The gay novel has had its day, according to Alan Hollinghurst, this generation’s greatest exponent of it.
The writer, who won the Booker Prize in 2004 with The Line of Beauty, said that liberation and Aids were no longer as relevant. “There was an urgency, a novelty to the whole thing,” he told the Hay Festival. “And in our culture at least those things are no longer the case.”
Hollinghurst, 64, said that there was now less “nutrition” for novelists writing about the gay experience, whereas before homosexuality was decriminalised there had been a “heightened excitement which came through something illegal”.
“There is still a frisson about it for anybody going to their first gay club even now, it retains something transgressive, I suspect,”