On June 7 the Publishing Triangle, a Manhattan-based organization made up of lesbians and gay men in the publishing industry, released its ranking of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels. Compiled by a jury of 14 judges, all of them authors or editors, the list encompasses centuries of works, from the explicitly homosexual to novels the judges described as "coded."

The top two are classics of pre-Stonewall sensibility: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Others were written by leading novelists of our day: Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran (number 15), Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (29), Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram (51), and Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman (59). Many of the titles stretch well back in time, from Herman Melville's Moby Dick (64) to Henry James's The Bostonians (27).

The number 34 slot on the top 100 went to British author Alan Hollinghurst's brilliant first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library. Published in 1988, the novel focuse

And Updike seems wholly uninformed on the issue of gay parents. "Paternity is an unsettling anomaly in this population," he argues. Later he complains that when Hollinghurst writes about gay father Robin and his gay son Danny, "the complications of being a homosexual father are but lightly described." This is social criticism more in line with Dan Quayle's attack on single motherhood in Murphy Brown than the serious thinking of a Harvard-educated Pulitzer Prize winner and the youngest man ever inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

But Updike's principle quibble is not specifically with Hollinghurst, who he says writes "beautifully. His eye for nature is keen and tender.... The psychologies of his numerous heroes are shrewdly traced." Updike's real beef is with gay men themselves.

I'm not familiar with the fine points of Updike's politics or his views on the culture wars of recent decades, but I have to say, I expected something better from the guy. The work of his I know best is Rabbit Is Rich (1982), the third of a series of novels chronicling four decades in the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a onetime high school athlete who goes on to own an auto dealership on Philadelphia's Main Line. By typical American standards Rabbit is a success--he went to the right schools, lives in the good neighborhood, has a family. Updike observes this world in rich and compelling detail: Although it's a fairly elite universe, it is certainly not without problems. Marital unhappiness, infidelity, serious conflicts between generations, and spiritual nagging about the meaning of it all fill the book.

In fact, it could safely be said that Updike has been America's best chronicler of upper-middle-class suburban adultery. His 1968 novel, Couples, was featured in a Time magazine cover story, "The Adulterous Society." The magazine wrote, "Adultery, says Updike, has become a kind of 'imaginative quest' for

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