O'Hara was born in Baltimore on June 27, 1926. In 1927, his family moved to Grafton, Massachusetts, and O'Hara was educated in private schools until 1944. He served a two-year tour of duty in the Navy before beginning college at Harvard as a music major. He eventually changed his major to English and graduated with a B.A. in 1950; he completed an M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1951.

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O'Hara began writing in earnest while at Michigan; he won the university's Hopwood Award in Creative Writing and wrote two plays, Try! Try! and Change Your Bedding that were mounted at the Poet's Theatre in Cambridge.

On graduation, O'Hara assumed a position at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. He left for a two-year period in 1953 to 1955 to assume an associate editorship of Art News and then returned to MOMA as a special assistant to the International Program. In 1960, he was promoted to curator of paintings and sculptures.

O'Hara's career as a poet is intricately interwoven with his life in the art world; indeed, O'Hara is often thought of as one of the major art critics of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1959, he published a study of Jackson Pollock for George Braziller's Great American Artists Series, which is frequently considered to be the canonical study of Pollock. O'Hara also published studies of contemporary Spanish art, Robert Motherwell, David Smith, and Nakian.

The influence of art is everywhere in O'Hara's writings. His first major volume of poetry, A City Winter and Other Poems (1952), was published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Its poems demonstrate a preoccupation with surrealism and with dadaist collage and montage techniques.

Two of O'Hara's texts specifically work as collaboration with artists: Stones (1958) is a series of lithographs by Larry Rivers combined with poems by O'Hara; Odes (1960) was illustrated by serigraphs by Mike Goldberg.

O'Hara also participated in the growing avant-garde film culture of New York, and coproduced two experimental films with Al Leslie, The Last Clean Shirt (1963) and Philosophy in the Bedroom (1965).

One of O'Hara's most important poetic innovations was an allegiance to popular culture. Although his poems are structured by the elite concerns of art, his subjects and images are frequently drawn from the world of urban gay male culture.

"The Day Lady Died," one of O'Hara's most famous poems, tells of the moment he heard that Billie Holiday had passed away. The title itself puns on Holiday's popular nickname, Lady Day. "Biotherm (For Bill Berkson)," one of the major collage poems of O'Hara, combines, among other things, images of Fire Island, classic Hollywood cinema, and restaurant menus. Biotherm itself was the brand name of a popular sunscreen.

O'Hara died on July 25, 1966, when he was struck by a dune buggy on Fire Island. His death was untimely, but his influence on gay poetry is undeniable. Among the poets who acknowledge a direct debt to O'Hara's stylistic innovations are John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Ned Rorem, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg.

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.

Perhaps no other book has been more influential--for better or worse--in determining the construction of gay and lesbian identity in the modern world, as well as social attitudes toward homosexuality, than the Bible.

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

Two of the communities of Fire Island, New York--Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines--are famous as hedonistic resort towns for gay men and lesbians.

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.

John Ashbery, one of the leading contemporary American poets, avoids explicit gay content in his poetry, but his work shares concerns with other late twentieth-century gay writing.

Robert Duncan wrote a remarkable series of poems that deal directly with the love of men for other men.

The forthrightly gay Allen Ginsberg is probably the best-known American poet to emerge in the post-World War II period.

The work of Australian lesbian poet Dorothy Porter presents a cheeky challenge to a literary establishment whose poetry has often been defined by pretension and obfuscation.

Bisexual artist Fairfield Porter is recognized as a major twentieth-century American Intimist painter.

One of the pioneers of Pop Art, Larry Rivers was a prolific artist, sculptor, and jazz musician; although he did not identify as a bisexual, the twice-married artist had significant same-sex sexual experience.

The American composer Ned Rorem has achieved literary prominence by publishing a series of diaries that include candid descriptions of homosexual love affairs and relationships.

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