A "Gay" Book...

This was pulled from an online conversation I had with a friend of mine whose work, in a review, had been referred to as "a Gay book masquerading as a Mystery." Note that I do not seek to directly challenge or provoke an argument with anyone in particular, but I do welcome commentary and opinions regarding the matter...

My response to such a notion was, and still is, as follows:

         A Gay book. Jesus... Really? Does it sit on the shelf and flirt with other books of the same gender? Yes, the chain-giants are highly dependent upon genre-labeling, but honestly, what the fuck? Is A Separate Peace a Gay book masquerading as a Classic? Should we just gather up all the novels that have anything to do with homosexuality and/or phobia and put 'em all in the room with the pink walls and the bead-door with the disco ball and the Cher cranked over the stereo? The entire *point* of literature is to expand the cultural perspective, for dammit sake, and I couldn't possibly care less if the characters are straight, gay, bi, eunuchs or amoebas...

         The fact that Howard Roark wasn't scrogging his school-buddies didn't make The Fountainhead any less epic, in my opinion, and the fact that The Color Purple was a "Black" book masquerading as a "Feminist" book masquerading as "A Brilliant Fucking Novel" certainly didn't turn me off to Alice Walker's work. With people running around assuming that Straight books are by default any different than Gay books, well, then we might as well have them drinking at different water fountains and pissing in different toilets. Does a Gay book get 3/5 of a Pulitzer?

         I mean, really...maybe if the *plot* centered around the very notion of homosexuality then one might consider it a "Gay" book, since it deals with, you know, "Gay"dom in general, but even then, I'd probably lump that in with Philosophy or Society, so I guess I'm different in that regard as well. But are we - the creative minds, the open minds, the accepting minds - still that far behind? Are we still thinking of ourselves as a sub-culture? Seriously?

Throw me a bone here, please...