Bowles was born in New York on December 30, 1910. His father was a dentist who exhibited little warmth for his son; an inflexible man, he evoked responses of passive resistance and secrecy, characteristics that would mark Paul's life and writing. As a boy, Bowles had few friends and took refuge in fantasy writing. He matriculated at the University of Virginia, but academic life did not interest him, and he left for Paris abruptly in 1929. Although he soon returned to New York, from 1931 onward he would spend most of his life outside the United States.

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Bowles's literary reputation rests on his novels, but until he was thirty-five he showed more interest in musical composition and poetry. Aaron Copland was a mentor, and in France, he intrigued Gertrude Stein, though she thought he was no poet. But Bowles was gifted in a number of fields, and increasingly he spread his skills over several: music for plays and films, short stories, autobiography, travel writing, and translations.

In childhood, Bowles was fond of a homosexual uncle. During one stay-over with him, he happened to enter a room where men were dancing intimately together. His uncle's anger at his nephew hurt Bowles, who had not been alarmed at this sight, and the incident suggests Bowles's attitude to different sexual behavior: He liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness. Such is the case in his most explicitly homosexual story, "Pages from Cold Point" (1947), in which a boy tries to seduce his father.

"Pages from Cold Point" marked a turning point in Bowles's life. In 1938, he had married Jane Auer, and in 1947, they went to live in Tangier. Jane Bowles had published Two Serious Ladies, and explored gay relationships in both her life and in her fiction.

Paul Bowles explored the psychological dimensions of relationships less directly, and many readers prefer to interpret his ground-breaking novel The Sheltering Sky (1949) in existentialist terms, even though it deals centrally with the extraordinary dynamic of his relationship with Jane--a dynamic to which the homosexuality of both is relevant.

With the arrival of the Bowleses, the Tangier cult developed rapidly. American writers and artists of the Beat Generation--William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and others--visited and socialized; the ambience of Tangier, as well as its toleration of experiments in drug use and sexual expression proved liberating and stimulating.

Jane Bowles, always on the edge of sexual scandal, died in 1973. Paul Bowles, though he continued to attract interesting figures and, in his discreet way, a cult following, was very stable, and continued to produce a stream of work until his death in 1999.

His translation work started with the Sartre classic No Exit (1958) but became more significant with his translations of previously unknown works by Moroccan writers Mohammed Mrabet, Mohamed Choukri and, subsequently, others.

Bowles's self-containment is signaled in his response to Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno's biography, which he attacked as being based on the testimony of "certain mischievous gossips." It should, however, be noted that several other texts about Tangier, its status as a cult-site, and Paul and Jane Bowles are even more "gossipy."

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.

Most gay, lesbian, and bisexual American writers who adhered to Marxist-oriented parties and social movements between 1917 and the 1960s strove to hide their sexual orientation, and some even depicted homosexuals negatively in their fiction and drama.

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.

Although Western culture's reliance upon binary systems of classification and identification has meant the practical erasure of bisexuality, as such, from literary and cultural analysis, bisexual experiences appear in many literary works from ancient times to the present.

American novelist, playwright, and short story writer Jane Bowles spent her life examining lesbian identity with an honest and sardonic wit.

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.

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

Despite his outsider status as a Jewish homosexual, Aaron Copland composed a significant number of musical works that embody the idea of American history, struggle, and courage.

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

One of the most distinguished and discerning British men of letters of the mid-twentieth century, John Lehmann is best known as an editor and publisher.

Poet, translator, literary and art critic, and short story writer, Edouard Roditi was associated with most of the twentieth-century's avant-garde literary movements from Surrealism to post-modernism.

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

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.

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