This theme of sexual identity dominates Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956). Its all-white cast of characters and its candid treatment of homosexual romance disappointed many of Baldwin's readers, yet Giovanni's Room eventually helped secure Baldwin's central place in gay American literature.

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A lyrical novel of remembrance and atonement, Giovanni's Room focuses on David, a young American in Paris. There he falls in love with Giovanni, a handsome Italian. But David, unable to accept his own gay self, abandons Giovanni, who helplessly seeks refuge in the Parisian sexual underworld. In a rather sensational turn of events, Giovanni murders Guillaume, an employer who humiliates and exploits him; soon he is caught, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.

The narrative begins on the eve of his execution and, in an extended flashback, David reconstructs his relationship with Giovanni and his own role in contributing to Giovanni's current plight. In David's recollections, Baldwin forcefully dramatizes the central dilemma of the protagonist: He is caught between cultural expectations of heterosexual conduct, which he himself has internalized, and his private sexual desire for other men. David fails to resolve the dilemma; because he is unwilling to accept his sexuality honestly, he is unable to live and love authentically.

Another Country, Baldwin's controversial bestseller, was published in 1962. A complex narrative, it explicitly combines racial and sexual protests. Its setting is mostly New York City; its plot is structured around the lives of eight racially, regionally, socioeconomically, and sexually diverse characters. This multicultural cast constitutes a microcosmic America; the conflicts among them, therefore, become emblematic of larger crises in American society.

But even as the novel projects a nightmarish vision of contemporary life, it extols the possibility of redemption through love. And for a pre-Stonewall novel, its treatment of homosexuality is remarkably sophisticated. Here homosexuality does not cause panic or produce guilt. True, it leads to suffering, as it does in the case of Eric--a gay Southern white male character who plays the most healing role in the novel--but in Baldwin's theology, suffering can lead to redemptive self-knowledge, to a more humane understanding of the self and the Other. Gayness, Baldwin suggests, has redemptive potential and can indeed be a valid basis to imagine and build a bold new world.

The idea that homosexuality may hold redemptive possibilities is articulated even more forthrightly in Baldwin's next novel, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968). It is the story of Leo Proudhammer, a bisexual, thirty-nine-year-old, highly successful black actor. While recuperating in a San Francisco hospital from a massive heart attack, Leo looks back at his life and imaginatively charts his journey from a bleak childhood in Harlem to his present status as a phenomenally successful artist.

He seeks through his recollections a pattern that would grant at least a semblance of order to his anarchic life. In his memory of his gay relationship with Christopher, a young black militant committed to revolutionary change, Leo ultimately recognizes the central justification for his life. Here, as in Another Country, Baldwin casts the homosexual in a redemptive role. Christopher's name itself, for example, suggests his role as a racial savior.

But Christopher is also comfortably and confidently gay. Thus by combining black militancy and gay sexuality in Christopher, Baldwin suggests that there is no fundamental conflict between the two traits. Such a suggestion may be at least in part a calculated response by Baldwin to the viciously hostile reaction his earlier gay-themed novels elicited from angry black militants who were uncomfortable with the increasingly visible role of Baldwin--an openly gay black man--in the civil rights movement.

There is in Baldwin's next novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), a conspicuous absence of gay themes. But in his sixth and final novel, Just Above My Head (1979), the focus is on the life of Arthur Montana, a recently deceased black gay gospel singer, as seen through the eyes of his surviving brother, Hall Montana. A lengthy narrative, Just Above My Head is Hall's love song for his brother, an attempt to understand his troubled life and lonely death.

Gay sexuality, as in Another Country and Go Tell, is one of the major themes in the novel; however, in contrast to those earlier works, here Baldwin treats it less self-consciously and less polemically. The gay theme, in fact, is more smoothly integrated into the narrative, and it is presented as an essentially unsensational, though problematic, aspect of Arthur's search for identity, meaning, and love.

Baldwin is a pioneering figure in twentieth-century literature. As a black gay writer in a culture that privileges those who are white and straight, he offered in his work a sustained and articulate challenge to the dominant discourses of American racism and mandatory heterosexuality. As an African-American writer, he ranks among the finest. As a gay writer, he occupies a preeminent place.

Long before the Stonewall Riots of 1969 helped liberate the gay literary imagination in the United States, he boldly made his sexuality a vital part of his artistic vision. Even more important, by insisting on honest and open explorations of gay and bisexual themes in his fiction, he made a sharp break from the established African-American literary conventions. Through such a radical departure from tradition, he helped create the space for a generation of young African-American gay writers who succeeded him.

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.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

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

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

Australian political scientist and self-described "international activist-academic" Dennis Altman has studied both the glbtq political movement and the globalization of sexual identities.

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.

Best known for his research on peanuts, agronomist and educator George Washington Carver become a cultural icon as the "Wizard of Tuskegee," but at the cost of hiding his homosexuality.

The pressures of being black and gay in a racist and homophobic society may have ultimately robbed renowned American painter Beauford Delaney of his sanity.

Lambda Award-winning author Larry Duplechan is best known for Blackbird (1987), a coming of age novel about a black teenager growing up in the bland outer suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1970s.

The Legacy Walk in Chicago is an outdoor history museum that reclaims and celebrates glbtq contributions to world history and culture.

Essayist and memoirist Richard Rodriguez, perhaps the most widely read of Latino-American authors, positions himself as an outsider in America, not only because of his ethnicity, but also because of his sexuality.