Thought For The Day: Christos Tsiolkas

Something hung in the air though and then the audience [at a Gay's The Word talk] broached it: the fact that his protagonist, Danny, 14 years old at the outset, is gay, but we are not given his coming-out story. "I made this decision that I wouldn't write a coming-out story," said Tsiolkas. "I don't think you need to write a coming-out story every time you deal with a gay character. I would bore myself, I would bore my reader. We know that story... I took a punt... I trusted the reader to fill in the gaps."

With those very reasonable sounding words –that there is no "one" coming-out story and it is not his responsibility to describe it anyway – Tsiolkas seemed to suggest that perhaps the time had come to override a literary tradition that, for the past 50 years or so, has made something of a central character's homosexuality; either celebrated it or defined it by its guilt, its persecution or its own particular excitements...

Australian author, Christos Tsiolkas, talks about his new novel, Barracuda, in the Independent.

Not sure this is that ground-breaking an idea, but there you go.