Glamorama is also marked by wit, humor, and satire. Indeed, Ellis uses his skill with humorous dialogue and maxims to make apparent his moral point of view.

Sponsor Message.

For example, Victor's outlook on life is stated in maxim-like dialogue, as when he remarks, "The better you look, baby, the more you see" and "being semi-famous is in itself difficult." His girlfriend Chloe's retorts are similarly aphoristic: "Everything you know is wrong" and "A mirror's your ideal mate."

Although the major characters are not easily identified with real people, famous people make cameo appearances in Glamorama. Since Ellis himself is a "celebrity author" known for the company he keeps, Glamorama might be regarded as the author's betrayal of his own celebrity world. It remains an underrated novel, but it has recently gained critical appreciation.

Lunar Park

Lunar Park (2005) is Ellis's most personal and most playful work. Bret Easton Ellis, a middle-aged writer, narrates it, but his word can no more be relied upon than Patrick Bateman's in American Psycho or Victor's in Glamorama.

Ellis, the character in Lunar Park, lives in a wealthy suburb where children's behavior is controlled by psychiatric drugs in a fashion similar to the way wives are controlled by technology in Ira Levin's suburban gothic The Stepford Wives. Ellis has married Jane, a model turned actress, largely because they had a son together, a fact that she has only recently brought to his attention. In addition, Ellis is being haunted by the ghost of his dead father, who may also manifest himself as Patrick Bateman and other horrific creatures. Ellis may, however, simply be deluded because of his prodigious drug and alcohol intake or because he is solipsistic in the extreme.

Ellis the author may imagine himself married with children in Lunar Park in order to explore once again his familiar theme of the fractured family. Ellis, the character in Lunar Park, disrupts his family so greatly that his wife and children eventually reject him. Only then does he realize, "I needed to be in that house. I needed to be a participant. I needed to be grounded in the life of the family that lived there."

In musing about the son Robby, Ellis the character observes, "[I]t bothered me that so little of his life revolved around poetry or romance. Everything was grounded in the dull and anxious day-to-day. Everything was a performance." Ellis the author could as easily be writing about his real or his imagined father, himself, or a future imagined self.

Conclusion

An indiscriminate purveyor of culture, Ellis mines high as well as popular culture. Moreover, he places his work within various literary traditions: Less Than Zero recalls J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye; much of The Rules of Attraction and The Informers is written in epistolary or diaristic form; The Informers is an homage to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio; entire chapters of American Psycho are mock album reviews, while others appropriate the language and tropes of advertising and pornography; Glamorama is a picaresque; Lunar Park refers meaningfully to Hamlet.

Ellis's use of language is especially skillful. Julian Murphet, in his excellent American Psycho: A Reader's Guide, makes much of Ellis's stylistic use of parataxis (the refusal of the prose to form complex sentences) and reification (the transformation of relationships between human beings into relationships between things).

What Murphet and others do not say is that Ellis also incorporates the language of advertising for its sounds (like the crisp sound "silk-crepe ties" makes when read aloud), the way a poet appropriates language. Ellis has said that he is an avid reader of poetry, an influence apparent in his trademark, long passages of dialogue that are heavily reliant on poetic rhythm.

Put another way, Ellis is at once a minimalist and a stylist. He emulates both the spareness of Hemingway and Joan Didion, on the one hand, and the more poetic, mannered style of Truman Capote and the New Journalists, on the other.

Ellis is far more of a satirist than, say, Edmund White or Andrew Holleran, but like those gay authors he relies on semi-autobiographical subject matter. As AIDS, death, and grief figure in their work, so they do in Ellis's as well. The word AIDS appears three times in the first three pages of American Psycho, and, later, in a graphic sex scene, Bateman and a woman negotiate the proper use of a condom.

Ellis also bears comparison to transgressive queer authors such as Jean Genet, William Burroughs, James Purdy, and Dennis Cooper in his use of pastiche, fantasy, and hallucinatory narratives.

Ellis's lover, sculptor Michael Wade Kaplan (who appears as Mike Graves in Lunar Park), died in January 2004 of heart failure after a night Ellis describes as a "blow-out" to celebrate Kaplan's thirtieth birthday. Ellis recently told The New York Times that he believes that Kaplan's death has contributed "a new layer of wistfulness and melancholy" to his writing, as manifested in Lunar Park.

This layer of melancholy represents a new development in Ellis's style and approach. It may help to attract readers who have been reluctant to embrace him because of his alleged lack of political correctness.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.

Although film may be a director's rather than a writer's medium, gay and lesbian screenwriters have made significant contributions to both mainstream and independent film.

Both in his life and his novels, American writer William S. Burroughs was an outlaw and a provocateur, focusing on sexual repression as the fundamental element of social control and writing in a surrealistic and bitterly satirical mode.

Truman Capote's fiction and autobiographical works helped establish what might be called the quintessential homosexual writing style of the 1950s and 1960s.

Controversial writer Dennis Cooper is best known for his series of strikingly original, critically acclaimed, albeit transgressive and contentious, novels exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, brutality, and death.

Jean Genet's work has left a powerful legacy to post-modernity and remains a provocation to questions of gay identity.

Ernest Hemingway, himself sexually insecure, included negative, even abusive portrayals of gay men in his fiction.

The pseudonymous Andrew Holleran has placed his homosexuality at the center of his commercially and critically successful novels.

James Purdy's novels often describe obsessive love between men for whom homosexuality is unthinkable and whose fate is inevitably bleak.

Christopher Rice, the author of four popular, gay-themed suspense thrillers, has also been active in supporting glbtq causes, especially those affecting glbtq youth.

One of the most prominent and highly acclaimed figures of contemporary gay literature, Edmund White works in many distinct categories of fiction and nonfiction.