Doktor Faustus (1947), Mann's great parable about Germany's descent into fascism, also contains an artist figure who is homosexual. Using the Faust myth, the novel traces the decay of bourgeois culture in Germany from the late nineteenth century to the present. The composer Adrian Leverkühn makes a pact with the devil in order to be able to create masterpieces of music for a few years. In exchange, he grants the devil his soul.

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One of the musicians in Leverkühn's circle of friends is Rudi Schwerdtfeger, with whom Leverkühn has, for a time, a sexual relationship. Again, homosexual desire is, in Mann's conception, antithetical to those forces and institutions that maintain and advance society.

Several critics believe that in some of Mann's later works, for example, Die Betrogene (The Deceived, 1953) and Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, 1954), he purposely disguised his own homosexual feelings and gave them a heterosexual guise by having female characters experience what he himself had felt for a younger man.

Conclusion

Thomas Mann's depiction of homosexual desire can be seen as an attempt to encode homosexuality in a manner that would allow him to speak what at the time was unspeakable for him, namely, his own homosexual feelings. This dual Otherness, that of the artist and that of the homosexual, found private expression in his diaries. As it became the major theme of his works, it took on other forms in language (metaphor, allusion, topoi), character, and plot.

Mann's fictional works have proved of enormous interest to gay scholars recently because so much "about" homosexual desire in fiction prior to Stonewall has to be read between the lines. It remains encoded, yet open to the interpretation of a generation of readers whose experiences and indeed definitions of homosexuality are quite different from Mann's own.

With major periodic setbacks, over the last two centuries German-speaking authors have gradually developed a gay and lesbian positive literature.

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.

Opera, an eclectic synthesis of voice, drama, music, costume, visual arts and spectacle, has played an integral role in queer culture since its development in seventeenth century Venice.

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.

Writer, actress, and intellectual refugee from the Third Reich, Erika Mann was one of the twentieth century's most intriguing nonconformists, noted especially for her anti-fascist cabaret satire.

Klaus Mann's vision of homosexuality is marked by loneliness and alienation, and his fiction is characterized by melancholic hopelessness.

The poems of Count August von Platen are homoerotic expressions of Platonic love, idealism, beauty, friendship, and longing.

American writer Glenway Wescott is author of a series of critically esteemed novels, but may be best known for his central position in New York's artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s.

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.