seduce the innocent or primp in front of public mirrors.

Not that these things never happen. But they happen to heterosexuals, too. The novelist who gives the impression that they happen all the time in the gay world; that this is common expected behaviour in day-to-day gay living, is doing vicious harm to homosexuals everywhere . . . most of whom live decorous lives into which they put as much dignity and intelligence as they can.

The need to serve conventional morality, if only in token, is another of the stereotypes that plague gay novels. Some writers feel obliged to punish their gay characters for the bare fact that they are homosexual. It is true enough in life that many homosexuals do suffer for their situation. I imagine there are very few who have not had at least some unpleasant experiences as a direct result of their sexual preferences. But to serve traditional moral codes, many a writer murders a homosexual with shocking callousness or subjects him to last-minute torments in order to "square things" with blue-stocking readers. Again, this is a convention that seems to pervade the hard cover books more than the paperbacks.

I think, of all the different genres of modern novels, none has overdone the psychoanalysis bit more thoroughly than the gay novel. It is a shorthand for a whole complex of difficult and involuted personality disturbances that are way beyond the writer's depth. He solves the problem and impresses he hopes the reader by carelessly throwing Freud around when the rest of the scene gets dull.

I am not trying to imply that it's wrong to probe the "whys" of a person's behaviour and desires. This is necessary in any novel and it has been a primary ingredient in most stories for centuries-long before Freud gave names to our myriad peculiarities. I object only that it has

one

become a heavily reworked sterotype in so many gay novels. If it is well handled, it can be most effective. A writer with a solid background of study and reading in the field may make hay with it, fictionally speaking. But badly done, it can lead many uninformed readers astray. After all, not every gay male walking the earth murdered his father and married his mother.

Little by little it is coming to be understood that a homosexual can be born, grow up and learn to get along reasonably well in the sticks, as well as in the big towns, just as heterosexuals do.

I don't believe there has been much effort to create new plots to suit the gay story. At the moment these novels are just beginning to be written in any numbers and authors are sticking pretty close to tried and true story lines. These act as a sort of touchstone for readers new to the genre. The people may seem strange to them, but they recognize the action as a legitimate fiction device. And, since homosexuals are people like everybody else, they will react with human emotions to as many different situations as novelists can maneuver them into. When the love and jealousy episodes crop up, readers unused to homosexual reactions have the good solid plot line to clutch and it helps them keep their bearings. But I hope, as progress is made and acceptance is gained for serious and good gay fiction, some of the most blatant of these conventions and stereotypes might be abandoned in favor of new angles and experiments.