It was only after the Stonewall riots and the birth of the gay liberation movement in 1969 that the official category "gay writing" came into being. Yet writings by and about lesbians and gay men have a much longer history than that. In Pages Passed from Hand to Hand David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell have charted 200 years of writing about gay men that includes such obscure items as Charlotte Chark's 1755 novel The History of Henry Dumont Esq. and Alan Dale's 1889 A Marriage Below Zero as well as surprisingly homoerotic work by Herman Melville, Henry James, and Ambrose Bierce. While most of these works were already known to serious readers of gay literature, Leavitt and Mitchell's contribution in Pages Passed from Hand to Hand is in consciously placing the material in a clear, unambiguously gay tradition for readers of all sexual persuasions.


From Library Journal
Contemporary gay literature is often thought to have no antecedents, either because no works on gay themes were written before our time or because the new gay fiction is so stylistically innovative that nothing like it has ever been seen before. Neither proposition is so. As this volume demonstrates, a rich array of gay literature appeared before E.M. Forster wrote openly of homosexuality in his 1914 novel, Maurice, though much of it was in coded form. Leavitt, one of the leading gay writers of his generation, joins with lover and sometime coauthor Mitchell to offer a choice selection of strictly male homosexual prose by authors ranging from Melville, Pater, Henry James, and Lawrence to Count Eric Stenbock and Gerald Hamilton. The lineage here is that of Forster, whose style?rich, thick, occassionally ebullient, and often bordering on the morose?can be seen as the touchstone. (Indeed, Leavitt self-consciously takes his style from Forster.) A necessary addition to all libraries?that is, until gay men get their own Norton.?David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania, PhiladelphiaCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
Before E. M. Forster's Maurice, written in 1914, introduced a new openness about the favorable depiction of homosexuality in English fiction, a number of novels and stories carried coded portraits of homosexuals and homosexuality. Many of these were, by necessity, published privately; still others were written to insure that the homosexual component would be recognizable to a select few; still others embedded homosexual content within such "safe" genres as the Western and the public school novel. There have been several recent anthologies of twentieth-century gay fiction, but David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's fascinating book is the first to explore the texts that circulated before the "gay fiction" genre came into being, and before greater tolerance allowed writers to treat homosexual themes directly. Leavitt and Mitchell include extracts from stories and novels by well-known writers such as Herman Melville, Walter Pater, Henry James, Willa Cather, and D. H. Lawrence, as well as work from neglected figures such as Count Eric Stenbock, John Francis Bloxam, "Alan Dale," and Gerald Hamilton -- the inspiration for Christopher Isherwood's Mr. Norris. The result is an entertaining and revelatory anthology, and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the literary treatment of homosexuality.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

There have been several recent anthologies of twentieth-century gay fiction, but Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt's book is the first to explore the texts that circulated before the genre of "gay fiction" came into being, and before greater tolerance allowed writers to treat homosexual themes directly. The result is both an entertaining and a revelatory anthology, and a valuable contribution to our understanding of the literary treatment of homosexuality.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal