AIDS literatures

Queer characters became increasingly visible in literary fiction, taking starring roles in novels by a range of writers, including Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Angus Wilson, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Jane Rule, and Maureen Duffy. From the 1950s, a range of fiction and nonfiction books on queer subjects were available as cheap paperbacks. After 1970, gay and lesbian fiction has been constituted as a genre. Queer fiction since Stonewall, in its heterogeneity, has reflected the heterogeneity of queer identities, culture, and politics. The most challenging of 1970s lesbian novels, Bertha Harris's Lover, assembles a fantastical cast of magical women. Over the next two decades American gay male fiction transformed itself from a field of isolated figures to a crowded scene. Queer identities are accommodated in a world more tolerant than that portrayed in radical fiction of the post-Stonewall period.