Humphries and Steve Cranfield had reached an advanced stage in the editing of an AIDS-related poetry anthology in 1992 when the directors of the press decided to close down the verse series. Poetry had flourished in the epidemic, only to catch its death in a recession.

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More committed to the promotion of poetry, the lesbian and gay Oscars Press appeared to be in a good position to take over where the Gay Men's Press had left off. Oscars had started early in 1986 as a reading group involving poets who had appeared in Not Love Alone; they published the first of a series of chapbooks in 1987 and the first of their paperback anthologies in 1990.

By the time one arrives at an event like the publication of Carl Morse and Joan Larkin's Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1988), it is clear that the culture of homosexuality has been established for long enough to be able to sustain not only the replacement of one canon with another, but also the simultaneous implication that many younger writers are strongly placed to invade the new canon in due course.

The book's dust jacket claims that it includes poetry written between 1950 and the time of publication--though, in fact, two of the three Auden poems included date from 1937 and 1938, and at least two of the Langston Hughes poems are from earlier than 1950.

Be that as it may, the book balances canonical homosexual (W. H. Auden), gay (Allen Ginsberg), and lesbian writers (Adrienne Rich) with the new wave of much younger poets (Mark Ameen, Dennis Cooper, Alexis De Veaux, Kitty Tsui, and so on).

Thematically, it moves from quietly affirmative voices of the McCarthyite era to the more flamboyant celebrations of Gay Liberation--though this historical progression is obscured by the editors' decision to arrange the poets not chronologically but alphabetically--and it incorporates poetry of the AIDS epidemic seamlessly into its cross-section of cultural development. Its portentous title clearly expresses the seriousness of its canonizing intent.

Conclusion

Even given the effects of homophobia on the production, distribution, and evaluation of texts, we are in charge of our own culture. We have our own requirements, and set our own standards thereby. It is the gay reader who decides what is a good gay poem. This is why gay-edited anthologies and gay-authored critical works are at the crux of the development of gay reading practices.

As important as the poem itself are the ways in which we come to hear of it, find a copy of it, read it, and keep it to ourselves or pass it on to others. Gay poetry emerges from a network of readers as much as from poets themselves. The encyclopedia you are reading continues the process.

Nineteenth-century Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.

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

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.

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.

Although he condemned homosexuality in his more magisterial, philosophical works, Bacon inserted homosexual innuendo elsewhere in his writings, particularly in several essays.

The English Renaissance poet Richard Barnfield wrote two volumes of homoerotic verse.

Baudelaire was among the first French poets to include lesbians as subjects.

Extremely wealthy and connected to the aristocracy, British author and connoisseur William Beckford was ostracized by English society for the last sixty years of his life because of his homosexuality.

Greek-born lesbian poet and translator Olga Broumas writes openly erotic poems that combine ancient Greek echoes and late twentieth-century idiom.

Although evidence of his own homosexual leanings is inconclusive, in his lifetime Sir Richard Burton was regarded with suspicion because of his knowledge and understanding of same-sex sexual activity.

The bisexual Lord Byron treated many of his homosexual love affairs in his poetry, encoding them by the use of classical references or by purporting that they were affairs with women.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Roman poet Catullus incorporated homoerotic themes in his verse, both reflecting the passionate character of same-sex friendships and describing several of his own homosexual adventures.

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

Controversial writer Dennis Cooper is best known for his series of strikingly original, critically acclaimed, albeit transgressive and contentious, novels exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, brutality, and death.

An intelligent observer and chronicler, and a master of poetic technique, Alfred Corn has been praised as one of his generation's finest poets and included in a line of gay visionary poets.

A successor to Walt Whitman, Hart Crane found spiritual transcendence in homoerotic desire.

Lord Alfred Douglas is remembered today for his tumultuous association with Oscar Wilde and as a minor poet.

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

Although Eliot tried to suppress the fact, The Waste Land is an elegy for a young Frenchman whom he met and loved in Paris and who died in the Great War in 1915.

Edward Field's poetry is an account of coming to terms with homosexuality in the literary world of New York in the second half of the twentieth century.

An American-born Israeli, Robert Friend was both an accomplished poet in his own right and also an exceptionally skillful translator of poetry from many different languages.

