A new catalogue traces the secret history of gay literature. Damian Barr talks to the man who compiled it, Neil Pearson - The Independent - Sunday, 11 September 2011
Every gay man remembers his first time.
The thrilling sensation of doing something you really wouldn't want your mother to catch you doing. I speak, of course, of the first time you picked up a book and discovered characters like you, living lives you had only guessed at. I was a speccy teen gay cliché who sick-noted out of PE for the library. There, on a normal looking shelf, was Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. It was like finding Narnia in the back of my wardrobe.
Maupin was daringly new to me but he was working a trail blazed long before, as a pioneering catalogue of the earliest known gay fiction now reveals. Available exclusively at Natalie Galustian Rare Books, They Were What They Were, written and compiled by Neil Pearson, is a literary landmark bringing together just over a hundred works published between 1862 and 1960. Yes, Wilde is there – you can pick up a signed copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, number 199 of 250, for £33,000. It's the most expensive item. The cheapest, at £10, is a copy of Horizon magazine from 1944 featuring a short story by Denton Welch in which a boy thrills to the attentions of his older brother's university friend. As with most items in the catalogue, there's no bumming, only chumming. You still have to read between the lines.
"The earliest book we have is from 1862, but much earlier exist," says Pearson. "There's a 17th-century Italian book called Alcibiades the Schoolboy in which a scholar defends sodomy in an attempt to seduce his pupil. It's thought to have been written by Antonio Rocco who, it won't surprise you to learn, was a libertine priest. It's impossible to f
Footnote:
Copies of the catalogue (£8) are available from Natalie Galustian Rare Books, 22 Cecil Court, WC2N 4HE (0207 240 6822) nataliegalustian.com
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