In his best-selling Myra Breckenridge (1968), Gore Vidal skewers conventional American sexuality by making the preoperative Myra a gay male and having the super-masculine Rusty turn homosexual after Myra rapes him with a dildo.

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In The Missolonghi Manuscript (1968), which purports to be a journal of Byron's last year, Frederick Prokosch (b. 1906) depicts homosexuality more straightforwardly than ever before, going beyond the implied of his popular male-bonding adventure novels of the 1930s (such as The Asiatics [1935] and The Seven Who Fled [1937]) to portray Byron's homosexual affairs completely frankly.

Among the pieces printed for the first time in Paul Goodman's collected stories, Adam and His Works (1968), are two with homosexual content, "The Old Knight" and "Martin."

In Keep the River on Your Right (1969), about his life with the cannibal Akaramas in the Peruvian jungle, Tobias Schneebaum (b. 1921) frankly portrays the homosexuality of Manolo, the lay missionary, and clearly implies his own in his feelings for the men of his tribe.

Conclusion

The remarkable achievement of twentieth-century American gay male writing before Stonewall might at first appear to be offset by the fact that much of it seems concessive. For example, in their association of homosexuality with violence, suicide, murder, or other kinds of pathetic death or at best with lives of freakishness or isolation, many works in the post-World War II outpouring of published gay male writing seem to confirm Mart Crowley's famous line in The Boys in the Band, "Show me a happy homosexual, and I'll show you a gay corpse."

Even some positive portrayals surround the subject with distracting reassurances, such as the bisexuality in Baldwin's and Goodman's work. Three points need to be made about this pattern, however.

First, it was not total, as indicated by the work of Clarkson Crane in the 1920s, Forman Brown ("Richard Meeker") in the 1930s, and Duncan, Thompson, O'Hara, Isherwood, Coleman, Kirstein, and Friedman in the post-war period. Second, it may chiefly represent a marketplace compromise authors felt they had to make to get their work published. Third, even when writers might have shared some of these materials' depression about homosexuality, that could not have represented the whole or the core of their feelings.

If twentieth-century American gay male writers before Stonewall had been thoroughly concessive, there would not have been any published gay male writing then at all, for they would have conceded to the long-standing stigma of homosexuality's "unspeakableness" and remained publicly silent. Since the very act of a gay writer's picking up the pen to write about the subject thus inherently contests stereotype, some degree of an opposing positive apprehension about homosexuality is contained even in this material's bleakest portrayals.

The same point is, of course, implied by the fact that, during years when homosexuality was still largely invisible in society and chiefly vilified when it was spoken of at all, these writers persisted in writing about the subject.

Finally, it should be noted that the dimensions of the twentieth-century American gay male literary situation before Stonewall surpass even this sketch. For reasons of space, I have had to exclude earlier gay male writers who were largely discreet about their homosexuality in their work, such as Francis Grierson (1848-1927), Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), Witter Bynner (1881-1968), and Thornton Wilder (1897-1975).

Likewise, I have omitted writers mentioned in earlier surveys of gay fiction whose works were unavailable to me or whose overall picture was unclear (for example, the 1933 Goldie by "Kennilworth Bruce," Hubert Creekmore's 1948 The Welcome, Thomas Hal Phillips's 1949 The Bitterweed Path, the 1949 Stranger in the Land by "Ward Thomas" [Edward T. McNamara]), and distinguished contemporaries whose homosexuality only became more evident in their work after Stonewall, such as James Schuyler (1923-1991), James Merrill (b. 1926), and Richard Howard (b. 1929).

The African-American gay male literary tradition consists of a substantial body of texts and includes some of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century.

The writers of the Beat Generation, many of whom were gay or bisexual, endorsed gay rights as a part of their rebellion against inhibition and self-censorship.

Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.

Since Stonewall, gay and lesbian drama has flourished, especially in the United States.

The Harlem Renaissance, an African-American literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, included several important gay and lesbian writers.

The gay and lesbian press is of prime importance in sustaining a frequently embattled minority and has been crucial in the development of a national mass movement for gay rights.

Latino gay men have published novels, poetry, drama, and essays that deal directly with gay themes, but the cultural forces of machismo and Catholicism have slowed the development of a Latino gay identity.

Before Stonewall, censorship of the theater caused authors to encode homosexual content in publicly-presented plays.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Critics use the term male romantic friendship to describe strong attachments between men in works ranging from ancient epics and medieval romances to Renaissance plays, Gothic novels, westerns, and war movies.

A distinctive American narrative genre that has developed over more than two centuries, the Western is now consumed worldwide; characteristically depicting homosocial relationships, it is also frequently suffused with homoeroticism.

The American dramatist Edward Albee, whose career flourished in the 1960s and then waned as a result of homophobia, wrote plays with gay subtexts in which loving is the ultimate act of violence and violence is the most effective expression of love.

One of the most gifted critics of American literature of the mid-twentieth century, Newton Arvin is today most remembered as a lover and mentor of Truman Capote and as the central figure in a 1960 scandal at Smith College.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

James Baldwin, a pioneering figure in twentieth-century literature, wrote sustained and articulate challenges to American racism and mandatory heterosexuality.

American novelist Djuna Barnes sought new forms of self-representation of lesbians in the face of society's compulsory heterosexuality.

James Barr is the pseudonym under which James Fugaté published the popular novel Quatrefoil (1950) and other works, and which he used as an activist in the homophile movement of the 1950s.

Gay American expatriate composer, writer, and translator Paul Bowles liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness.

One of the first Jewish-American writers of his generation to write in English rather than Yiddish, Myron Brinig was also one of the first to create homosexual characters, though he remained publicly closeted all of his life.

