Maurice

"Historically, it’s very interesting, as Forster is obviously one of the pillars of 20th-century English literature. But this is a book he suppressed during his lifetime and thought it was unpublishable, which is sort of sad if you think about it. It’s about Maurice, who’s in love with a guy he meets at Oxford called Clive. They have an affair, but then Clive gets married to a woman. Maurice comes to visit him and is rejected by Clive in his new guise as a married man. Then Maurice finds consolation with Alec the gamekeeper. So it’s a novel that seems based on wish fulfilment, but it also has a lot of class analysis, and I think the thing that has always puzzled Americans about British gay writing is that the middle- and upper-class people always fall in love with working-class people. There is this important class theme in British gay literature which doesn’t exist in America, partly I suppose because we don’t have a class system in the same way. I mean we do have a class system, but it’s pretty well hidden even from ourselves. It’s an interesting, groundbreaking book. Had it been published at the time that he wrote it, it would have been extraordinary, it would have opened up all kind of doors. It’s very beautiful and I think he had a real influence on Hollinghurst. People often discuss Hollinghurst as a Forster-influenced writer. He would give the manuscript to other homosexual friends to read. It was designed to amuse them too. He himself had a working-class lover, Bob Buckingham. Yes. But Genet was often involved with married men. I think a lot of men of that generation were only attracted to straight men. It’s something I try to take up in my book Jack Holmes and His Friend because Jack is in love with his straight friend Will. That was a very period taste. You didn’t want another homosexual in your bed; you wanted a real man who was, by definition, heterosexual. So, if that’s the case and you could only fall in love with heterosexual men, they do have a tendency of getting married to women. Then you have to deal with them. Genet actually chose the wife of one of his male lovers and built a house for them with a room for himself. Even his last lover, who was a Moroccan, Mohammed al-Qatrani – he lived with him and his wife and child. It only ever met about seven or eight times. But it did represent a real moment in gay fiction because earlier gay fiction had been addressed mainly to straight people in the form of an apology, complete with explanations about how the characters got to be gay – because they had a suffocating mother or an absent father or something like that. It was about the terrible pain they suffered and the books almost always ended in suicide. The Violet Quill really represented a break with that tradition, in that suddenly there were in place various institutions of gay literature like good literary magazines and almost 70 or 80 gay bookstores throughout the country. Dancer from the Dance was published in 1978, which was sort of a banner year for gay fiction. Lots of books were published that year which were important, including Armistead Maupin ’s Tales of the City, Larry Kramer’s book Faggots and my book Nocturnes for the King of Naples . Literature often trails politics by about 10 years – I mean, a lot of books about World War II weren’t published until 10 years afterwards, and in the same way these books came 10 years after Stonewall, which was the beginning of gay liberation. “People love to tell you sexual writing is either boring or ludicrous.” The function of the group was partly to claim a certain turf for each writer. So Andrew Holleran, who wrote Dancer from the Dance , his turf was Fire Island in New York. Mine was childhood, which I exploited in A Boy ’ s Own Story and which I read to the group as I was working on it. There was Robert Ferro and he wrote about the family and the gay child’s efforts to establish himself in the eyes of his own parents and wanting to be accepted with a lover as a couple with the same status as heterosexual siblings and their mates. So I think that was part of the function of that group. Another function was simply to provide an audience and encouragement for us as we tackled these new areas of experience, which required a certain amount of courage to write about. We all felt we had something to lose by coming out and writing about gay stuff. We had some sort of literary reputation that we were afraid of sacrificing by being identified as gay."