| “Edmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination,” novelist Tom Crewe wrote in his tribute to White on Wednesday. “However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on.” Many queer writers have a particular book that “opened the door” for them when they were coming to terms with their identity. For Yael van der Wouden, whose novel The Safekeep is in contention for next week’s Women’s prize for fiction, it was A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar. The author read the coming-of-age novel about a young Palestinian-Egyptian woman when she was in her early 20s. “I’d willed myself into deciding that really, I wasn’t queer. I fell in love with this story and found comfort in it and somehow didn’t believe that said anything about me, about my desires,” van der Wouden says. “What a gift to have novels that can hold your hand gently and quietly while you struggle with the act of knowing.” Meanwhile, for the poet Keith Jarrett, it was James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain that struck a chord. The novel “conveys queer longing with such magnificence”, which, along with “the fervour of Pentecostal Christianity in 1930s Harlem, the claustrophobia his teenage protagonist feels, and Baldwin’s sociopolitical commentary … makes it a masterpiece,” he says. “As a religiously conflicted teenager in 2000s east London, I had such a visceral connection with this novel.” “When I first realised I was a dyke in the 1970s, there weren’t many lesbian novels apart from 1950s pulp,” the crime writer Val McDermid says. “But the one novel that really did speak to me was Patricia Highsmith’s Carol [first published in the US as The Price of Salt]. There was an emotional reality to it and a real engagement with the difficulties of being different within a very homogenous US society.” And, in contrast to the mostly negative depictions of lesbianism at the time, “nobody died and it offered the prospect of a happy ending”. Charlie Porter, author of Nova Scotia House, remembers reading The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs when he was about 16: “Cut-up, complex, dangerous, The Naked Lunch showed me queer writing should break conformity.” | 