In his paintings of the Caribbean and of the American South, Homer depicted persons of African descent with a dignity and a lack of stereotype, exceptional among white artists of the period. Among the most famous of Homer's Caribbean works is Gulf Stream (1899), a heroic and sensually charged representation of the dazed survivor of a tropical storm.

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Also during his later years, Homer did a series of paintings of animals and birds that are apparently seeking to escape from hunters (for example, The Fox Hunt, 1893; and Right and Left, 1909). It is indicative of Homer's continued development as an artist and as an individual that he was able to move from powerful images of hunters to these eloquent expressions of the plight of the hunted.

Homer died on September 29, 1919 in Prout's Neck.

In nineteenth-century America men who loved other men often suffered from guilt, but artists such as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins celebrated male camaraderie and affection, while expatriate John Singer Sargent depicted the dandy, and photographs documented male friendships.

American realist artist Patrick Angus produced keenly observed and compassionate depictions of the gay underclass of the 1980s.

The most important American novelist of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville reflects his homosexuality throughout his texts.

In essays, journals, and poems, Henry David Thoreau recorded impassioned expressions of the beauty and the agony of love between men.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.

American artist Martin Wong created innovative, transgressive paintings that celebrated his sexuality and explored multiple ethnic and racial identities.