Even in our times, Alcibiades remains a pertinent symbol. He is referred to in Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar (1948, revised 1965) and Messiah (1954), and in Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine (1956). Lawrence Schehr entitles his study of gay discourses in French literature Alcibiades at the Door (1995). In these works, the emphasis is on Alcibiades and Socrates as lovers and their dysfunctional relationship in the end.

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Alcibiades is also a prototype of the dandy. As such, he inspired Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, Charles Kingsley, John Addington Symonds, Lytton Strachey, and André Gide. This aspect of Alcibiades is explored in Dietmar Jovy's drama Alcibiades the Athenian: Dandy, Statesman, and Strategist (2000).

Even for lesbians, Alcibiades has become a symbolic figure. For example, Margaret Fuller, in a diary entry in 1842, describes her relationship with Anna Barker, as well as the friendship between Madame de Staël and Madame de Récamier, in terms of the intimacy between Socrates and Alcibiades.

The best-known artistic depictions of Alcibiades include Raphael's School of Athens (1508-1511), Peter Paul Rubens's The Drunken Alcibiades Interrupting the Symposium (ca 1600), and Pietro Testa's painting of the same title (1648).

The institution of pederasty (paiderastia) was a conspicuous feature of ancient Greek public and private life, but other forms of male-male sexual relations flourished in the Greco-Roman cosmopolis of the second and third centuries C.E.

Ancient Greece holds a unique place in the heritage of homosexual literature as it was a society that openly celebrated same-sex love in its poetry and prose.

Ancient Rome's attitude toward same-sex sexual activity was remarkably various, with role, age, and status as important as gender in the regulation of sexual relations.

The Greek god of wine, revelry, and orgiastic delights, and the patron god of hermaphrodites and transvestites, Dionysus has been extremely popular as a subject of Western art.

Although he condemned homosexuality in his more magisterial, philosophical works, Bacon inserted homosexual innuendo elsewhere in his writings, particularly in several essays.

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

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer uses homosexual relations and desires as a means to cast moral judgments on characters and to satirize them.

Lord Alfred Douglas is remembered today for his tumultuous association with Oscar Wilde and as a minor poet.

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

Christopher Marlowe represents homoerotic situations and incidents in his plays and poems more frequently and more variously that any other major English Renaissance writer.

The aesthetic of the important and influential Victorian critic Walter Pater reflected a homosexual sensibility.

Petronius' Satyricon is both the best evidence for homosexual behavior at the height of the Roman Empire and one of the most bumptious homoerotic picaresque narratives ever written.

Among Greek writers on homosexual themes, Plato is preeminent not only as a major philosopher but also as the greatest master of Greek prose.

No ancient is more instructive about pederasty than the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch.

After five novels which included suggested lesbianism, Mary Renault turned to open male homosexuality in the last nine, which included The Charioteer and eight celebrated historical novels set in ancient Greece.

Italian rhetorician and philosopher Antonio Rocco is author of an early classic of pederastic literature, L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (Alcibiades the schoolboy), which was written in 1630 and published anonymously in 1652.

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.

The English biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey spoke openly of his homosexuality to his Bloomsbury friends, but his openly gay works were published only after his death.

John Addington Symonds was the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.

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.