Mordden, along with Andrew Holleran, Armistead Maupin, Gordon Merrick, and Edmund White, was among the first generation of openly gay authors to have their books considered mainstream rather than "sex writing".
[3] His stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction books cover multiple topics including American musical theater, opera, film.
He has also written for The New Yorker, including three works of fiction, Critic At Large pieces on Cole Porter, Judy Garland, and the musical Show Boat,[4] and reviews of a biography of the Barrymores and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus.
Mordden's A Bad Man Is Easy To Find, published in 1989 under the pseudonym of M. J. Verlaine is a series of interrelated short stories about the lives of women, and has only one minor gay character.
In 2015, Mordden returned to writing historical fiction with One Day in France, set in Limoges and Oradour-Sur-Glane when the latter, a peaceful village, was destroyed and its inhabitants brutally murdered by a squad of the Nazi Schutzstaffel.
In 2021, Mordden published another novel, You Can't Be Too Young or Too Pretty, a black comedy about a murder cult preying on college students in an unnamed American town.