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 Los Angeles is the center of American popular culture; it has also been important to the histories of twentieth-century gay and lesbian literature. |
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James Barr (1922-1995) is the pseudonym under which James Fugaté published the popular novel Quatrefoil (1950) and other works, and which he used as an activist in the homophile movement of the 1950s. |
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 Mercedes de Acosta (1893-1968) was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, costume designer, and memoirist remembered today for her love affairs with some of the most glamorous women of her time including Greta Garbo and Eva Le Gallienne.
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 Bernard Cooper (b. 1951) blurs the boundaries between autobiography, essay, poetry, and fiction in his elegantly crafted works that focus on sexuality, memory, and growing up gay in the 1950s and 1960s. |
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Dennis Cooper (b. 1953) 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.
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 Katherine V. Forrest (b. 1939), whose novel Curious Wine is a lesbian classic, has played a major role in bringing lesbian fiction to the forefront of the mystery, science fiction, and romance genres. |
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Richard Halliburton (1900-1939), a gay explorer-adventurer-writer who achieved fame for his escapades, is the only man to have swum the entire length of the Panama Canal. His home in Laguna Beach, which he dubbed "Hangover House," remains a landmark of architectural modernism. |
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 Joseph Hansen (1923-2004) is best known as the author of the Dave Brandstetter mystery series. Hansen also published a considerable body of non-mystery fiction and poetry, most of it dominated by homosexual characters and themes. |
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 Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was a major Anglo-American novelist, a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, and a prominent figure in Los Angeles' literary and artistic community. |
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William Dale Jennings (1917-2000) was an editor, author, and pioneer of the American gay rights movement. John Wayne starred in the film adaptation of Jennings' novel The Cowboys in 1972.
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 Gavin Lambert (1924-2005) is best known as a screenwriter, though he was also a novelist and biographer who captured the essence of life in the film community in a perceptive and witty fashion. |
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Tim Miller (b. 1958) is a performance artist whose shows are rooted in his own life experiences. In 2006, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his book 1001 Beds, a collection of performance scripts, essays, interviews, and journal entries that vividly illustrates the way his performance pieces and his gay activism are inextricably linked.
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Paul Monette (1945-1995), who won a National Book Award for nonfiction, wrote novels, poetry, and memoirs about gay men striving to fashion personal dentities and to cope with the loss of
a lover to AIDS. |
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George Nader (1921-2002) is most widely remembered as a popular leading man of the 1950s and 1960s, but his novel Chrome, which ran to six printings, also established him as a significant gay writer. |
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 Michael Nava (b. 1954) is a mystery writer who has increasingly been recognized as an important novelist. His mature work transcends the limited expectations of the popular and highly specialized mystery genre.
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 John Rechy (b. 1934) is known as a brutal and lyrical chronicler of the pre-Stonewall sexual underworld. In his novels about hustling, preeminently City of Night and Numbers, Rechy moves from the world of homosexual behavior into the world of gay identity. |
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 Patricia Nell Warren (b. 1936) is the author of The Front Runner and other successful novels about American gay culture, a novel about a secretly gay Spanish bullfighter, and a series of essays on glbtq figures in sports. Warren is also a community activist who ran a strong but unsuccessful race for a seat on the West Hollywood City Council in 2007.
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 John Morgan Wilson (b. 1945) has spent much of his life as a journalist and a writer of television scripts, but he is best known today as the author of a gay male mystery series featuring a flawed and often exasperating amateur detective named Benjamin Justice. |
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 Terry Wolverton (b. 1954) is a writer, editor, teacher, and performance artist who has consistently worked to document glbtq history and increase the visibility of the community. She is a past executive director of The Woman's Building in Los Angeles. |
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