The Flower Beneath the Foot (1924), which includes a description of a party excavating "among the ruins of Chedorlahomor, a faubourg of Sodom," follows the adventures of Laura de Nazianzi, who achieves sainthood by renouncing heterosexual romance and joining the lesbian Convent of the Flaming Hood.

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Sorrow in Sunlight (1924), given the outrageous title Prancing Nigger in the American edition at the suggestion of Firbank's close friend Carl Van Vechten, ascribes the typical social aspirations of the lower-middle-class English to Mrs. Almadou Mouth, who migrates with her black family to the local capital of an unnamed tropical isle so that she can get her daughters into society.

His last and most explicitly gay work, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, appeared in 1926, the same year as Firbank's early death at the age of forty. The book begins with the cardinal baptizing a police puppy named Crack, and ends when the naked cardinal ("elementary now as Adam himself") drops dead while pursuing a choirboy named Chicklet around his church.

The posthumously published The Artificial Princess (1934) reworks Wilde's tragic play Salome, concerning the fatal encounter between the Herodias' daughter and John the Baptist, as a comedy.

With the exception of Prancing Nigger, which enjoyed brisk sales in the United States, Firbank received no income from his literary works, which were published at his own expense and pointedly ignored by British critics unable either to gloss over or acknowledge his homosexual subject matter.

By accusing him of "frivolity" Firbank's homophobic detractors have obscured recognition of his literary innovations, which place him in the company of other gay and lesbian modernists such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Evelyn Waugh, and Gertrude Stein.

No descriptive summary can begin to convey the rich allusiveness of his narratives, which abandon conventional plotting and chains of cause and effect and focus, rather, on the workings of an artistic consciousness through a series of interrelated conversations, animated tableaux, and symbols that constitute a veritable encyclopedia of gay and lesbian cultural reference.

Excavating the homosexual meanings in everything from St. Sebastian to Egyptian statuettes, butterflies to orchids, and Priapus to Ganymede, his use of inverted word order, dashes, exclamation points, ellipses, and innuendo shows his characteristic "" mode of presenting material in fragments in order to articulate the love that dares not speak its name.

His description of Monsignor Parr in Vainglory as "something between a butterfly and a misanthrope, [who] was temperamental, when not otherwise . . . employed," gives some indication of his masterful use of indirection.

Committed to the preservation of gay and lesbian culture in an era of political backlash, as well as to the unfettered expression of his artistic self, Firbank himself may be fittingly characterized by the comment of Lady Parvula de Panzoust in Valmouth that "None but those whose courage is unquestionable can venture to be effeminate."

He died on May 21, 1926, probably as a result of acute alcoholism and general debility. In a truly Firbankian scenario, he was accidentally buried in a Protestant cemetery, but--upon discovery of the error--was subsequently reinterred in the Catholic cemetery of San Lorenzo.

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

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

Like other minority groups, gay men and lesbians have had to develop both a particular sense of humor among themselves in order to make their marginal social status endurable and also a defensive awareness toward the rest of the world in order to disarm their adversaries with laughter.

Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.

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

The life of eccentric British composer, painter, and novelist Baron Berners was a grand performance.

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.

Noted for his elegant prose style and subtle representations of moral ambiguities, Alan Hollinghurst has in recent years emerged as Great Britain's most significant contemporary gay novelist.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

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.

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.

Evelyn Waugh, who had homosexual affairs while at Oxford but later led a heterosexual life, treated homosexuals both nostalgically and contemptuously in his novels.

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.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.