Two significant critical assessments of gay literature, published in New York just weeks apart, illustrate the continuing gap separating the works of lesbian and gay novelists from the embrace of the mainstream publishing world.
             On June 7 the Publishing Triangle, a Manhattan-based organization made up of lesbians and gay men in the publishing industry, released its ranking of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels. Compiled by a jury of 14 judges, all of them authors or editors, the list encompasses centuries of works, from the explicitly homosexual to novels the judges described as "coded."
             The top two are classics of pre-Stonewall sensibility: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Others were written by leading novelists of our day: Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran (number 15), Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (29), Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram (51), and Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman (59). Many of the titles stretch well back in time, from Herman Melville's Moby Dick (64) to Henry James's The Bostonians (27).
             The number 34 slot on the top 100 went to British author Alan Hollinghurst's brilliant first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library. Published in 1988, the novel focuses on the lessons a young aristocratic gay man learns about history--his country's and his family's--from his relationship with an older genteel homosexual.
             The May 31 edition of The New Yorker includes a review of Hollinghurst's latest work, The Spell, written by John Updike, the novelist, poet, and critic who is quite nearly the embodiment of America's literary establishment. Updike's essay raises the fundamental question as to whether gay literature has any general value at all.
             "Nothing [in The Spell] is at stake but self-gratification," Updike writes. "Novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and in...