Artists
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.
American realist artist Patrick Angus produced keenly observed and compassionate depictions of the gay underclass of the 1980s.
American artist Don Bachardy, the long-time companion of novelist Christopher Isherwood, has achieved renown in his own right for his nudes and celebrity portraits, which honestly convey the personalities of his sitters.
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.
Accomplished actor and singer John Barrowman has won plaudits as a musical theater star, as well as for his roles in film and television.
A popular African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, James Richmond Barthé used his art as a means of working out internal conflicts related to race and sexuality.
Photographer Crawford Barton captured the blossoming of an openly gay culture in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s.
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.
Cartoonist Alison Bechdel is best known for her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which has run in alternative gay and lesbian newspapers for nearly two decades.
The life of eccentric British composer, painter, and novelist Baron Berners was a grand performance.
Artist Forrest Bess was a mystic who sought to fuse male and female in his life and work; in small abstract pieces, he represented his visions, which, he believed, contained the secret of immortality.
Versatile African-American artist Nayland Blake creates--in a variety of media--work that reflects his preoccupation with his racial and sexual identities.
Avant-garde American artist Ross Bleckner creates paintings that draw upon and play with earlier traditions of abstraction by wedding his private experience as a gay man to public concerns surrounding gay identity, most especially the AIDS crisis.
The most popular artist of nineteenth-century France and a renowned painter of animals, Rosa Bonheur lived in two consecutive committed relationships with women.
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.
The female nudes and portraits of cross-dressed women made American artist Romaine Brooks's lesbian identity known to the world.
Edward Burra, a British illustrator and stage designer, depicted the possibility of gay sexual encounters in his drawings and watercolors of the urban underworld.
Luis Caballero Holguín, one of the most significant Latin American painters of the second half of the twentieth century, considered his homosexuality a fundamental component of his artistic expression.
American painter Paul Cadmus is best known for the satiric innocence of his frequently censored paintings of burly men in skin-tight clothes, but he also created works that celebrate same-sex domesticity.
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.
Hughes, Langston
Beat Generation
Comedy of Manners
Sedaris, David
Novel: Lesbian
Baudelaire, Charles