Art: European
A painter in the Impressionist style, as well as an engraver, sculptress, and writer, Louise Abbéma is best known for her portraits and genre scenes and for her close relationship with Sarah Bernhardt.
Gay and lesbian artists of the African Diaspora have recently begun to explore issues specific to gender and sexuality; often relying on self-portraiture, they address homophobia and racism as well as desire and longing.
As part of its reaction against the industrialism of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts movement, which emphasized handcrafted decorative works of art and architecture, created medieval-type artists' guilds, which have been seen as homosocial.
Widely recognized as Britain's most important twentieth-century painter, Francis Bacon creates beautifully composed works featuring violent subject matter that at once repels and attracts.
The gay monument in Barcelona, dedicated in March 2011, commemorates the sufferings of glbtq people.
Early French Impressionist Jean-Frédéric Bazille is remembered as an artist of great talent whose full potential was never realized because of his early death.
English decadent and Symbolist artist Aubrey Beardsley made a lasting contribution to the art of illustration; a satirist with a gift for caricature and grotesquerie, Beardsley attacked Victorian sexual values.
The celebrated British photographer Cecil Beaton described himself as a "terrible, terrible homosexualist," but may be best known for his relationship with Greta Garbo.
The life of eccentric British composer, painter, and novelist Baron Berners was a grand performance.
The distinguished career of art historian Anthony Blunt came to an end upon the revelation that he had been the unnamed "fourth man" in the Cambridge spy scandal of the 1950s.
British performance artist and photographer Tessa Boffin was the first British lesbian artist to produce work in response to the AIDS epidemic.
The most popular artist of nineteenth-century France and a renowned painter of animals, Rosa Bonheur lived in two consecutive committed relationships with women.
Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, a seventeenth-century Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, was a bold and influential patron and collector of the visual arts.
Renowned for his linear finesse and richly colored, meticulous paintings, Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli produced profound religious works, astute portraits, and poetic adaptations of classical mythology, all of which encourage a suggestively queer response.
"Official State Sculptor" of Nazi-era Germany, Arno Breker created muscular nude scenes that verge on the homoerotic.
Agnolo Bronzino, court painter to Cosimo de Medici, through both his writing and painting, offers significant insight into same-sex desire and relationships in sixteenth-century Florentine society.
Edward Burra, a British illustrator and stage designer, depicted the possibility of gay sexual encounters in his drawings and watercolors of the urban underworld.
Photographer, photo collagist, writer, and translator Claude Cahun is known today primarily for creating images, including self-portraits, that play with concepts of gender.
The most original painter of early seventeenth-century Europe, Caravaggio imbues his art with homoeroticism.
English painter, designer, and decorative artist Dora Carrington is best known for her long relationship with gay writer Lytton Strachey, but she had affairs with both men and women, and her work has recently gained recognition.
Sculptor, goldsmith, memoirist, and flamboyant pederast, Benvenuto Cellini is one of the greatest artists in the history of Western art.
Contemporary Art, which designates new currents in art since 1970, is identified with postmodernism; during this period an art addressing gay and lesbian identity emerged.
One of the most innovative Italian painters of the sixteenth century, Corregio (Antonio Allegri) devised a highly original manner than anticipates the Baroque style of the seventeenth century.
The varied oeuvre of Renaissance sculptor Donatello includes figures of beautiful male youths imbued with homoerotic sensuality.
One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp desired to break down all linguistic, sexual, and social restraints.
Hughes, Langston
Beat Generation
Comedy of Manners
Sedaris, David
Novel: Lesbian
Baudelaire, Charles