The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon is my favorite novel. Ever. It offers pretty much everything you could ever want in a book: romance, sex, friendship, death, terrifying escapes, comedy, comic books, Jewish mythology, The Empire State Building, Harry Houdini, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and so much more. It’s a truly great entertaining, read.

But, don’t just take my word for it, The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was a NY Times Bestseller, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

There are so many great elements that make this novel resonant for LGBTQ people, but none more so than the indelible gay character, Samuel Klayman, AKA Sammy Clay.

One-half of the title characters, Sammy Clay is portrayed as a young guy with sheer spunk and the unwavering determination to be a success. Pairing up with his artist cousin, Joe Kavalier, who just barely escaped the Nazis in Prague before making his way to NYC, Sammy uses his love of the new medium of comic books to invent and launch The Escapist, an adventure comic, in Depression-Era America. The Escapist, becomes an enormous success and even helps the morale of the troops during WW II.

What really makes the character of Sammy meaningful isn’t his achievements or his pluck. It’s because, throughout the novel, he struggles with his gayness. American society wasn’t welcoming homosexuals in this era and the pressure takes an obvious toll on Sammy throughout the novel as he attempts to reconcile his deep feelings inside with the image that everyone wants him to be.

Sammy is in the closet for much of the novel. But that closet door swings open for Sammy when he meets handsome radio actor Tracy Bacon. Playing “The Escapist”, Sammy and Joe’s comic book creation on the radio, Bacon becomes friends with Sammy in an attempt to understand the role he’s playing, but their friendship turns to romance and their love becomes the theme for the last half of the story.

The moment that everything changes for Sammy is when Tracy Bacon kisses him for the first time. A kiss that is literally electric; they lock lips during a lightning storm while they are in an office in The Empire State Building that plunges the two men into the dark. It is the sexiest love scene I have ever encountered.

Earlier in the novel, Sammy sees men kissing and touching at a party at a Greenwich Village apartment and experiences feelings he can’t explain:

“He knew about homosexuality, of course, as an idea, without ever having really connected it to human emotion; certainly, never to any emotion of his own.”

But, when Sammy starts to fall in love, he begins to get the idea of just how great it feels to be honest with himself.  However, being gay is only one of the things that Sammy struggles with throughout the rest of the story, as family responsibility, society, and morality all compete for his full attention, which at times, becomes too much for him to handle.

Sammy jumps right into this new gay life after the kiss. But, when he and Tracy Bacon are partying in a mansion with a group of rich, closeted NYC gays, a vindictive and prejudiced maid alerts the police. The cops raid the premises, and beat and arrest the guests, with only Sammy and one other man escaping. In return for this, Sammy is sexually abused by one of the cops in an incident that leaves bigger scars on Sammy for the rest of the novel. He is haunted by guilt humiliation throughout the rest of the narrative.

Chabon’s first novel The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh (1988) is also one of the great gay-themed modern novels. It’s openness about gayness was rather groundbreaking early in the plague years. I love it. Chabon, who is straight-but-not-narrow, has gay characters and themes in most of his other works, including the wonderful Wonder Boys (1995).

“Forget what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”

Michael Chabon

But, The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay is a more sweeping storytelling than Chabon’s previous books. It’s a quintessential American novel with a lot of themes, including a look at a young gay man trying to find his place in an unwelcoming society. I think that Sammy Clay is one of the very best LGBTQ characters in literature.