SOURCE: "A Man's Own Story," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 260, No. 3, January 23, 1995, pp. 101-02.

[An American critic and educator, Kirp frequently writes about educational matters and issues related to gay culture and politics. In the following negative review of The Folding Star, he compares the novel to other recent works by gay writers. Acknowledging that Hollinghurst occasionally offers telling moments and details in his portrait of gay culture, he describes the novel's protagonist as pathetic and the plotline as "crudely visible" and "patently artificial."]

During the dozen years between the 1969 Stonewall riot and the advent of AIDS, a host of writers reinvented gay fiction. (Lesbian fiction was also being reconceived, but that's another story.) Banished were the accounts of wracked consciences and suicides in the making, tearstained tales of tea and sympathy. Gone as well were the coded references and coy asides of writers who, afraid for...