American novelist John Horne Burns used his outsider status as a homosexual to critique America's class-coded heterosexist morality and its ethnocentrism and marketplace mentality.

Both in his life and his novels, American writer William S. Burroughs was an outlaw and a provocateur, focusing on sexual repression as the fundamental element of social control and writing in a surrealistic and bitterly satirical mode.

The bisexual Lord Byron treated many of his homosexual love affairs in his poetry, encoding them by the use of classical references or by purporting that they were affairs with women.

Truman Capote's fiction and autobiographical works helped establish what might be called the quintessential homosexual writing style of the 1950s and 1960s.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

John Cheever, who was bisexual, gradually came to invest homosexuality with redemptive and transforming powers.

A successor to Walt Whitman, Hart Crane found spiritual transcendence in homoerotic desire.

Playwright Mart Crowley deserves honor for having blazed the trail for gay-themed theater with his 1969 groundbreaking play The Boys in the Band.

Countee Cullen, an important member of the Harlem Renaissance, has coded references to homosexuality in much of his poetry.

Robert Duncan wrote a remarkable series of poems that deal directly with the love of men for other men.

Edward Field's poetry is an account of coming to terms with homosexuality in the literary world of New York in the second half of the twentieth century.

Members of New York's early twentieth-century avant-garde, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler are also the authors of a widely suppressed and largely unread experimental novel of 1930s gay life, The Young and Evil.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

The works of García Lorca, internationally recognized as Spain's most prominent lyric poet and dramatist of the twentieth century, are filled with thinly veiled homosexual motifs and themes.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

The forthrightly gay Allen Ginsberg is probably the best-known American poet to emerge in the post-World War II period.

The candor with which the bisexual Paul Goodman wrote about the homosexual libido in his poetry and fiction made him an important and highly visible advocate of gay liberation.

The Anglo-American writer Thom Gunn was a major gay poet and a perceptive critic of gay poetry.

There has been renewed interest in the life and work of American adventurer and travel writer Richard Halliburton at least in part because of his homosexuality.

A central figure in the evolution of modern American art, Marsden Hartley created works that help define the delicate balance between the erotic and the poetic.

Richard Howard's searching and witty poetry, in which homosexuality is not a problem but a solution, is a significant contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Langston Hughes, whose literary legacy is enormous and varied, was closeted, but homosexuality was an important influence on his literary imagination, and many of his poems may be read as gay texts.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

Though closeted, Henry James had a number of intimate relations with young men, and his sexual orientation imbued his fiction.

Co-author of the book of the celebrated musical A Chorus Line, James Kirkwood also wrote five popular novels and two nonfiction books.

Although best known for his contributions to the development of American ballet, Lincoln Kirstein was an important figure in the shaping of twentieth-century American culture generally.

Critic F. O. Matthiessen was instrumental in the inclusion of gay writers in American literary history, and the exchange of letters between him and his lover Russell Cheney are among the most revealing gay male documents of the 1920s.

American publisher and writer Robert McAlmon made significant contributions to twentieth-century literature, both by publishing avant-garde writers and by depicting a queer subculture in his own works.

Texas-reared Terrence McNally, whose first play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, was one of the great scandals of the 1964 New York season, emerged in the 1990s as America's most important gay playwright since Tennessee Williams.

James Merrill's significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry.

Howard Moss, one of the leading figures of American letters in the latter half of the twentieth century, is the author of a significant body of elegant, erudite, and urbane work, especially poetry. 

Often categorized as a Beat writer, poet and memoirist Harold Norse created a body of work that uses everyday language and images to explore and celebrate both the commonplace and the exotic.

The influential poet Frank O'Hara wrote works informed by both modern art and the world of urban gay male culture.

Robert Patrick is a founding father of gay drama in America and an influence in the development of gay drama in England.

James Purdy's novels often describe obsessive love between men for whom homosexuality is unthinkable and whose fate is inevitably bleak.

In his novels about hustling, preeminently City of Night and Numbers, John Rechy moves from the world of homosexual behavior into the world of gay identity.

The American composer Ned Rorem has achieved literary prominence by publishing a series of diaries that include candid descriptions of homosexual love affairs and relationships.

Although late in fully understanding his sexual preference, George Santayana wrote a series of sonnets celebrating his love for a friend who died young and described his male friendships in rhapsodic terms in his autobiography.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Schuyler, a prominent member of the New York School of poets and painters, wrote openly about his homosexuality.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

A brilliantly original gay writer, Jack Spicer wrote poetry noted for its lyric beauty, intellectual power, and formal invention.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

Edward Prime-Stevenson, who wrote both fiction and nonfiction, might well be styled the first modern American gay author.

A pioneering California writer, Charles Warren Stoddard is best known for his homoerotic tales collected as South-Sea Idyls and The Island of Tranquil Delights.

John Addington Symonds was the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness.

Novelist John Kennedy Toole expressed sympathy for the socially marginalized and animosity towards the powers that enforce conformity, but he was never comfortable with his own homosexuality and presents sexual non-conformity in highly conflicted ways.

The gay novelist, critic, and photographer Carl Van Vechten was especially interested in African-American culture and was an influential patron to many writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he has pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.

American writer Glenway Wescott is author of a series of critically esteemed novels, but may be best known for his central position in New York's artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s.

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.

The works of Thornton Wilder are landmarks of American literature, but they reveal scant traces of the author's homosexuality.

Jonathan Williams was the author of more than a hundred books and booklets of gay poetry that merges flesh and spirit with a sense of history.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays.

In his occasional depictions of gay subjects, Lanford Wilson proves himself to be a powerful voice speaking of the lives of gay men today.

In addition to writing fiction with gay and bisexual characters and situations, Donald Windham has made a significant contribution to gay studies as a memoirist and editor.