Business Day

THE MEDIA BUSINESS; Big Publishers Profit as Gay Literature Thrives

By ESTHER B. FEIN
Published: July 06, 1992

Correction Appended

The major league shortstop scoops up a ground ball, pivots to start a double play and suddenly finds himself smiling giddily. He's in love -- with his second baseman.

This may sound like the plot of a paperback by an unknown gay author published by a small press and selling at a gay bookstore. But it is actually "The Dreyfus Affair: A Love Story," a novel by Peter Lefcourt, an acclaimed author and Emmy-winning television writer and producer who is heterosexual. What is more, it is published by Random House and selling in independent and chain bookstores across the country.

The critical success of Mr. Lefcourt's novel is one of the many signs that books by and about gay men and lesbians have burst out of specialty shops and presses and are now a viable and growing segment of mainstream publishing.

"It is now easier than ever for a writer to propose a book about gay people to an agent," said Jed Mattes, a literary agent with a large gay clientele, "for the agent to pitch the book to an editor, for the editor to get the book approved by a publisher, for the publisher to present the book to salespeople, for the salespeople to convince booksellers to carry it and for the booksellers to get customers to buy it."

The change has little to do with growing public awareness about gay life styles or pressure by gay organizations, people in publishing said. Gay literature, they said, has proven itself to be commercially successful. A New Day for Authors

The climate is drastically different from the days when E. M. Forster quit publishing when he was only in his late 40's. Although he was riding the success of "A Passage to India," his letters revealed that he no longer felt honest writing fiction in a heterosexual milieu, and the literary world would not accept him writing in his own homosexual one.

"I should have been a more famous writer," he wrote in his diary, "if I had written or rather published more, but sex has prevented the latter."

Now, virtually every big publishing house has at least one overtly gay title in its catalogues. Book clubs offer gay titles as featured selections. The number of gay and lesbian bookstores has jumped over the last decade to about 50 from 10 and many general-interest bookstores have special gay and lesbian or alternative life-styles sections.

"It's a commercial decision -- they see a hungry audience that buys books," said Arnold Dolin, publisher of Plume Books, an imprint of Penguin U.S.A., which, along with its NAL/Dutton division, is one the foremost mainstream houses to carry an extensive array of gay books.

"Yes, it's true that AIDS has made people more aware of gay life styles," said Robin Hardy, a freelance writer and editor and co-chairman of the Publishing Triangle, a three-year-old gay organization. "And it's certainly true that the gay liberation movement has opened people's eyes. But what made publishers and booksellers take note is because they saw how well gay titles did, they saw the number of gay bookstores and they realized there was an open market out there."

When gay men and lesbians started publishing houses in the 1970's and even the 1980's, their primary goal was not commercial. They had a personal commitment to seeing gay and lesbian writers publish, a desire to read and distribute books that affirmed who they were.

Barbara Grier and Donna McBride started Naiad Press, the oldest lesbian publishing house in the country, in 1972 and for 10 years had to work other jobs to make ends meet.

Correction: July 8, 1992, Wednesday A picture caption in Business Day on Monday with an article about the success of gay literature misidentified Walter Vatter. He is director of publicity for A Different Light bookstore, not a co-owner.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/06/business/the-media-business-big-publishers-profit-as-gay-literature-thrives.html
www.nytimes.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-48
39430
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:S2O34C24J2NZZTSLRARIQLOA7HB37EWZ
<urn:uuid:dec680b4-ba48-4cfe-bbfc-ebb9648f9e80>
2013-12-07T07:46:24Z
170.149.168.130
sha1:O3NAXMQWDKNQAVUXXZUL2CQMP2A62VOL
<urn:uuid:43977ee9-5785-4bc1-a06e-31143ded50c0>
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/06/business/the-media-business-big-publishers-profit-as-gay-literature-thrives.html
response
<urn:uuid:a896997a-0b9e-4496-94cd-84da8d4a5eef>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-48
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Winter 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf