Since Roditi held his contemporaries to the same high standards he set for himself, he was often involved in heated aesthetic arguments. John Bernard Myers, who ran the prestigious Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York from the 1950s to the 1970s, described Roditi as a person who attacked everyone, regardless of school or affiliation. Roditi, however, saw himself as decrying a destructive cult of personality.

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He believed that the obsession with "celebrities" was driving contemporary visual and literary art toward mediocrity. With regard to the visual arts, he lamented the rise of outsized and outrageous works, especially installation art; as for literary trends, he railed against media's focus on writers' messy lives at the expense of serious attention to their work.

Roditi did not care that people might be offended by his sometimes harsh judgments: he believed that he had earned the right to express his opinions and he felt he could back them up with his scholarship.

When he died in Paris on May 10, 1992, Roditi was working on his memoirs. Reportedly consisting of four large volumes, they remain unpublished.

Jewish-American gay and lesbian literature is marked by its rich heritage, diverse subject matter, and thriving vitality.

McCarthyism, which attempted in the late 1940s and early 1950s to expunge Communists and fellow travelers from American public life, made homosexuals the chief scapegoats of the Cold War.

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

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

Psychotherapy, the clinical process of treating mental and emotional health problems, has recently been energized by a movement to depathologize homosexuality and to enhance the dignity and self-respect of glbtq clients.

An artistic movement that grew out of Dadaism and flourished in Europe shortly after World War I, Surrealism embraced the idea that art was an expression of the subconscious.

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

Through her Parisian bookshop and her editorial work, American expatriate and lesbian Sylvia Beach did much to influence the course of modern literature.

Gay American expatriate composer, writer, and translator Paul Bowles liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness.

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

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

Despite his outsider status as a Jewish homosexual, Aaron Copland composed a significant number of musical works that embody the idea of American history, struggle, and courage.

French designer Christian Dior revitalized haute couture after World War II, creating luxurious designs characterized by a feminine classic elegance.

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.

The work of bisexual artist Léonor Fini, which emphasizes female power and autonomy, may be seen as a response to the patriarchal assumptions of Surrealism.

Members of New York's early twentieth-century avant-garde, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler are also the authors of a widely suppressed and largely unread experimental novel of 1930s gay life, The Young and Evil.

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

The candor with which the bisexual Paul Goodman wrote about the homosexual libido in his poetry and fiction made him an important and highly visible advocate of gay liberation.

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.

Klaus Mann's vision of homosexuality is marked by loneliness and alienation, and his fiction is characterized by melancholic hopelessness.

Although his sexuality cannot be documented, the Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote homoerotic verse, much of it in English.

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.

Throughout her life, poet and novelist Edith Sitwell surrounded herself with gay men, some of whom became her artistic collaborators. Although it is not clear that she ever experienced a sustained sexual relationship with anyone of either sex, her closest emotional bond was with another woman.

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

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.

Russian-born painter, sculptor, and set designer Pavel Tchelitchew created a number of works that illustrate homoerotic desire.

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.