ABSTRACT
for quite some time I imagined that all pre-Stonewall novels followed an unbroken formula: boy meets boy, boy dies. The famous novels of that period—Gore Vidal's The Pillar and the City (1948), James Baldwin's Giovannis Room (1956), and even John Rechy's City of Night (1963)—paint a grim picture of the homosexual: a life that was furtive and dangerous, even when not deadly. I had the impression that gay fiction through the sixties had not progressed beyond the gay books of the thirties and forties, the work Samuel Steward described as “a sad and sorry thing.” Steward blames it on “A firm named Greenberg,” all of whose novels “ended unhappily with the homosexual ‘hero’ committing suicide or being killed in some way; thus sin was punished and middle-class virtue triumphed” (107).
