Considered Delany's magnum opus, Dhalgren depicts a violent urban dystopia modeled on the abandoned, burned-out blocks that blighted American ghettos in the 1970s. Kidd, the protagonist, is both poet and outlaw, whose charisma wins him a street gang's loyalty and numerous "ambisexual" escapades. Kidd is also amnesiac; unable to learn from his past, he must continually reinvent his response to society. Meanwhile, Kidd as poet observes his own creative process as the novel unfolds. These devices reinforce a sense of disorientation and precarious identity, drawn from Delany's own experiences with dyslexia.

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Less acclaimed but equally challenging, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) is a densely woven epic of a union between two men of disparate backgrounds, one a former slave, the other the scion of a powerful family. Privileged classes maintain their concept of status via holographic illusions, but even this sheltered universe seethes with a conservative backlash movement that is reminiscent of today's culture wars. As of 2005, however, its cliffhanger ending still awaits a long-promised sequel.

In Triton (1976), Delany adopts the perspective of an anti-hero who, as an unreconstructed masculinist, is frustrated by the social dynamics of a society wholly comfortable with sex changes and gay relationships.

The Nevèrÿon series (Tales of Nevèrÿon, 1979; Nevèrÿona, 1983; Flight from Nevèrÿon, 1985; and The Bridge of Lost Desire, 1987) is Delany's excursion into non-futuristic fantasy and includes some of his most popular fiction. Through the exploits of Gorgik, a gay, mixed-race former slave who rises to authority in a pre-monetary society, Delany explores the attributes of a "civilized" person: one who is accustomed to social differences and has mastered effective modes of negotiation among them. Flight . . . includes the "The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals," which, Delany later explained, is intended partly as a refutation of those who would use AIDS "as an excuse to armor the body in silence, ignorance, and rubber."

In his essays, Delany comments on the relationship between his fiction and life as he experiences it. "Fiction makes models of reality," he observes. He is concerned with distinguishing between the "true" (culturally assumed paradigms) and the "real" (observable realities), because minority groups' reality models are different from those of the dominant culture.

Delany sees clear lines of influence from the African-American civil rights struggle to the women's and gay liberation movements, noting that the civil rights movement only made headway when society began questioning the sexual stereotypes that had been embedded in racial ones. For him, sexual orientation is not about identity--he considers that approach "reductive"--but rather about the struggle against socially imposed conformity. He notes that "coming out" underwent a shift in meaning after Stonewall, from "into gay society" (an action for a gay audience) to "out of the closet" (an action aimed at the dominant society), and fears that feminists and homosexuals may backslide into reactionary power dynamics if they fail to remain faithful to the civil rights model.

Delany's voluminous oeuvre of fiction is accompanied by a prolific body of commentary, interviews, and essays. He is fond of pointing out that science fiction is not so much a genre as a "way of reading" with its own connotations and expectations. He elaborates on semiotics (the semantic functioning of signs and symbols) as developed by Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Campbell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the poststructuralist literary analysis of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. Shorter Views (2002) is of special interest for his views on sexuality, coming out, and AIDS. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) examines the effects of the Times Square makeover on New York City's working-class gay community.

Delany has taught creative writing and comparative literature at SUNY-Buffalo, Cornell, University of Wisconsin, University of Massachusetts, and the Clarion workshops. He is currently Professor of Comparative Literature at Temple University. In 2005, he received the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award.

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.

In the twenty years since its first appearance in the West, AIDS has been the subject of a large body of literature, most of it written by gay men and much of it designed to expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of affected individuals.

The contemporary literary awards given specifically to honor glbtq books may be seen as an outgrowth of the modern American gay rights movement, so intertwined are they with the movement for equality.

Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.

Off and on over two centuries, New York City has also reigned as the capital of homosexual, transgender, and queer life in America.

Sadomasochistic literature, one of the most controversial forms of lesbian and gay writing, confronts such issues as domination, submission, uniformity, and humiliation and poses a constant challenge to them.

Beginning with the "new wave" in the 1960s, science fiction and fantasy writers have explored openly and seriously issues of gender and sexual orientation.

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.

Versatile African-American artist Nayland Blake creates--in a variety of media--work that reflects his preoccupation with his racial and sexual identities.

One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it.

Although Ursula Le Guin does not address homosexual issues directly, she includes homosexuals as minor characters in works that cause readers to reexamine their assumptions about sex roles and stereotypes.

In both her science fiction and her criticism, Joanna Russ is outspokenly lesbian and feminist.