Familiar Stories from Strange Bedfellows: Chosen Community

Abstract

Much contemporary gay and lesbian fiction emphasizes disconnection from the family, whether happily or unhappily (sometimes both at once). This divide is often symbolized in a character’s movement from small town to city, which Gregory Woods describes as “equivalent to Huck Finn’s lighting out for the territories” (348). Set in an old frontier town around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (1991) undertakes a rather critical exploration of this American myth of frontier freedom embodied in Huck. By contrast, Spanbauer’s novel exemplifies those gay and lesbian historical fictions that locate more productive potential behind, as it were—in chosen family histories.