Finally, a momentous historical and aesthetic shift seems to be taking place. Gay readers have given rise to gay writers, and the historical necessity of distorting so-called straight literature and heterosexual sensibilities may be becoming outmoded as literature falls increasingly prey to niche marketing.

Will the new explicitness cost us irony, subtlety, and empathy as we strive to "read"--that is, to make sense of--the world and the text, others and ourselves? Less cross-reading may need to be done, but what the act of cross-reading loses to necessity it will gain back from openness and explicitness.

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More, not fewer, cross-reading analyses seem to be appearing in gay and lesbian studies, an academic discipline that is no longer just outing and uncloseting the gay and lesbian but also militantly appropriating the straight.

The relevance of an exchange between gay readers and straight texts, like that which occurs between homosexual writers and the heterosexual public, can no longer be discounted or dismissed. Cross-reading, at last, is out of the closet.

Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.

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.

Although the question of homosexual identity is a complex one, it has polarized activists, theorists, and literary critics into two primary camps, essentialists and constructionists, both of which can contribute usefully to an understanding of the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Slash fiction refers to a genre of fan writing that imagines homoerotic bonds developing between the leads of a variety of "cult" mainstream media productions, including television shows and films.

James Baldwin, a pioneering figure in twentieth-century literature, wrote sustained and articulate challenges to American racism and mandatory heterosexuality.

One of the masters of French nineteenth-century fiction, Balzac provocatively includes both lesbian and gay male characters in his novels.

French semiotician Roland Barthes argued that the reintroduction of the sentimentality of love into sexuality would be the ultimate transgression.

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

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.

American novelist, playwright, and short story writer Jane Bowles spent her life examining lesbian identity with an honest and sardonic wit.

Both in his life and his novels, American writer William S. Burroughs was an outlaw and a provocateur, focusing on sexual repression as the fundamental element of social control and writing in a surrealistic and bitterly satirical mode.

One of America's premier literary artists in the earlier twentieth century, Willa Cather reflected her own lesbianism in the creation of strong women characters and in the exploration of male homosexuality.

An outspoken homosexual, Jean Cocteau was a prolific poet, novelist, critic, essayist, artist, and filmmaker.

One of France's most beloved authors, Colette wrote novels with strong lesbian subtexts.

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

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

The works of García Lorca, internationally recognized as Spain's most prominent lyric poet and dramatist of the twentieth century, are filled with thinly veiled homosexual motifs and themes.

Jean Genet's work has left a powerful legacy to post-modernity and remains a provocation to questions of gay identity.

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

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

Nikolai Gogol's repressed homosexuality is reflected obliquely in nearly all of his works, especially in the fear of marriage that permeates his stories and plays.

Langston Hughes, whose literary legacy is enormous and varied, was closeted, but homosexuality was an important influence on his literary imagination, and many of his poems may be read as gay texts.

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.

Though closeted, Henry James had a number of intimate relations with young men, and his sexual orientation imbued his fiction.

The Russian writer and translator Mikhail Kuzmin wrote poems and novels that present sympathetic, often idealistic, portrayals of gay love and desire.

The bisexual novelist and memoirist Violette Leduc is an astute psychological observer and a dramatic chronicler of women's issues.

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.

In his quest for masculinity, Yukio Mishima mythologized himself both in his life and his writings, culminating in his ritual suicide.

In novels, poetry, and a memoir, Paul Monette wrote about gay men striving to fashion personal identities and, later, coping with the loss of a lover to AIDS.

The creativity of Russian poet Sophia Parnok was closely linked to her lesbianism.

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

Homosexual themes and motifs are suggested in a number of Manuel Puig's eight novels, and in the best known of them, Kiss of the Spider Woman, homosexual desire is central to the fiction.

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.

Whether or not the Marquis de Sade was himself bisexual, homosexual activity is an important item in his program of revolutionary sexual libertinism.

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 addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

A lesbian theme runs throughout the works of Marina Tsvetaeva, widely considered one of the four greatest twentieth-century Russian poets.

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

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.

The controversial lesbian author and theorist Monique Wittig has produced some of the most challenging fictional and theoretical work of second-wave feminism.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.

The prize-winning novelist Marguerite Yourcenar reflected her own homosexuality in her works almost exclusively through male characters, most notably in Memoirs of Hadrian.