Bram moved to New York from Virginia in 1978 and published Surprising Myself, his first novel, in 1987. Since then, a succession of Bram articles, stories, reviews, and novels have followed with regularity. Father of Frankenstein, is perhaps Bram's best known work, since it became the 1998 movie Gods and Monsters. The film won the following year's Academy Award in screenwriting.

Christopher Bram has achieved an increasingly solid reputation as one of the best contemporary gay novelists. Several of Bram's novels take place in New York and appear to contain autobiographical elements, and all deal with predominantly gay themes and characters.

While describing himself as a gay novelist, however, Bram has indicated in several interviews that his intention is to depict gayness as having more similarities with than differences from life in general. Carefully plotted and meticolous in historical detail, Bram's novels ofer both an examination of gay life and a mirror of a particular time and place.