Moss also published three collections of his critical writings, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker, including Writing Against Time: Critical Essays and Reviews (1969), Whatever is Moving (1981), and Minor Monuments: Selected Essays (1986).

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In his 1981 collection of essays, Whatever is Moving, Moss confronts homosexuality in the works of Walt Whitman, C.P. Cavafy, and James Schuyler.

Moss contends that homosexuality informed Whitman's "most intense emotional affairs" and provided Cavafy with "built-in advantages as a spokesman for the city" of Alexandria, since as a gay man, he got to know it "in ways most people don't--strange places at strange hours." As for Schuyler, Moss admired his sexual frankness, remarking "He is in touch with parts of himself not usually available for examination and not often handled by most writers." Moss points out for particular attention Schuyler's sixty-page "The Morning of the Poem" (1980) and its rendering of the "men Schuyler has been attracted to, described lovingly."

Additionally, Moss wrote essays on such significant glbtq writers as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, and Katherine Mansfield.

Moss is also the author of four plays: The Folding Green (1954), Garden Music (1966), The Oedipus Mah-Jong Scandal (1968), and The Palace at 4 A.M. (1972), a poetic reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth.

In addition to Vassar College, Moss taught at several other academic institutions, including Washington University (1972), Barnard College (1976), Columbia University (1977), University of California, Irvine (1979), and the University of Houston (1980).

Moss died of cardiac arrest on September 16, 1987.

While he received accolades from critics and peers, as well as several prestigious awards, Moss's skills and artistry as a poet went largely underappreciated by the general public during his lifetime; he never achieved the fame or wide readership that many cultural commentators felt he deserved.

"Partly as a consequence of [his role at the New Yorker] his own talent has been underrated," suggests the critic David Ray. "Yet he has with consistent productivity . . . turned out volume after volume and has dutifully and with impressive scholarship written criticism. He is, in short, an American man-of-letters in a sense largely missing from our literary culture."

Bruce Bawer, the gay essayist and poet, echoed such sentiments in his tribute to Moss published in the New Criterion, noting that "the grace, refinement, and deep humanity of [Moss's] poetry will continue to draw readers to him when many of the more celebrated poets of our day are forgotten."

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.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

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.

A poetic response to the death of a greatly loved person, the elegy has had since classical times a homoerotic component.

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

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.

Widely acknowledged as one of the finest twentieth-century American poets, Elizabeth Bishop encoded a lesbian identity in her poems.

Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen sprinkled her fiction with people and relationships, usually coded, of either clear or ambiguous homosexuality.

Alexandrian Greek poet C. P. Cavafy has written some of the greatest homoerotic poems of all time.

The Canadian-American poet Daryl Hine was a leader in giving serious homosexual poetry a place in the mainstream of American poetry.

Richard Howard's searching and witty poetry, in which homosexuality is not a problem but a solution, is a significant contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Though Katherine Mansfield was reticent in the depiction of lesbianism in her short stories, she had close female friendships and was always deeply concerned with the status of women.

Poet J. D. McClatchy, Jr., a master of traditional poetic forms, most notably the sonnet and sonnet sequence, ranks as a significant voice in contemporary American letters.

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

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

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.