Susan Sontag published ?Notes on Camp? in 1964, a year after the publication of John Rechy?s City of Night, the first openly-queer self-narrative in American literature and five years after the Stonewall bar riots in New York, which gave origin the gay liberation movement. The sixties, then, represent the birth of an era in which literature came out of the closet and works started to portray gay characters more openly. These characters became multi-dimensional and adopted diverse attitudes, lifestyles and forms of expression. We know that the characterization of speech is one of the aspects that presents major difficulties in literary translation: if the translator fails in her/his job, the result may be a series of characters that lack emotional depth and a distinctive speech. This presentation will tackle the key elements in the speech of gay (and non-gay) characters in contemporary literature in the face of their translation.
