Erotica and Pornography
Jean-Daniel Cadinot, French pornographer extraordinaire, has attracted an international following for his audacious films, which manage to be both unusually artistic and enormously arousing.
Given the historic stigma around making, circulating, and possessing overtly homoerotic images, the visual arts have been especially important for providing a socially sanctioned arena for depicting the naked male body and suggesting homoerotic desire.
Considering the unique set of problems facing lesbians who want to produce erotic art for the enjoyment of other lesbians, it is remarkable that so much lesbian erotica has been produced in so brief a time.
As a founder of the "queercore" movement, filmmaker and reluctant pornographer Bruce LaBruce reaffirms and celebrates the outsider status of homosexuals.
New York City's Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of explicitly gay art.
Because pornography is an accepted part of gay male life, performers in gay pornography hold a relatively esteemed position in gay culture and several have emerged as idols and icons.
Bisexual pornography began in earnest during the mid-1980s, but the quality and number of bisexual videos has decreased dramatically since their heyday in the 1980s.
Gay male pornographic film and video, which dates from the release of Wakefield Poole's The Boys in the Sand in 1971, has provided gay men an all-too-rare positive image of gay sexuality.
Although pornography is controversial among lesbians, it has nonetheless been openly embraced by a faction of pro-sex lesbians, and there has emerged a small but growing film and video industry committed to authentic lesbian pornography.
Most of the pornography that features transsexuals is neither made by nor for them, but in recent years trans porn activists have began to produce pornography for transsexual and other queer audiences.
An influential figure in a unique American style of art, George Quaintance was a pioneer of male physique painting.
In his 1960s and 1970s images of hikers, bikers, and surfers, photographer and activist Mel Roberts captured the spirit of the California Dream that lured thousands of gay men to the Golden State in search of freedom and opportunity after World War II.
Defiantly rejecting the invisibility, homophobia, and indignities of pre-Stonewall life, the men in Tom of Finland's drawings reflect a hyper-masculine, working-class version of homosexual manhood that proved important to the emerging gay rights movement.
Hughes, Langston
Beat Generation
Comedy of Manners
Sedaris, David
Novel: Lesbian
Baudelaire, Charles