into one’s
sexual orientation, for example, reminded them of high school clashes with
members of conservative Christian student organizations. Feinberg and Sanchez
emphasized that HIV/AIDS continues to threaten gay men, which inspired me
to introduce them to a local AIDS case worker. Because one student had emi-
grated from Mexico and another from an African-American neighborhood in
Chicago, Greenwell and Rice-González exposed them to intersections among
race, masculinity, and sexual orientation. Our Skype session with Christopher
Bram, orchestrated through the Lambda Literary Foundation Writers in Schools
program, provided insight into the writing process and proved that authors exist
as more than words on a page. Overall, they wanted to pass most of these novels
to other gay readers and seek out other titles, which was my own primary goal.
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102 College English
Surveying the course objectives, teaching approaches, and course lists reveals
how much work LGBT literary studies warrants. Expanding this survey outside
the United States may provide teaching scholars with crucial perspectives on
determining which creative and even theoretical writings comprise the elusive
LGBT canon, and close scrutiny of the publishing industry will inspire ques-
tions about its role in the production of an LGBT literary canon, particularly
when small, independent presses such as Valancourt are restoring forgotten gay
classics for new generations of readers. For me, then, asking about the existence
of a canon of LGBT literature is a way of asking whether there are works that
every scholar in that (sub)field should know. Establishing such a list could ensure
that the field carries some integrity, on one hand, and that the field might be
more than the sum of its parts on the other: rather than fulfilling a conservative
function, as canons often do, identifying a set of principal works or methods
can encourage a more progressive interdisciplinary paradigm of LGBT liter-
ary research. My ideal canon would offer a range of positions on which LGBT
literary scholars might draw. At the same time, such a canon can function as a
form of collective memory, serving to remind both developing and established
scholars of the work that laid the foundation for the current state of the field.
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