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From the mid to late 1980s through the early to mid 1990s, a confluence of factors elevated gay fiction into prominence: an “out” population demanding political recognition, a readership dependent upon books for honest depictions of their lives, a national network of gay bookstores, and a publishing industry courting this emerging market. This was a time when gay writers understood their mission in the grandest terms: to hold up a mirror, but at a slant, so that the angle of reflection would capture not just the newly visible self but the surrounding world as well. Gay fiction would tell stories that had not yet been told, and tell them well. Gay fiction would make gay lives the stuff of literature.

In 1991, Edmund White, one of the genre’s pioneers, began an article in the New York Times Magazine noting that “the revolution of the gay male novel has seemed breathlessly rapid.” He recounted an event at the 1991 Out/Write conference in San Francisco, when playwright Edward Albee was booed by a predominantly gay and lesbian audience for asserting that he would not be saddled with the label “gay writer.” I was at that jam-packed assembly and remember well the frustration felt by the crowd. Here we were, young, proud, and galvanized, and one of the old guard was wagging his finger at us for the very thing that bound us together. It was one of those volatile public moments that felt instantly important, history in the making.

A couple years ago, I attended the Lambda Literary Conference, the descendant of Out/Write, again held in San Francisco. The three-day event was cordial, intimate, networky, and devoid of even the slightest whiff of controversy, more a class reunion than a public brawl. Indeed, when it comes to gay literature, what is there to fight about? Ten years after White’s essay appeared, you’d be hard-pressed to find the Times Magazine exploring the gay male novel as a cultural topic, much less one in a state of breathless revolution.

Before the 1970s, there was no “gay fiction,” no section of the literary landscape staked out by writers, pitched to publishers, and sold to readers under this name. Literary novels with gay characters and themes—The Well of Loneliness, The City and the Pillar, The Sexual Outlaw—existed singly, like small island states blotching a vast, indifferent sea of books. Such works were labeled by their publishers as “controversial” or “shocking,” which was a way to titillate readers who were not gay or lesbian, rather than connect to those who were.

That the concept of “gay fiction” was new, even revolutionary, was not something I understood, coming out at college in the mid-1980s, when novels illuminating this life I had claimed were already available to me. These novels captured the perspectives of self-identified gay men, revealed the history of their long-silent subculture, depicted the sex that they were having (the kind of sex I was starting to have). This knowledge was not available through movies, TV, or high school health class, only through the intimacy of the printed page.

These were the worst of times for gay men, when the Reagan administration set policy to please its fundamentalist Christian cronies; when a squeamish Supreme Court decided the Constitution didn’t protect consensual sex if the mouth or ass was involved; when HIV was decimating us. But it was also the best of times. Two decades earlier gay men found each other only in bars and at cruising spots, went to psychiatrists to turn straight, and kept their mouths shut in public. That there was now an aboveground gay community, with its own social organizations, businesses, and newspapers—that gay bars might now have windows that let in light—was a kind of miracle. Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet, said of coming out, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.” During those best and worst of times, literature was my bridge between misery and freedom.

I can chart my coming of age according to the novels I read at that time: the desire stirred up by Patricia Nell Warren’s steamy romance, The Front Runner, when such longing was still taboo to me; the identification I felt with the high school protagonist of John Fox’s Boys on the Rock, who spends the first part of the book trying to convince everyone, even the reader, that he’s fucking Sue when it’s Al he’s hot for, but ultimately gains the self-assurance to send the half-closeted Al packing; the struggle of a mother to come to terms with her son’s gay-ness in Laura Z. Hobson’s Consenting Adult, a copy of which I gave to my own mother and which brought out her empathy more than the self-help title (Now That You Know) I’d earlier foisted on her. When I moved to New York after college, I found my footing in downtown gay life by reading John Weir’s The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy, and Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble. Alan Hollinghurst’s Swimming Pool Library was very British but spoke to me with its unbridled sex and its journey into pre-Stonewall gay history; Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion was very British and lesbian but still served as a tool of seduction between me and the boy I fell for.

Books were necessary, and writers—as that outcry over Albee reinforces—were looked up to. Writers, in fact, were all we had. Aside from a couple of politicians, writers were the only openly gay public figures. Even the celebrity icons we take for granted today—Martina Navratilova, Elton John—were in the closet back then.

The situation was so ripe that by 1994, in his introduction to Waves: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction, editor Ethan Mordden was able to argue that two “waves” of gay fiction had already come and gone. The first was centered on the Violet Quill, a small circle of cultured New Yorkers including Edmund White (A Boy’s Own Story), Andrew Holleran (Dancer from the Dance), and Felice Picano (The Lure), who met regularly for a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and whose cumulative writings helped put gay fiction on the map. This was the Stonewall generation; indeed, Edmund White was at the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar, the night the patrons rebelled against a police raid. The Violet Quill has come to symbolize for gay literature what Stonewall has for gay politics: the crucible that enabled what followed.

The second wave Mordden identified was made up of the disparate authors who emerged in the mid-1980s, like David Leavitt (Family Dancing), Dennis Cooper (Closer), and Stephen McCauley (The Object of My Affection), who built upon the Violet Quill’s publishing successes but branched out beyond their urban concerns and urbane aesthetics. A third wave, Mordden wrote, was emerging from a generation—my generation—that was “political, archetypal, experimental.” This was exciting news for me, already at work on a novel of my own, ready to catch that wave and ride it hard.

Alas, it crashed offshore. Of the authors included in Mordden’s anthology, only Michael Cunningham—who won the 1999 Pulitzer for The Hours—has gone on to indisputable literary success. John Weir hasn’t written a second novel; Scott Heim last published one in 1997; Jim Provenzano’s two novels have been self-published at much personal expense and effort. And then there’s Brad Gooch, who abandoned serious fiction (The Golden Age of Promiscuity) and scholarship (City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara) for self-help, penning The Boyfriend Within and Dating the Greek Gods, brisk-selling dating manuals that seem to promise a lover as handsome as the author, whose face beams from each cover.

“Gay fiction doesn’t sell.” This was the argument heard again and again by my agent, shopping my novel around to publishers in 1999. Too many big advances had not been earned back by gay books in the previous decade. My own bookshelves bear this story out, lined as they are with slashed-price copies of mid- 1990s works by queer fiction pioneers like Holleran and White. Gay fiction, hyped as the next big thing, was being remaindered. Today, no major New York publisher is cultivating a list of gay male authors; of the midsize houses, only Alyson and Kensington (the eventual buyer of my novel) are doing so. Compare that to the late 1980s, when one imprint alone, NAL/Dutton’s Plume, boasted thirty queer fiction titles.

What happened in the 1990s to gay fiction is, in part, what happened to all fiction. Sales dropped, corporate mergers reorganized publishers around the bottom line, and the one-two punch of online booksellers and chain store expansion toppled bricks-and-mortar independent retailers. (Gay bookstores went dark in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and many other cities.) Recent studies tell us that those under thirty-five are half as likely as those thirty-five and older to read a single novel or book of poetry in a year. Young gays and lesbians seeking a sense of connectedness are thus less likely to look for it in a book than on a screen of one size or another, where they will surely find something. The television industry realized several years ago that homosexuals could be packaged for primetime, usually in soaps (Melrose Place) or sitcoms (Ellen); today, cable TV is full of same-sex kissing, and most reality shows designate a token queer slot. If such glossy, market-driven portrayals don’t satisfy, you can communicate directly with someone just like yourself through an online community—one without a center but easily accessed, disembodied but talking amongst itself all the time. What was once available only from a trip to the nearest big city (often not so near) now comes and finds you behind your own closed door.

All these changes in media and technology took place in tandem with one more: the introduction of protease inhibitors, the AIDS drugs that gave people with HIV a future. This scientific breakthrough has had a very specific, but rarely discussed, effect on gay literature. For fifteen years, gay men, including too many writers and editors, died in droves. The mortal truths ushered in by this plague became the stuff of our literature. Thus the gay male novel became the AIDS novel, its “revolution” mired in night sweats, bedpans, and eulogies.

Then AIDS was corralled, but novels concerned with its effects, already in the production pipeline, continued to appear. Gay readers began to walk away from our grim fictional tales and have not yet looked back. (Having been given new life, they obsess about lifestyle, evidenced by a glut of books on décor, dating, and physique.) Allan Gurganus’s Plays Well with Others—to my thinking, the most elegant depiction in prose of how the plague transformed a generation—should have been regarded as one of the masterpieces of gay literature, of all contemporary literature, when it appeared in 1997. Dismissed as an “AIDS novel” after AIDS stopped showing up on the nightly news, it became one of those big books on the remainder table. The publishing industry determined that our fiction wasn’t selling, and gay writers were left scrambling for subject matter.

Gay fiction today is an art form dismantled, a pie chart of subgenres: romance, horror, mystery, humor. There’s a preponderance of “lit-lite,” the stuff with gossip in its veins, promising readers a backstage look at Hollywood, the fashion industry, the social circles of moneyed Manhattan. Gay bookstores overflow with specialized anthologies; a recent edition of the monthly Lambda Book Report, a must-read for gay authors, lists calls for entries for works on “true stories from leatherbars,” “how bi-men come out,” “black lesbian stories of longing, lust and love,” “queer writers discussing their attachment to a different race, religion, nationality, etc.,” “working class themes” and “gay travels in Islam.” These books put specialized content first, almost ensuring that the quality of the writing will be a second priority. Taken together, anthologies like these paint a picture of a community so splintered it can barely relate to itself, much less comment on the outside world.

