Hear Us Out

Conversations with Gay Novelists

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by Richard Canning

Columbia University Press

Due/Published February 2004, 432 pages, paper

ISBN 0231128673

Canning brings us new interviews with twelve prominent gay writers who have emerged in the last decade. Hear Us Out demonstrates how in recent decades the canon of gay fiction has developed, diversified, and expanded its audience into the mainstream. Readers will recognize names like Michael Cunningham, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours inspired the hit movie; and others like Christopher Bram, Bernard Cooper, Stephen McCauley, and Matthew Stadler. These accounts explore the vicissitudes of writing on gay male themes in fiction over the last thirty years--prejudices of the literary marketplace; social and political questions; the impact of AIDS; commonalities between gay male and lesbian fiction . . . and even some delectable bits of gossip.

 "This second volume of interviews with important gay novelists confirms the promise of the first volume. Richard Canning is just what one hopes for in an interviewer: tactful but probing, modest but very well-informed, serious but good-humoured, detailed but never trivial. His interviews will be enjoyable for the general reader and invaluable for the gay literary scholar. They are a wonderful resource." -- Gregory Woods, author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry

"This volume -- the second in Canning«s groundbreaking account of Anglo-American gay male fiction -- is essential reading for anyone interested in gay culture, contemporary fiction, or both. Readers new to the work will find insight mixed with anecdote in a way that charms as it instructs. But even readers already familiar with astonishing breadth of Canning«s work are likely to be pleasantly surprised by this new volume. For while the last volume looked backward to construct a literary history out of established figures, this one looks forward to bring that history right up to today. There are of course the famous names (among them Cunningham, Cooper, Indiana, and Bram). But there are also ones younger and less familiar (like Grimsley, T—ib’n, and Hensher). The exciting diversity of the interviews, and indeed the interviewees, makes this not merely a history of the present, but a peek into the future." -- David Van Leer, University of California, Davis