Fiction
College professor, tattoo artist, novelist, and memoirist, Samuel Steward is best remembered for the literate and explicit gay male erotica he published under the pseudonym Phil Andros.
A pioneering California writer, Charles Warren Stoddard is best known for his homoerotic tales collected as South-Sea Idyls and The Island of Tranquil Delights.
Howard Overing Sturgis is best known for two homosexual novels, Tim: A Story of Eton and Belchamber.
Algernon Charles Swinburne was interested in flagellation, sadomasochism, bisexuality, and lesbianism, not only for their erotics but also as gestures of social and cultural rebellion.
The recent novels of acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tóibín are astutely observed, unsentimental explorations of gay men trying to fit into an unwelcoming, and often openly hostile, world.
Although Pier Vittorio Tondelli occupies a central position within the Italian literary canon, the theme of homosexuality in his work has been ignored or minimized by his critics.
Montreal-born playwright and novelist Michel Tremblay draws on his own Catholic working-class background in his presentation of bar culture characters and their relatives.
A lesbian theme runs throughout the works of Marina Tsvetaeva, widely considered one of the four greatest twentieth-century Russian poets.
Spanish novelist Esther Tusquets brings a highly eroticized woman's voice to Spain's post-Civil War literature, employing lesbian characters to delineate the limits and possibilities of female sexual autonomy.
The gay novelist, critic, and photographer Carl Van Vechten was especially interested in African-American culture and was an influential patron to many writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
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.
A circle of gay male writers in Manhattan who met a few times in 1980 and 1981, the members of the Violet Quill helped create the post-Stonewall renaissance of American gay male writing.
Renée Vivien, who had many affairs with women, openly celebrated lesboerotic love in her poetry and dreamed of women-controlled spaces in an era when most women were still domestically confined.
Bruno Vogel's experiences as a soldier during World War I and as a homosexual in a society hostile to any open expression of same-sex love shaped his political and aesthetic vision.
In her explorations of the damage done to the individual self by racism and sexism, Alice Walker views lesbianism as natural and freeing, an aid to self-knowledge and self-love.
Throughout his life, Horace Walpole was devoted to other men, and his exploration of dysfunctional families in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother probably stems from his own experience with a destructive father.
From ancient times, homoerotic writing has been a notable part of the literature of war.
The poet, novelist, and short story writer Sylvia Townsend Warner is an important lesbian voice of the earlier twentieth century.
Patricia Nell Warren is the author of significant novels about American gay culture that exemplify popular adult and young adult mainstream fiction.
Sarah Waters is the author of three lesbian novels as well as articles on lesbian and gay literature.
Evelyn Waugh, who had homosexual affairs while at Oxford but later led a heterosexual life, treated homosexuals both nostalgically and contemptuously in his novels.
Anna Elisabet Weirauch is best remembered for her three-volume lesbian novel Der Skorpion (The Scorpion) set during the Weimar Republic.
Largely autobiographical, the novels of Denton Welch are suffused with homosexuality.
American writer Glenway Wescott is author of a series of critically esteemed novels, but may be best known for his central position in New York's artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s.
A distinctive American narrative genre that has developed over more than two centuries, the Western is now consumed worldwide; characteristically depicting homosocial relationships, it is also frequently suffused with homoeroticism.
Williams, Tennessee
Aestheticism
Wilde, Oscar
Erotica and Pornography
The Harlem Renaissance
Camp