Similarly, more and more queer bookstore shelves are filled with “erotica,” a relatively new designation straddling the line between fiction and nonfiction. (Is anyone really fact-checking how “true” those “stories from leatherbars” really are?) Erotica supposedly serves as a testament that pornography has gotten intelligent, even artful, though my own readings in the genre have turned up many stories so focused on the money shot they engage the imagination no more deeply than porn (and many too silly to even get the blood pumping). Though a frank depiction of sex has always been one of the pioneering aspects of gay fiction, gay fiction has never been just about sex. Erotica seems to me like most of the new gay subgenres, a retreat. Gay lit without the lit.

Erotica is sex as entertainment; on the other side of the coin is gay writing that provides entertainment with no sex. Here we find today’s most successful openly gay author, David Sedaris, whose memoirs recount a faggy childhood and a domestic, boyfriend-centered adult life, all the while steering clear of sex. In a recent interview he noted, “On the lecture tours, you say the word ‘I’ when you read out loud, and people would imagine me having sex. It is not pleasant for people to imagine me having sex.” Only a writer who sees himself first and foremost as a performer would decide what goes into his books based on how it will present from a podium. Indeed, Sedaris began on the radio; his work on the page almost demands that you have already heard him speak. Sedaris is hilarious, but he is an entertainer, not a model for the resuscitation of gay writing.

Michael Cunningham might be. Possibly the most respected author to emerge from gay fiction’s heyday, Cunningham has consistently remained true to his original vision. He’s done this in part by working slowly but steadily, producing three novels in ten years—A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and The Hours. His “queer eye” takes in everyone: gay, straight, and in between; male, female, and transgender. (A lack of female characters is one of the shortcomings of gay male fiction; you can’t hold a mirror to the world and reflect only men.) In Cunningham’s fiction, intimate events in the lives of gay characters reveal society’s larger story. His novels span decades, but every moment, every sentence, every image is rendered with God-in-the-details precision.

The best gay fiction of the last few years—Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys; Allan Gurganus’s The Practical Heart; Trebor Healey’s Through It Came Bright Colors—shares this careful crafting. These authors neither shy away from sex nor assert it at the expense of characterization, language, or story. Each of these works points toward how the various strands of contemporary gay literature, subdivided and specialized across bookstore shelves, might be reassembled into works that are meaningful and integral, held together not just by (sub)cultural content but by artistic form—by the union of the two, the writer’s voice, the foundation of any fiction worth talking about.

If worthy novels by gay male writers are still being published, does it matter that the category has lost its prominence? One can argue that such a situation is preferable, a sign of political assimilation. Perhaps we have come full circle to Edward Albee, whose desire to be seen as simply a writer, without the delineating modifier gay, no longer seems heretical but status quo. One thinks of the oft-used construction “so-and-so happens to be gay,” which treats homosexuality as a trait no more significant than left-handedness. But, of course, left-handers are no longer shamed into altering their natural dexterity; homosexuals still start out their lives presumed by everyone around them not to be homosexual. A minority culture, misunderstood and seen as alien (to say nothing of the rights denied it), needs its own literature. Gay fiction may have lost some of its necessary social function, but what has stepped in to replace it is grossly inadequate. On Will and Grace, sexuality is a joke, funny ha-ha when mentioned on-screen and funny-strange in its implication. The best-written gay characters on TV, David and Keith on Six Feet Under, occupy the opposite end of the spectrum: a world without any other gay men except those with whom they have passing sex.

I take some comfort in an emerging new “wave” of gay fiction. It includes those of us who could have been third-wavers ten years ago but took too long, and those emerging since, largely at smaller presses and university imprints (Southern Tier, Graywolf, Soft Skull, Suspect Thoughts, Green Candy, University of Wisconsin, Cleis). These are the new publishing heroes of gay—or, more accurately, more inclusively—queer fiction. They have taken up the slack left by the big New York houses, whose relevance has diminished as strategies of corporate “synergy” diminish the possibility of real risk taking. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these smaller presses rarely have the distribution or deep pockets that enable writers to make a viable living, a problem not just for individual authors but for literary culture.

However these commercial forces shake out, the challenge remains for gay writers to recommit to this identity while telling the largest story possible. Not “large” in terms of sweeping casts of characters and swaths of history, though such expansiveness is ours to claim, but in terms of the ideas only we can offer, the perspective only our mirrors will afford. Gay fiction will matter again when our writers see themselves as not only necessary to the articulation of the queer experience, but also necessary to the future of literature.