While urban gay subcultures attract the lion's share of scholarly and popular attention, there has been a long-standing relationship between gay male lives and suburbia. In Gay Suburban Narratives in American and British Culture, Martin Dines explores this relationship between gay male lives and suburbs, by analyzing suburb-located gay male narratives in texts and films in the United States and Great Britian. Dines takes the reader on an analytic tour of several distinct social and literary contexts that each manifest a particular strategy for negotiating gay male identity in suburbia.

In chapter 1, Dines introduces us to scholarly and literary traditions of placing the city at the center of gay life. He problematizes this centering of the city, demonstrating that a view of gay lives as necessarily urban is based on outdated assumptions about both gay lives and the suburbs. Dines covers well the few scholarly sources that have begun to address the suburbs, before moving to gay narratives that have originated in the suburbs for far longer than scholars have recognized their importance. In chapter 2, Dines looks at the US genre of traditional coming-out stories of the “suburban sissy” who migrates to the city to find his fully gay and out self. Dines demonstrates that these stories are as much about reclaiming the formative experiences of one's suburban past as they are about finding one's gay self in the city. In chapter 3, Dines examines British narratives, in which protagonists stay in the suburbs and come out there as a declarative act, making public their private selves. Although Dines's book is not primarily a comparison between US and British trajectories, the distinction between US coming-out narratives that focus on separating from a heterosexual family and a suburban past to join an urban gay community, and British trajectories that emphasize publicly acknowledging one's sexuality within the contemporary suburb is interesting.

After the distinction between coming-out narrative trajectories in US and British contexts, Dines examines two disparate recent trends in US accounts of suburban gay life: the new narrative movement and the gay conservative movement. In chapter 4, Dines explores the new narrative movement of novelists Dennis Cooper and Kevin Killian. New narrative writers, rather than seeing the suburbs as “the straightest space imaginable,” see the suburbs' blankness and open-endedness as mutable space with queer and postmodern possibilities. By contrast, gay conservatives (whom Dines critiques in chapter 5) see the suburbs as a place to assimilate into the mainstream with a conventional identity. Finally, in chapter 6, Dines explores gay suburban narratives that attempt to manipulate hybridity, generate suspicion of fixed identities, and queer suburban space. Using Oscar Moore's A Matter of Life and Sex and Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia as exemplars, Dines shows how modern British texts scramble metropolitan and suburban distinctions, reflecting the increasing multidimensionality, hybridity and boundless possibilities of suburban space.

Dines provides an engaging, original analysis of the variety of ways that gay texts deal with the relationship between gay male identity and suburbia. This impressive tour ultimately points to suburbs as polyvalent sites of possibility and hybridity that demand our serious attention. This book is important not only for its detailed and interesting analysis of gay suburban texts, but for the ways it enhances our understanding of the importance of suburbs to the development and future of gay male identities.