1.

The first thing to say, of course, is that the question is deeply silly. The half answer, half protest that immediately springs to mind is, It depends. Many are the conditions that it depends upon.

History is one. Once upon a time, novels were frank about sex. Two limitations are worth noting: the candor was, for the most part, limited to heterosexual episodes and, in respectable quarters, it did not extend to the corporeal mechanics of sex—it merely noted the fact of it. Still, fact is something, and sometimes it is quite something: consider Diderot’s indiscreet jewels, in 1748, or the many acts of hospitality rendered to Tom Jones, in 1749. (Outside respectable quarters, there were, of course, many authors who were candid about the mechanics, even in the early days of the novel; pornography flourished mightily during the Enlightenment.) As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, however, a “wonderful propriety,” as Henry James put it, took hold. “There came into being a mistrust of any but the most guarded treatment of the great relation between men and women,” James wrote in an 1899 essay, “The Future of the Novel.” James conceded that discretion had its charms. “I cannot so much as imagine Dickens and Scott without the ‘love-making’ left, as the phrase is, out,” he wrote. (The scare quotes, the italics, and the interpolated qualifying phrase are all his.) James was fairly sure, however, that if novelists persisted in the “immense omission,” as he called it, the art form would stagnate. “There are too many sources of interest neglected—whole categories of manners, whole corpuscular classes and provinces, museums of character and condition, unvisited.”

It may surprise those who know James only by reputation to hear that he wanted more sex in novels, but, in fact, he wrote a great deal about the difference that sex made to a relationship. “The Spoils of Poynton,” for example, is concerned with the mistake of restraining one’s greed for physical love (though it’s sometimes misread as a sermon preaching the opposite). Twenty years before the movie “Nosferatu,” James wrote about the sex lives of vampires in “The Sacred Fount,” a novel that is nearly impossible to read today without construing the title as a reference to the purported sanative effects of sexual fluids.

Still, it’s true that James wasn’t known for being explicit about, well, anything. Which illness is the heiress expiring of? Which widget is manufactured by the young man’s family business? A reader of James never learns. James the person doesn’t seem to have been heterosexual, and a need for disguise may have motivated his career-long experiment in omitting specifics. To succeed as a novelist, he had to find a way to universalize a sensuality that he knew to be particular. After all, the law isn’t the only force that one has to worry about when writing about sex. There’s also the marketplace. Long after gay novelists ceased to fear that a man-on-man love scene would send them to jail, they could still justifiably worry that it might cost them sales and literary status.

2.

But everything changed, right? Sexual intercourse began in 1963, as Philip Larkin has recorded, and, in the years that followed, some straight novelists became well travelled in the corpuscular provinces. Roth’s Portnoy violated a piece of liver in 1969; Updike’s Rabbit wiped another man’s emission off the face of his teen-age girlfriend in 1971. Such scenes may be a tad polymorphous, but it takes more than one or two chromatic notes to compromise a key signature. The heterosexuality of Roth’s and Updike’s novels is in no way disestablished.

Straightness matters because it seems to have protected Roth’s and Updike’s careers from any serious damage. An explicit gay love scene, on the other hand, would likely have had consequences: an obligation to shift from a mainstream publishing house to a specialty-interest one. A more limited readership. An unspoken sense among the arbiters of taste that, no matter how talented, such a writer is necessarily minor. (This essay, I should acknowledge, is going to focus on the perils of representing sex between men. Lesbian sex presents a different set of hazards, no less challenging to navigate, and those of trans sex remain largely uncharted.) Accordingly, the prose of gay writers, even in the sixties, was comparatively discreet. In 1963, when Grove Press published John Rechy’s “City of Night,” a novel about a male hustler, The New York Review of Books complained, in reference to the hustler’s love scenes, that “the full extent or the exact nature of his being had” was withheld from the reader. One doubts that Christopher Isherwood, to take another example, was any more squeamish about the human body than Roth or Updike, but, in “A Single Man” (1964), a novel in which an old professor regrets the resort of the young to “flirtation instead of fucking,” the old professor doesn’t actually get to do or be done by the handsome student to whom he preaches fucking. Auden wrote a beautiful account, in verse, of a blow job with a stranger, but it snuck into print, in 1965, only against his wishes, and he denied his authorship in order to keep it out of his canon.

Under the circumstances, a gay writer in those days could be excused if he found it a bit wearisome when moral courage was attributed to straight bawdiness. In “A Single Man,” Isherwood’s professor

remembers throwing this, or some other book like it, into the wastebasket, in the middle of the big screwing scene. Not that one isn’t broad-minded, of course; let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore, and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can’t these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes—such as, for example, boys?

Despite Isherwood’s joke, a member of a minority can never really turn the tables, partly because he knows too much to want to. All their lives, gays and lesbians read novels and watch movies about straight love affairs. Most of us have learned not to mind the occasional lapses into hydraulics and plumbing. In fact, most of us have learned to enjoy them on an aesthetic plane. Where the subject matter of love is concerned, even the most well-plowed field always deserves another plowing.