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There was frank and affirmative
gay male American
writing from the century's start, but it was usually published
abroad or by marginal presses or remained private and unpublished. As
the century advanced, there were marked increases in both the amount of
frank gay male American writing and the amount of it issued by
mainstream publishers.
Truman Capote |
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 James Baldwin (1924-1987)
was a pioneering African-American writer who wrote sustained and
articulate challenges to American racism and mandatory heterosexuality. |
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John Horne Burns
(1916-1953) used his novels to critique America's class-coded
heterosexist morality, its ethnocentrism, and its marketplace
mentality. |
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William S. Burroughs
(1914-1997) was an outlaw and a provocateur in his writing and his
life. |
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Truman Capote (1924-1984)
helped establish what might be called the quintessential homosexual
writing style of the 1950s and 1960s. |
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Hart Crane (1899-1933) was a
successor to Walt Whitman who found spiritual transcendence in
homoerotic desire |
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 Countee Cullen (1903-1946),
an African-American poet of the Harlem Renaissance, was heralded as the
"poet laureate" of the period. |
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Robert Duncan (1919-1988)
wrote a remarkable series of poems that deal directly with the love of
men for other men. |
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 Langston Hughes
(1902-1967), was a closeted African-American writer, but homosexuality
was an important influence on his literary imagination. |
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 Christopher Isherwood
(1904-1986) was a major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the
gay liberation movement. |
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John Rechy's (b.1934)
reputation as a gay writer rests primarily on City of Night
(1963), which documents the wanderings of a nameless male hustler. |
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 Though
George Santayana
(1863-1952) is now remembered chiefly as a philosopher, he was also a
poet, novelist, literary critic, and speculative thinker. |
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Jack Spicer
(1925-1965) was a brilliantly original gay writer who wrote poetry
noted for its lyric beauty, intellectual power, and formal invention. |
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 Gore Vidal (b. 1925) is
important in the gay literary heritage because of the
straightforwardness with which he has treated gay themes and characters. |
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 Tennessee Williams
(1911-1983) was conflicted about his own sexuality. He wrote directly
about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late
plays. |
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more on American Literature
>> |
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Photo Credits:
Photograph of Capote by Roger Higgins; Photographs of Hughes, Isherwood,
and Vidal are details from photographs by Carl van Vechten.
Photograph of Baldwin courtesy National Archives and Records
Administration. Photographs of Hughes, Isherwood, Santayana,
Vidal, and Williams courtesy Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
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