New tales for new times

An interesting article in The Guardian suggests there are still new stories and be found, and new ways to tell them:

We live now in an unprecedented era of history, the first time gay people can to some extent live openly, and love each other for decades, and build families together, without the threat of state reprisal if not without the threat of danger. Long-term commitment is now a real possibility. This changes the experience of desire, shifting our expectations and the meaning we attach to it. Our literature should account for this. 

Many have worried that marriage equality and the normalisation of gay culture may dampen the creativity with which many of us have lived our lives on the fringe, may fray the vibrant communities and families we’ve built when those we were born into rejected us. I hope that we will, instead of being dulled by the institution, bring the liberating creativity of gay life into it. We have now the opportunity to define marriage for ourselves. Here too the novel can be our lens, helping us imagine lives for ourselves, possible outcomes, to bring our own blurry, nearing futures into sharper focus while we still have time to shift course. 

We should not be mistaken. To dance with another man in a crowded bar, to kiss him on a crowded street: these are still radical acts. But so is sprawling with him on the couch, reading for a while together in silence, and going to bed early. This, too, is the stuff of literature, this too is the stuff of dreams...