Early Gay Novels

(A Room in Chelsea Square: A Witty Novel was published anonymously in 1959 by Doubleday)

Every week for about a year now, I have been going to the Desert Pride Center to help sort, shelve and catalog the donated books that they receive for their Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgendered Library. About a week ago I came across the first book that I had seen that didn't even have an author using a phenomenon, but actually no author listed at all.

The book, A Room in Chelsea: A witty novel, with its natty Edward Gorey wrap-around dust jacket shows two stylish gentlemen having cocktails and a male nude statue and champagne bottle in an ice bucket on a sofa table with a purple & white-stripped tablecloth. Published in 1959 by Doubleday in the US, it was first copyright in 1958 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. of London. Of course it didn't have a bar code so in looking it up by its Library of Congress Catalog Number (59-10688) I found that subsequent editions attribute the author as Michael Nelson.

Reading... "We consider this to be one of the wittiest, most entertaining novels to appear in a long time. Its theme is familiar and has, throughout the ages, been idealized, romanticized, analyzed with laudable compassion and total recall by serious writers, or exploited by less serious ones for commercial gain--from the ancient Greeks to today's introspective unburdenings on the psychiatrist's couch or in the prep-school dormitory. And its characters, too, have time and again served as some of literature's most reliable heroes and villains." on the dust jacket certainly got me intrigued. Such code words to say gay (or homosexual in the 1950s) seemed to scream from the page.

Set around four main characters the story revolves around their rather leisurely indolent lives as they pretend to be friends, all the while backstabbing each other in the most catty of ways. In many ways this book is similar in a highbrow way to the stories of the gay men who were the subject of the off-Broadway play and film, "The Boys in the Band," that was set in the upper east side of New York in the 1960s. Chronicling the lives of gay men who often lived closeted lives outside their apartments, today we view these portraits as stereotypes that are quaint, tragic and somehow not real.

I wouldn't say this was the "wittiest" thing I have ever read, but it certainly gives an insight into what gay literature was like 50 years ago.