Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
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In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture.
But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas.
With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond.
Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.
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Christopher Bram. (2012). Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. Grand Central Publishing.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Christopher Bram. 2012. Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. Grand Central Publishing.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. Grand Central Publishing, 2012.
MLA Citation (style guide)Christopher Bram. Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. Grand Central Publishing, 2012.
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Christopher Bram is the author of nine novels, including Gods and Monsters (originally titled Father of Frankenstein), which was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Bram was a 2001 Guggenheim Fellow and received the 2003 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in New York City.
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- This “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inquirer).
In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture.
But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas.
With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond.
Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century. - reviews
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Starred review from November 14, 2011
This select series of profiles and literary analyses by the author of Gods and Monsters (turned into an Oscar-winning film) explores with brio the gay temper in American literature, from 1948 to 2000. Segmenting his book into five parts, by decade, Bram concentrates on the giants among them: Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Edward Albee, James Merrill, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, and, above all Edmund White (the “central figure” for his generation, as Vidal had been for an earlier one). We’re treated to their successes as well as to the juicy rivalries that sometimes marked their careers. Bram doesn’t indulge in canon formation. In fact, he only mentions Henry James, Willa Cather (one of the few women of this book on a male tradition), Hart Crane, and Thornton Wilder in passing. Rather, Bram succeeds in integrating the politics and culture of homosexuality from the postwar period through McCarthyism and Stonewall to the decimating specter of AIDS and a healthy new liberation. Storytelling, Bram says, was central to the gay revolution. “And why not?... what is homosexuality but a special narrative of love?” Unified by the keen observations of a novelist working in the tradition that re-energized American letters, Bram successfully informs and entertains. Agent: Edward Hibbert.
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December 1, 2011
Novelist and Guggenheim Fellow Bram (Exiles in America, 2006, etc.) charts the emergence of gay writers, decade by decade, from the mostly-closeted 1940s to the whole-house present. The author, gay himself, does not say much about his own career here--just a couple of modest asides--but he does pay homage to those he considers the godfathers of gay writing, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, James Baldwin and the "fairy godfather," Gore Vidal, to whom Bram returns continually throughout. The author also slams those critics who could not see the literary merit of stories with gay characters and behavior--principally Stanley Kauffmann, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Midge Decter, though Bram points out that writers from Norman Mailer to Andrew Sullivan have at times had "issues." Bram follows the careers of the godfathers, but he also looks at other important novelists, poets and playwrights, including Christopher Isherwood, Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee, James Merrill, Frank O'Hara, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Mark Doty, David Leavitt, Michael Cunningham and many others. Often he pauses for plot summary, analysis and judgment. The author also points out writers he believes have not received sufficient attention, among them Paul Russell, Mark Merlis and Henry Rios. Bram pauses occasionally to rehearse key events in gay cultural history--the Howl obscenity trial, the Stonewall riots, the televised 1968 clash between William F. Buckley Jr., and Vidal, Anita Bryant's anti-gay crusade, the devastating effects of the AIDS crisis in the '80s and beyond. Bram also flashes some attitude here and there, and not just toward the enemies of gay writers. He sometimes chides Vidal, shines a harsh light on Capote and calls Edmund White's novel Caracole "a complete dud." An educative mixture of analysis, celebration, description, disappointment, disdain and, finally, love.(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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August 1, 2011
Himself a distinguished novelist (and gay), Bram here undertakes to investigate the significant gay writers--Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, and James Baldwin--who emerged after World War II and changed both the literature and the culture of America. A key cultural study for informed readers.
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from December 15, 2011
Highly regarded novelist Bram's needed, spirited survey of post-WWII gay literature in America begins with this compelling line, The gay revolution began as a literary revolution. In his view, many prominent gay novelists, playwrights, and poetsas their novels, plays, and poems rose in critical and public acceptance from outlaw to pioneer statusled the way for a social change that swept the country, by which gay life in general gained in increasing acceptance. The image the reader gathers from this learned but never stuffy analysis, brimming with Bram's own well-considered and entertaining opinions, is a door of a darkened room slowly opening to admit the light from without. We begin our visitation to seminal writers with the first wave following the end of WWII, which included such figures, now thought of as luminaries, as Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsburg, and James Baldwin. Just as recovery from illness is not a perfect trajectory upward, the reaction to gay lit wavered, even in increasingly tolerant times, certainly hitting a speed bump during the AIDS crisis. Bram notes an irony in the present day: even as the economy has resulted in a shrinking publishing industry, vast strides in gay acceptance have been made. For all literature collections striving for inclusion and relevance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)
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January 1, 2012
This book is a history, literary critique, and collective biography in one. Novelist Bram (Gods and Monsters), himself an essential gay writer, discusses gay men (no women here, with no explanation) from Gore Vidal in the early postwar years up through the 1990s and close to the present. His main thesis, that "good art can lay the groundwork for social change," is demonstrated and contextualized in dozens of examples of how literature can be not just a reflection of the times but also a catalyst for change; for example, Mart Crowley's 1968 play (made into a 1970 movie), The Boys in the Band, is shown to have produced conflicting reactions that spurred the debate of what gay culture should look like. VERDICT The men Bram focuses on, from James Baldwin to David Leavitt, are beautifully drawn, and Bram has a knowing critical eye for the strengths and weaknesses of their works. Bram's own prose is wonderfully immediate and readable, combining biography, gossip, literary criticism, and social history. Highly recommended for all literary historians and for those interested in American or LGBT studies or the rise of gay literature. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/11.]--David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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