Even though Carpenter's writings have been reissued in affordable and dependable editions from London's Gay Men's Press, he remains one of the most under-examined figures in the history of gay writing. One reason for this is that his mystical orientation, transhistorical sensibility, and eurocentrism initially seem to make him incompatible with current views of sex and sexuality.

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Yet if these traits are bracketed as the effects of the moment in which he wrote, a level of amazing cognizance and foresight appears. The influence of the feminist movement on Carpenter's work resulted in a theorization that views all sex and gender relations as effects of capitalism, a view that is entirely congruent with current Marxist and social-constructionist views.

Moreover, his centrality within his own culture led to significant influences on authors such as E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence; the current neglect of Carpenter results in a decontextualization of these and other writers' thinking. It is to be hoped that as gay and lesbian studies continue to expand, the place of Carpenter as a social and sexual theorist will be more fully recovered.

From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

The homophile movement of the United States refers to organizations and political strategies employed by homosexuals from the end of World War II to 1970.

Home to one of England's largest and liveliest glbtq communities, Manchester has hosted EuroPride and the Pride Games and established a popular Lesbian and Gay Heritage Trail.

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

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

Twentieth-century efforts to reform British law and public opinions about homosexuality met with mixed results, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United Kingdom has emerged as a leader in recognizing the rights of its glbtq citizens.

"Uranian" and "Uranianism" were early terms denoting homosexuality, in English use primarily from the 1890s through the first quarter of the 1900s.

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a Cambridge classicist and friend of E. M. Forster, is significant for the glbtq legacy as the author of an immensely popular book on ancient Greece and a posthumously published, surprisingly frank autobiography.

Henry Havelock Ellis--British psychologist and writer--was one of the first modern thinkers to challenge Victorian taboos against the frank and objective discussion of sex.

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 carefully detailed case studies of nineteenth-century psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing shed light on the sexual habits of a wide spectrum of men and women.

For his time, D. H. Lawrence was a maverick in his open and adventurous discussion of all sexual issues and especially homosexuality, both male and female.

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

Nineteenth-Century German activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was both the first modern theorist of homosexuality and the first homosexual to "come out" publicly.

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.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.