E. M. Forster never published openly gay work during his lifetime, publishing Maurice posthumously. The novel was an open secret to his friends, and he let Gordon Merrick, the first gay male blockbuster novelist, read it overnight in a hotel after their first meeting.
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Merrick’s spouse, Charles Hulse, told me it inspired Merrick’s first gay NYT bestseller, “The Lord Won’t Mind,” published in 1967, when I interviewed him for a profile I wrote about Merrick in Out Magazine back in the 1990s.
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Merrick had debuted with a NYT bestselling novel, “The Strumpet Wind,” in the 1940s, and then tried to write novels about gay men that were listed as “sexology.” He stopped writing for over a decade, returning only after reading Forster’s manuscript for Maurice.
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Forster admires Merrick’s “sexology” novels and wrote to invite him to meet. “The Lord Won’t Mind” was published by Jacqueline Suzanne’s publisher and was a hardcover bestseller in 1967. Edmund White credits Merrick’s success with publishers as the reason his debut was published.
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Sorry—1970 for the Lord Won’t Mind. Anyway, Merrick died in 1988 with millions of books in print. His publisher regularly shipped six figure first print runs of the 12 novels he published afterward, all of them with explicit gay sex and covers like these. On sale in supermarkets.pic.twitter.com/B31AWPBe8c
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By the time I met Edmund White in 1996, there was a publishing columnist for the NYTimes famous among queer writers for assuring readers that no one bought gay fiction, 2x a year when I counted.
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I feel like there was a backlash against gay books in 1980s inside the publishing world (not from readers). The fate of Samuel Delany's Neveryon series is instructive.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
I think so. This at the time the AIDS crisis began.
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