If Challenge (1923) is a roman à clef about the affair with Violet Keppel, Dark Island (1934) is another, about her relationship with Gwen St. Aubyn. Sackville-West here projects herself into both the jealous husband, Venn, and the devoted secretary, Cristina, who battle each other for possession of Shirin (Sackville-West's real-life Persian petname for St. Aubyn), and the erotic quality of the relationship between Shirin and Cristina, though not explicit, is unmistakably suggested.

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Only in her last novel, No Signposts in the Sea (1961), does Sackville-West make any explicit reference to lesbian love, however, and there she carefully distances herself from it. "Perhaps a relationship between two women must always be incomplete," the main character, Laura, speculates to a male friend, "--unless, I suppose, they have Lesbian inclinations which I don't happen to share. Then, or so I have been given to understand, the concord may approach perfection."

Sackville-West was not the great writer she longed to be. Her poetry and prose fiction were conservative compared to the new modes being forged by T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. But her long poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927, The Edwardians was a best-seller, and her works consistently made money for Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, which published them between 1924 and 1940.

More important, her works, her letters, and her life provide a glimpse into a period when something identifiable as "lesbian consciousness" can first be seen coming into existence, and they document the struggle of one passionate, intelligent, upper-class woman to articulate what it might mean.

The Bloomsbury circle's open acceptance of erotic license and hostility toward social convention are important elements in the history of homosexuality among the English upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

In literature, the gay male cross-dresser and the lesbian cross-dresser are depicted quite differently.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

The glbtq history of Los Angeles, the U.S.'s second largest metropolis, is replete with cultural, social, and political firsts.

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.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

Twentieth-century efforts to reform British law and public opinions about homosexuality met with mixed results, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United Kingdom has emerged as a leader in recognizing the rights of its glbtq citizens.

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 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.

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

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