Matt Cain: My gay stories used to get rejected, now it’s a golden age of queer fiction – iNews
This Pride Month, I’m celebrating. As a kid, I never thought I’d be a published author. I never thought I’d be writing novels featuring gay themes. I certainly never thought I’d be hearing from straight readers eager to tell me how much my books have moved or inspired them.
That’s because, when I was growing up – in Bolton in the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis – I barely encountered any gay-themed fiction at all. Yes, there was the odd literary novel, but there was nothing aimed at a mainstream readership or the working-class people I knew. Nor was there much positive representation in other art forms.
Instead, I found my escape in pop icon Madonna, her message of self-empowerment, and her passionate defence of her gay friends. I sidelined my love of reading, and not knowing anybody who made a living from writing, didn’t allow my dream of becoming a novelist to take hold.
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But towards the end of the 1990s, things began to change. As the AIDS crisis receded, tabloid headlines portraying gay men as dangerous sexual predators disappeared. A growing visibility for gay men in real life was proving the point made by Harvey Milk when he implored every gay person to come out: “Once they realize that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all.”
Cinema, TV and theatre were discovering that our lives often make good material for drama as they tend to involve more emotional intensity than the average straight life, not to mention events such as familial rejection, and in the past, professional dismissal, criminal conviction, and even torture. The success of 1999’s Queer as Folk, plus gay characters in soap operas and contestants on talent shows, and later, films such as Brokeback Mountain in 2005, were demonstrating that straight people were ready to empathise; they wanted to hear our stories.
While this was happening in the 00s, through my work as a TV producer and journalist – for outlets such as The South Bank Show, Channel 4 News and Attitude magazine – I started to meet artists working across the creative industries. I started to see that my dream of being a writer might just be achievable. I started to understand how I could achieve it.
I also discovered that publishing hadn’t progressed as much as other art forms. My first efforts to write novels featuring gay characters all met with rejection. In a series of letters and then emails, I was told “this feels a little niche”, “I’m not sure this story has a strong enough hook to really appeal to a mass market readership”, and “this type of book really needs to fall into the literary fiction arena, think Edmund White or Alan Hollighurst [sic]”. The implication was that gay themes may be palatable to the educated but not the “lower” classes.
I was devastated and went back to feeling like a misunderstood, rejected young boy. But I was also outraged. So I took my first novel – The Madonna of Bolton, a loosely autobiographical story about a working-class boy growing up in the 1980s who clings onto Madonna to help him survive growing up gay – and decided to crowdfund it through the publisher Unbound. In 2017, with the support of the media and several celebrities, it became Unbound’s fastest crowdfunded novel ever.
Now, I think we are in a golden age of gay fiction. This isn’t limited to literary fiction – I’m thinking of what the publishing industry calls “commercial” novels; accessible books that are aimed at a mainstream readership. These include books by Justin Myers, Steven Rowley, and Graham Norton, plus lesbian author Laura Kay and bisexual writer Lily Lindon.
My latest book is The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle. Again, it’s set in the working-class north and is about a lonely and secretly gay postman who sets off in search of the love of his life, a man he hasn’t seen for 50 years. By contrasting what happened to him in the early 1970s with the welcome he receives from his community today, I want to celebrate the progress we’ve made as a society.
I often wonder why so many straight readers connect with gay-themed books. I think it isn’t just because they’re ready to empathise with queer characters but also because these books tend to involve an element of self-discovery or self-realisation, a theme that has universal – and arguably, increasing – appeal. And they tend to be about characters negotiating the conventions of the time – and bucking them. Stories like these can be freeing for all kinds of people who feel limited by society, giving them permission or even inspiration to leap outside restrictive expectations.
So it isn’t just a golden age for gay fiction – it’s also one for all kinds of readers. And I think that’s something we should all celebrate. @MattCainWriter
‘The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle’ is out now