Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative » (ANN)

Norman W. Jones is Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University.

The first extensive study of gay and lesbian historical fiction, this book demonstrates how the highly popular genre helps us understand gay and lesbian history. It shows not only why the genre should be taken more seriously by historians but also how it implicitly works to ameliorate divisions between Christianity and homosexuality. The book contends that gay and lesbian historical fictions model ways of approaching sexual and historical mystery not as a threat to understanding but as its ground. These fictions thus implicitly undermine the supposed dichotomy between secular and sacred ways of knowing, thereby expanding the resources for ethical debate about homosexuality.

Can We Talk?
• Spot the Homo: Definitions
• Revisionist Histories from Mysterious Hauntings
• Coming-Out Stories as Conversion Narratives * Chosen Communities: Familiar Stories from Strange Bedfellows * Romancing the Past: The Uses of Identification