To the question 'Is the term "gay fiction" a legitimate term?', writer Joseph Hansen (1923-2004) had the following to say:
Not as far as I'm concerned. Once, due to a misapprehension on my part, I ended up with a story in a gay anthology. I won't do that again. I don't believe in gay anthologies; I don't believe there is such a thing as gay literature. And I simply won't have anything to do with that.
We're all on this planet together. We'd better try to understand each other and tolerate each other and get along with the business of being human beings, because there's plenty of stuff that all of us need to improve, and one of them is not our sex lives. There are a lot of other things ahead of that.
There is too much that contributes to a feeling of "us" and "them"–we're here and they're here, and we're different from them, and they're different from us. One of the things that made me most angry about that anthology that I contributed to was that when it came out the title was Different! Different is what we don't need. All-the-same is what we need.
(From Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers, by Philip Gambone, pages 36-37.)
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