Stefan George, one of the foremost German poets of the turn of the twentieth century, encoded his homosexuality in his works.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

The ancient Sumerian poem Gilgamesh is structured around the love that the heroic male couple Gilgamesh and Enkidu have for each other.

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

Thomas Gray, the best-loved English poet of the eighteenth century, wrote several poems that express the love he felt for other men.

The Anglo-American writer Thom Gunn was a major gay poet and a perceptive critic of gay poetry.

Much of the sexuality in the lyrics of the great Persian poet Hafiz is homoerotic and infused with a homosexual mysticism.

Despite his relatively brief literary career, Essex Hemphill became arguably the most critically acclaimed and best known openly gay contemporary African-American poet.

In his highly accomplished and influential poetry, Horace reflects the easy bisexuality of the Roman upper class in the first century B. C.

A. E. Housman's poetry is inextricably rooted in homosexual experience and consciousness and is also a significant reflector of gay history.

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.

J. K. Huysmans, an important figure in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, exemplified a style of homosexuality at a pivotal moment in the emergence of a gay identity.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

The works of satirist Juvenal are crucial for exploring attitudes toward (homo)sexuality in ancient Rome.

For his time, D. H. Lawrence was a maverick in his open and adventurous discussion of all sexual issues and especially homosexuality, both male and female.

Christopher Marlowe represents homoerotic situations and incidents in his plays and poems more frequently and more variously that any other major English Renaissance writer.

The poems and songs of the amazingly prolific Rod McKuen express a bittersweet, aching tenderness that has endeared him to millions of fans.

The most important American novelist of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville reflects his homosexuality throughout his texts.

James Merrill's significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry.

Best known for his genius in art and architecture, Michelangelo was also an accomplished author of homoerotic poetry.

Petronius' Satyricon is both the best evidence for homosexual behavior at the height of the Roman Empire and one of the most bumptious homoerotic picaresque narratives ever written.

As one of the most famous homosexuals in France in the latter half of the twentieth century, novelist Roger Peyrefitte helped shape the public perception of homosexuals in the days before gay liberation.

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

Among Greek writers on homosexual themes, Plato is preeminent not only as a major philosopher but also as the greatest master of Greek prose.

Although overt homosexuality is absent from William Plomer's novels and poems, the relevance of his sexuality to his work is evident.

No ancient is more instructive about pederasty than the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch.

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

Adrienne Rich, who has aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, is America's most widely read lesbian poet.

Because his writing stresses liberation, the French "boy-poet" Arthur Rimbaud, whose art is based solely on his individual creativity, is a progenitor of modern gay poetics.

Poet, translator, literary and art critic, and short story writer, Edouard Roditi was associated with most of the twentieth-century's avant-garde literary movements from Surrealism to post-modernism.

Frederick William Rolfe (Baron Corvo) is important for the gay literary heritage because of his distinctive decadent prose style, his outrageous decadent lifestyle, and his unashamed celebration of eroticized male friendships in his works.

Although late in fully understanding his sexual preference, George Santayana wrote a series of sonnets celebrating his love for a friend who died young and described his male friendships in rhapsodic terms in his autobiography.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

In his poetry and his autobiography, Stephen Spender wrote about his homosexual experiences in his early life.

Athenian lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton were remembered in ancient Greece as the great tyrannicides and celebrated as lovers, patriots, and martyrs.

John Addington Symonds was the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness.

Although he was sexually attracted to women, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote poetry suffused with homoeroticism, including the most beautiful homoerotic elegy in the English language.

The ancient Greek poet Theocritus is the first great voice in the homoerotic pastoral tradition in Western literature.

In essays, journals, and poems, Henry David Thoreau recorded impassioned expressions of the beauty and the agony of love between men.

The poetry of Paul Verlaine celebrates both heterosexual and homosexual activity, including lesbian relationships.

Virgil wrote approvingly of male love in many works, and his second eclogue became the most famous poem on that subject in Latin literature.

Largely autobiographical, the novels of Denton Welch are suffused with 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.

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.

The art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the first German to have been publicly acknowledged as a homosexual, developed an aesthetic deeply rooted in his homosexuality.

A trailblazer in post-Stonewall gay theater, Cal Yeomans explored sex and sexuality so directly in his critically-acclaimed plays that it made his work difficult to produce even in the gay community.