Why does a straight woman write gay fiction?

At readings, signings, in e-mail, in chance conversations, about one in ten readers asks me this. I'm not sure what that figure signifies, if anything, and I could answer with questions. "Why does a male writer write female characters, and vice versa?" "Why does a writer create a vampire, an angel, a god, or the voice of an animal?" "Why does a writer dip into history and create a persona of one hundred or one thousand years ago?"

Imagination. That's the joy of fiction. I want to imagine and write people who interest me. So I suspect that what I am more accurately being asked is, "Why is writing gay characters what interests you?" That requires a longer, more thoughtful answer, perhaps best described as an ongoing personal journey that I'm trying to take in a creative way.

Like many journeys, it began almost accidentally with a book. I was working at a bookstore, tantalizingly surrounded by thousands of unread books. I walked onto the floor one day to stand next to a coworker and said, "I need something to read. Something different from anything I've read before." He knew a little about my reading habits and said, "Why don't you try gay fiction?"

I had no idea where to look. We had a small gay/lesbian section of nonfiction. Gay fiction was scattered here and there among hundreds of other books, virtually indistinguishable by spine or jacket. You almost had to know a certain code of language and symbols to find it, and these I didn't know. "St. Martin's Press." "Lambda." "Men on Men." "Pink Triangle."

He and I walked up and down the aisles, and I don't know which of us found it. The book. It was called EIGHTY-SIXED, by a writer named David Feinberg. The jacket promised that I would read a "powerful and riveting book about AIDS and come away laughing and crying almost simultaneously," and it delivered. I was enthralled. I'd been allowed to look into a world I'd had little awareness of. Fifteen years before, a woman at my dorm had told me she was a lesbian. A few years after that, I'd been told that a male acquaintance was gay. Looking back, I realize that I knew many gay and lesbian people throughout my life. But like those works of gay fiction, they were virtually indistinguishable from anyone, everyone.

Maybe that first book was a random discovery, but I'll always believe that the next book was meant to be. Sometimes when publisher returns were overlooked, they ended up on our discount cart. I'd occasionally peruse the cart and buy a stack of books to take home and ignore, because I was too busy to read them. But after reading EIGHTY-SIXED, I happened upon a book in that stack on my bookshelf: BORROWED TIME, by Paul Monette. It was nonfiction, the moving story of Paul's loss of his lover Roger to AIDS. It had a profound impact on my life; it was the first book I discussed with a new friend I met through the bookstore. Steve was gay and HIV positive. His lover had died of an AIDS-related illness shortly before I met him. He had a personal story about Paul Monette that he shared with me, and our conversation started a friendship that would ultimately involve literature, politics, AIDS activism, and my having the privilege of being Steve's caregiver until the day he died as I held his hand.

Gay fiction as metaphor for gay men…The riches within! The humor. The struggle. The pain. The joy. The TRUTH. It was the honesty that grabbed me, whatever emotion or device was used to express it. The truth of lives that a majority of people knew nothing about, possibly wanted to know nothing about. But I hungered to know.

Gay fiction wasn't easy to find in my mainstream world. This was pre-Internet. There was no clearly marked road into this new land, even with Steve as a guide. I stumbled onto publishing houses whose books listed similar books. In time, I found Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, David Leavitt, Peter McGehee, Armisted Maupin, Ethan Mordden, Robert Ferro, Larry Kramer.

As my library and awareness expanded, I realized that a flow of pre-AIDS voices had been cut off before their promise was barely tapped. There was a period when it became almost impossible to find any gay fiction I hadn't read. My time was taken up by life experiences with new gay friends and my growing perception of their uniquely vital place in our culture. Then, like so many of those gay authors, my friends' voices were silenced one by one. The void on my bookshelves crept into my life. Steve had once told me, "Write us. Be a voice for us." I had little faith in my ability to do that. What could my perspective as a straight woman offer gay fiction?

That was a dark time, but there's a psalm that says, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning." Three amazing men brought morning to my life. A poet. A teacher. And a man so full of talent that he didn't know which way to express it first. Any of us could write a book about the paths that led us to one another and the mysteriously wonderful connections we had.

Instead, we decided to blend our four voices into a fictitious story that was really meant for our own pleasure. In time, other friends were curious and wanted to read it. Then they wanted to know what happened next. And next. Ultimately, what happened next turned out to be the assistance of an agent and the encouragement of an editor who helped us get IT HAD TO BE YOU published. But our creative energy was still going strong, and HE'S THE ONE grew from that. We felt that our first novel left some things unresolved, so I'M YOUR MAN comes out next month to explore those. One of my writing partners and I had more time, and a compelling need, to write, so with the blessing of our other writing partners, we created THE DEAL. There's more to come; we're all still writing together.

These are strange times we live in, and it seems more necessary to me than ever to do as Steve said: Be a voice for us. I'll keep writing as long as they'll publish me and beyond. I'll write what I know: the humor, passion, happiness, and disappointment to be found in the love of friends, families, and objects of our affection. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter if I'm gay or straight, male or female. It only matters that I use my voice as honestly as I can when I write, and I hope honesty comes naturally by writing from a life that has been enriched and enlivened by diverse and wonderful people.