Freed of the constraints that a more prestigious academic position might have imposed on her, Paglia was able to skewer many of academe's sacred cows, including the dominance of French theory in literary criticism and the privileging of high culture, but the costs of such freedom has been a tendency to stake out positions more for their shock value than their reasoned approach. As a public intellectual she has frequently been more of a provocateur than a serious commentator, someone who sometimes seems more interested in calling attention to herself than in engaging in serious dialogue.

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Paglia followed Sexual Personae with other books, including Sex, Art, and American Culture in 1992, Vamps and Tramps in 1994, an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds published by the British Film Institute in 1998, and Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems in 2006. Though none of these have created the kind of intellectual excitement that her first book generated, they have sold well and solidified her reputation.

Paglia's essays have been widely published, and she writes regular columns on culture and politics for Interview Magazine and Salon. She continues to teach at the University of the Arts.

As a media star and cultural "expert," Paglia is distinguished by an unusually wide range of interest and by seemingly contradictory stances. She can speak expertly of figures as different as John Donne and Madonna, Alexander Pope and Robert Mapplethorpe and of works as distinct as Spenser's Faerie Queen and Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct. And though a self-described atheist, she extolls the social and cultural contributions of religion.

Her mordant criticisms of American feminism for inculcating a victim mentality, for a neglect of science, and for a distaste for Dionysian sexuality have caused some to label her anti-feminist, a charge that she vigorously disputes. "I belonged to a wing of feminism that was ostracized and silenced, and we suffered for decades during the hegemony of the puritanical anti-sex wing typified by Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon and so forth," she stated in 2006. "So when I suddenly seemed to appear like a Jack-in-the box in the early 90s, with a book it had taken me 20 years to write, people were determined to say I was anti-feminist. I said, 'no I'm not, I'm anti you, I'm anti the feminist establishment.'"

In Vamps and Tramps, she declares, "I want a revamped feminism. . . . My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her--in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment. . . . Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and professional world--but not at the price of special protections for women which are infantilizing and anti-democratic."

In addition to criticizing the feminist establishment, Paglia has also lambasted pro-choice activists, date-rape victims, and gay organizations such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), which she has described as loud and whiny.

Paglia inveighs against what she has called the "gay Stalinism" of some activists, especially those influenced by Michel Foucault and Post-modernism, as opposed to what she calls the humanistic tradition that extends from Whitman and Wilde to Tennessee Williams and Allen Ginsberg.

She claims that the welcome relaxation of legal and social sanctions against homosexuality over the past 30 years has weakened the unsentimental powers of observation for which gay men and lesbians, as outsiders, were once renowned. "Gay men used to be ferocious exemplars of free thought and free speech. But within 15 years of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, an insidious totalitarianism infected gay activism, parallel to what was occurring in feminism in the Catharine MacKinnon/Andrea Dworkin era. Intolerance and witch hunts became the norm," she declared in 2002.

Although she describes herself as a Democrat, she was very critical of President Clinton for bringing shame on the office of the Presidency. She describes herself as "pro-military," but she has vigorously opposed the War in Iraq and denounced the incompetence of the Bush administration. Her political stances are sometimes difficult to categorize, and are more often libertarian than liberal or conservative.

Paglia is an outspoken opponent of "political correctness" and what she sees as enforced liberalism on college campuses. A proud advocate of sexual deviance, she supports pornography--especially gay male porn--as a celebration of sexuality.

Since 1993, Paglia has lived with her partner, artist and teacher Allison Maddex. She co-parents Maddex's son Lucien, whom she legally adopted in 2002, but, with typical contrariness does not call herself his mother, since she does not believe that a child should have two mothers.

Since the 1960s, European film has included significant gay-themed films, many of them directed by openly gay and lesbian directors.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual film directors have been a vital creative presence in cinema since the medium's inception over one hundred years ago.

The gay and lesbian press is of prime importance in sustaining a frequently embattled minority and has been crucial in the development of a national mass movement for gay rights.

The dominant ideology among politicized lesbians during the 1970s and 1980s, Lesbian Feminism was based on the premise that lesbianism and feminism were inextricably linked.

Libertarians are not necessarily advocates of gay and lesbian rights, but they certainly want the state out of a person's bedroom and they question any governmental regulation of marriage.

Post-modern theory has led to the problematizing of marginalized and "other" peoples and cultures and to viewing homosexuality as a social construction.

Using bold images and confrontational tactics, ACT UP worked to promote awareness of AIDS and challenge the complacency of politicians and government officials in the early years of the epidemic.

Best known for her revolutionary study of women's condition, The Second Sex (1949) and as the companion of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir had a number of same-sex relationships during her life.

Emily Dickinson's poems and letters to her sister-in-law Susan are both passionate and elusive in their homoeroticism.

England's supreme poet of heterosexual love in the late Renaissance, John Donne also wrote a series of homoerotic verse letters to a young man and a remarkable dramatic monologue in a lesbian voice.

Controversial radical feminist and anti-pornography crusader Andrea Dworkin wrote and spoke extensively on the cultural subjugation of women.

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

In some of the most original poetry of the Victorian period, the sexually-repressed Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated male beauty as one of the most splendid witnesses to the divine.

Perhaps the most famous of contemporary American photographers, Annie Leibovitz has evolved a personal style characterized by imaginative poses, bright colors, and intense lighting.

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial images typically combine rigorously formal composition and design with extreme subject matter.

Poet and playwright Edna Saint Vincent Millay expressed her bisexuality in both her life and her work.

While Milton accepted the biblical condemnation of sodomy, some of his works suggest that his attitude toward same-sex relations was enlightened for his age.

Michelangelo Signorile is a prolific, and often provocative, writer and activist whose books and articles, radio show, newspaper columns, and website champion the cause of glbtq rights.

Although she treated her own lesbianism as a strictly private matter, Susan Sontag wrote perceptively on gay male figures and issues.

The confrontations between police and demonstrators at the Stonewall Inn in New York City the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 mark the beginning of the modern glbtq movement for equal rights.

Social and political commentator Andrew Sullivan has established himself as an influential participant in Anglo-American political discourse.

German filmmaker Monika Treut consistently explores challenging and controversial issues surrounding minority sexual and gender identities.

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.

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.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays.