GLR May-June 2026

thing will be just like us,” he tells Fehmi. “Just like our rela tionship. It’ll all be hidden in plain sight.” When Ş ener and Fehmi get away with murder, the act signifies what they will do to keep loving each other: They will defeat the hostility toward aging bodies, move past adultery and betrayal (not to mention murder), and celebrate each other’s strengths and weaknesses, particularly traits that heteronormative eyes see as femme. § T HE CANVAS FOR QUEER RELATIONSHIPS has undoubtedly ex panded in 2026. In Summerhouse , Hawk Mountain , and These Violent Delights , gay relationships are intense and legitimate enough to warrant extreme acts. “I’d kill for you”—it’s a pass ing, hyperbolic statement that cloaks a serious and committed passion, one that now belongs to gay people (at least in the space of literary fiction). But are these books literary ? What might their grouping into a canon say about “gay male literature”? It depends on what we mean by literary . Yes, a literary work uses literary devices. It believes that æsthetics carry power, and its use of language embodies its themes. Literary fiction is char acter-driven; it focuses on the minutiae of the day and the social psychology of one or several main characters. These craft con cerns lead to significant social insight. Each of these novels says something meaningful about love, sexuality, and social arrange ments. They borrow from genres like horror, romance, and thrillers, but I’d argue they aspire toward (and realize) literary renderings, even if the syntax lacks the pyrotechnics of Alan Hollinghurst. One novel that arguably values entertainment over literary ambitions is I Might Be in Trouble by Daniel Aleman. This is the page-turning, often hilarious story of a young writer, David Al Finnish Poets in Love ARTMEMO

varez, waking up in a hotel room to find that his handsome Grindr date—the perfect guy who might be the one to resurrect his writing career and erase his lingering heartbreak over a pre vious partner—is dead. Worse, David may be the murderer. Abandoned by fair-weather friends after his second book flopped, David calls the next best thing, his literary agent, a fad ing publishing juggernaut named Stacey Hixon-Jones (think Ju dith Light), who helps him relocate the body. These novels explore important emotional facts about being queer: the lacerating blitz of internalized homophobia, the cru elties of beauty standards in gay culture, the right to appear grotesque yet still be understood. They say something more pro found than (dare I say) Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won literary awards but was riddled with gratuitous adverbs and quasi-trauma porn, a heteronormative pablum for book clubs that define edge as the sides of a plastic spork. In contrast, these nov els are sharp, often shocking. Hawk Mountain would disgust many people, gay and straight; the promiscuity of I Might Be in Trouble could do the same; the sex club scenes of Summerhouse or the idealization of a seventeen-year-old boy could trigger re vulsion. Once something becomes “literary,” it tends to benefit from the power of respectability. But respectable to whom? Whether one decides to call these novels “literary” is less important than the fact that they reflect an expanded literary can vas. Each of these texts exemplifies the right to slay. To murder, to slay, to “serve cunt” (as the kids say)—these are all metaphors for holding power. In many gay communities now, “slay” is not just an evocation to celebrate or a simple affirmation: It is a com mandment. In the context of gay literature, writers do not just have the right to slay, but the obligation: the obligation to ex pand and uphold the human imagination through fiction.

A RTEMIS K ELOSAARI O N SEPTEMBER 4, 1931, thirty year-old Uuno Kailas wrote a pas sionate love poem. Already a renowned poet in Finland, Kailas must have felt he’d found a soulmate. “You’re a son of the glaciers who dreams of palm trees,” he wrote. “Within your soul there are two flowers, familiar to me: petals of the black orchid and the bright poppy. I feel you close—and distant still.” He was addressing a stranger: aspiring poet Kaarlo Sarkia. When they met soon afterward, Kailas found that Sarkia—only a year younger— admired him equally. Both were heavily influenced by French Symbolism, particularly Charles Baude laire; Sarkia even translated Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud into Finnish. Sarkia’s and Kailas’ own poems are full of sensual, dream-like imagery but also vivid senti ments of shame, agony, and death. A biogra pher of Sarkia describes him as having “a dualist attitude” that combines “longing for

purity and searching for pleasure.” The black orchid and the bright poppy, as Kailas put it. Both had been sensitive children who’d experienced frequent abandonment and alienation. Pain and death were loom ing threats: both had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, the romantic disease of the suffering artist. Accepting their homosexual inclinations hadn’t been easy for either. “Same-sex for nication” had been a crime in Finland since 1895, when the country had been an au tonomous province of the Russian Empire, and the law remained after Finland’s inde pendence in 1917. Though there were few trials during the early 20th century, judg mental attitudes crept into public conscious ness through both religious and (pseudo)scientific arguments. Nonetheless, the poets fell instantly in love. A poem Sarkia wrote soon afterward displays a carpe diem attitude that abandons shame. The golden dahlia, a late-summer flower standing proud against the approach ing winter, becomes a symbol of romance.

During the winter of 1931-32, the poets were almost inseparable. “So would my deepest feeling embrace the perfection of your parts, it would be your blessed robe. Had the creative hand molded your being on the first day, dear, it would have created none other,” Kailas wrote in “Polvistunut” (“The Knelt-Down”). Before Sarkia, Kailas had loved several men in a similarly adoring manner. Appar ently the first had been his schoolmate Bruno Schildt. In 1921, the two had volun teered in the so-called Kinship Wars: the Finnish nationalists’ effort to fight emerg ing Soviet Russia and unite speakers of Finnic languages (the Finns’ “kinship na tions”) into a nation called Great Finland. It was unsuccessful, and Schildt was killed. For the rest of his life, Kailas blamed him self. One of his short stories, published posthumously in 1936, is simply and cru elly titled “ Bruuno on kuollut ” (“Bruuno Is Dead”). The narrator, named for the author, describes his fallen friend’s beauty as in an ardent blason poem and confesses that he

TheG & LR

22