Pretty great news that the long-ago boom in gay lit (remember the Violet Quill?) has come back around — there is a universally recognized renaissance in LGBTQ+ fiction, with demand soaring even as right-wingers seek to curtail its impact on children. And on adults, if we're being honest.

When I published Boy Culture in 1995, I did so following the footsteps of a slew of gay male books that influenced me: The City and the Pillar (1948) and Myra Breckinridge (1968) by Gore Vidal, Dancer from the Dance (1978) by Andrew Holleran, A Boy's Own Story (1982)  by Edmund White, Faggots (1978) by Larry Kramer, The Confessions of Danny Slocum (1980) by George Whitmore, The Lost Language of Cranes (1986) by David Leavitt, Pizza Face (1991) by Ken Siman, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket (1989) by John Weir, even Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976) — the list goes on.

Though my impression of some of the hot LGBTQ+ books in recent years has been that they're escapist and not very interesting, they're there, and who is to say they aren't having the same generational impact as the ones that paved the way? They're also less narrow — not always written by and for gay white men. Hopefully, people craving this content will seek out the classics, as I did, too.