Power Games Inhabit Guibert’s Last Novel.George Cecil Ives: Out Poet, Lover of Bosie.Inside Ukraine: An lgbtq Leader Speaks Out.Taken together, these books might qualify Mary Renault, herself a lesbian, as the first gay novelist, as she wrote not a one-off novel about same-sex love but a body of work that kept it front-and-center as a recurring theme.įollowing is an essay by the late Alan Conrath, slightly edited by me, which appeared in the May-June 2004 issue.

Renault, in contrast, took pains to portray same-sex relations in a positive light, notably in The Mask of Apollo (1966) and in The Persian Boy (1972), which effectively outed Alexander the Great. And while The City and the Pillar (1948) had sold quite well a few years earlier, author Gore Vidal had seen fit to create two angst-ridden protagonists one of whom murders the other in the final scene. Indeed these two novels undoubtedly provided much of the American reading public with its first exposure to homosexual themes and characters. Indeed if there’s a case to be made for it as “the first” such novel, it lies in the fact that it found a large and eager audience of gay readers-as did Renault’s next novel, The Last of the Wine (1956).

That The Charioteer was read as a “gay novel” is demonstrated by the fact that it became an instant bestseller among homosexual readers soon after its publication. One of his lovers is similarly confused, but the other, a naval officer who’s a veteran of the British public school system, seems quite comfortable with his sexual leanings and accepts himself as a different kind of man. Taking place during World War II, the novel recounts the story of a wounded soldier named Laurie “Spud” Odell who is both torn between two lovers and conflicted about his own homosexual feelings. BEST KNOWN for her historical novels set in ancient Greece, many with overtly homosexual themes and scenes, Mary Renault began her career with a novel set in modern times called The Charioteer (1953).

The Charioteer by Mary Renault