Fiction
Bisexual African-American novelist, poet, and performance artist Sapphire came to public attention with works that focus on the harrowing realities of inner city existence.
The New Zealander Frank Sargeson wrote stories and novels about ordinary men in ordinary circumstances, their plots driven by sexual problems and antagonisms that obliquely reflect their author's homosexuality.
May Sarton, who gradually revealed her lesbianism in her writing, worked successfully in poetry, the novel, essays, and the journal.
Now best known for his highly successful mystery novels set in ancient Rome, Steven Saylor began his writing career by publishing erotica under the pen-name Aaron Travis.
Author and playwright Sarah Schulman is concerned with constructing a lesbian identity around and against the multicultural identities of New York.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Schuyler, a prominent member of the New York School of poets and painters, wrote openly about his homosexuality.
Swiss writer and photojournalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach documented social conditions from Afghanistan to Alabama; her fiction reflected the tormented attachments and recurring loneliness that plagued her short lifetime.
Beginning with the "new wave" in the 1960s, science fiction and fantasy writers have explored openly and seriously issues of gender and sexual orientation.
British novelist Paul Scott, acclaimed for The Raj Quartet, was a repressed homosexual who found in India a rich metaphor for the interior distances that must be traversed as one person seeks to connect with another.
The eighteenth-century novelist Sarah Scott challenges the sex-gender system of her society and claims narrative authority for women loving women.
Using his and his family's experiences, particularly his childhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, and his own wacky perspective on life, David Sedaris has become a world-famous humorist, comedian, writer, playwright, and radio personality.
Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai has emerged as a significant figure in post-colonial and gay writing by virtue of the style, wit, and perspicacity of his three novels.
An important voice in children's literature over the past half century, Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated books that both acknowledge the fears faced by children and celebrate the imagination with which they cope with them.
British dramatist Peter Shaffer emerged in the 1960s in the paradoxical guise of the last great twentieth-century poet of the numinous who was also capable of writing commercially successful plays that could be turned into equally successful films.
Popular short story writer and novelist Ann Allen Shockley treats both interracial and lesbian experiences.
Throughout her life, poet and novelist Edith Sitwell surrounded herself with gay men, some of whom became her artistic collaborators. Although it is not clear that she ever experienced a sustained sexual relationship with anyone of either sex, her closest emotional bond was with another woman.
Slash fiction refers to a genre of fan writing that imagines homoerotic bonds developing between the leads of a variety of "cult" mainstream media productions, including television shows and films.
Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, who published as Somerville and Ross, were both life and literary partners.
Although she treated her own lesbianism as a strictly private matter, Susan Sontag wrote perceptively on gay male figures and issues.
Novelist Tom Spanbauer probes the darker undercurrents of sexuality, race, and violence while simultaneously using his unique prose style to meditate on and question received notions of time, subjectivity, and history.
In his poetry and his autobiography, Stephen Spender wrote about his homosexual experiences in his early life.
The male athlete has been an important gay icon in several cultures from ancient times to the present.
Despite the high representation of lesbians in women's sports, sports and sportswomen have played a minor role in lesbian literature.
In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.
Edward Prime-Stevenson, who wrote both fiction and nonfiction, might well be styled the first modern American gay author.
Transsexuals of Brazil
Cross-Dressing
Butch-Femme
Androgyny
Stonewall Riots
Women's Liberation Movement