Fiction
British dramatist, novelist, and poet Aphra Behn was known to her contemporaries as a "scandal" for both her writings and her flamboyant personal life.
Born of an elite Victorian family, E. F. Benson was a prolific, often campy, writer of biographies, autobiographies, and novels, many of which were informed by homoeroticism.
Canadian novelist Anthony Bidulka, author of the Russell Quant detective series, creates mysteries that skirt the dark side of detective fiction through humor and emotional buoyancy.
Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen sprinkled her fiction with people and relationships, usually coded, of either clear or ambiguous homosexuality.
American novelist, playwright, and short story writer Jane Bowles spent her life examining lesbian identity with an honest and sardonic wit.
Gay American expatriate composer, writer, and translator Paul Bowles liked to examine sexuality from a dispassionate perspective for its psychological suggestiveness.
A matriarch of fantasy and science fiction literature, Marion Zimmer Bradley also authored lesbian paperback pulps and articles for The Ladder and Mattachine Review.
Christopher Bram's novels address homosexual issues in a variety of periods and locales.
One of the first Jewish-American writers of his generation to write in English rather than Yiddish, Myron Brinig was also one of the first to create homosexual characters, though he remained publicly closeted all of his life.
English novelist, essayist, and biographer Brigid Brophy was one of the 1960s' most daring voices in her explorations of the varieties of sexuality.
A feminist and a lesbian, Québécoise writer and editor Nicole Brossard creates texts that are radical in their approach to gender, sexuality, and literary convention.
Lesbian poet and novelist Rita Mae Brown, best known for the highly successful Rubyfruit Jungle, resists neat categorization.
American novelist John Horne Burns used his outsider status as a homosexual to critique America's class-coded heterosexist morality and its ethnocentrism and marketplace mentality.
Both in his life and his novels, American writer William S. Burroughs was an outlaw and a provocateur, focusing on sexual repression as the fundamental element of social control and writing in a surrealistic and bitterly satirical mode.
Italian novelist Aldo Busi, while eschewing the label "gay writer," nevertheless presents homosexual acts as normative behavior and foregrounds gay sex as an epiphany for his protagonists.
It is impossible to understand twentieth-century lesbian literature without recognizing the significance of butch-femme relationships.
The English novelist Samuel Butler had a predilection for intense male friendships, which is reflected in several of his works.
Controversial for defending sadomasochism and pornography, gender outlaw and sexual anarchist Patrick Califia, who recently underwent gender reassignment, is widely admired as a defender of individual freedom.
American writer Peter Cameron is renowned for his astute explorations of the shifting, impulsive emotions of his characters and for his elegant, intoxicating dialogue.
Since the 1960s, Canadian gay and lesbian writers have produced a vibrant body of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.
Truman Capote's fiction and autobiographical works helped establish what might be called the quintessential homosexual writing style of the 1950s and 1960s.
One of America's premier literary artists in the earlier twentieth century, Willa Cather reflected her own lesbianism in the creation of strong women characters and in the exploration of male homosexuality.
The acclaimed prose style of travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin, a secretive bisexual, may have been developed as a means of hiding the truth of his sexuality.
John Cheever, who was bisexual, gradually came to invest homosexuality with redemptive and transforming powers.
Gay- and lesbian-relevant themes and issues resonate throughout both classic and contemporary works of children's literature.
Chinese mythology is rich in stories about homosexuality.
French feminist theorist and novelist Hélène Cixous celebrates female homoeroticism and feminist solidarity.
The Greco-Roman myths concerning same-sex love have been of crucial importance to the Western gay and lesbian literary heritage, both as texts and as icons.
Although predominately heterosexual in its orientation, John Cleland's Fanny Hill has passages which give insight into lesbian and male homosexual roles and practices in eighteenth-century England.
Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff explores issues of race, class, and sexuality in her prose and poetry.
Carlo Coccioli, Italian-born trilingual writer and author of the landmark gay novel Fabrizio Lupo (1952), depicted the struggle to find and keep religious faith in spite of the absurdity of life and the propensity of human beings to dehumanize each other.
The Comedy of Manners, which flourished on the Restoration stage, has been particularly amenable to twentieth-century gay male writers as a vehicle for social satire in both dramatic and nondramatic works.
The coming out experience is so important to gay men and lesbians that it is a primary focus of much of their literature.
The English lesbian novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett explored passionate friendship between two women in her first novel and included lesbian and gay characters in two later novels.
Award-winning writer Bernard Cooper blurs the boundaries between autobiography, essay, poetry, and fiction in his elegantly crafted works that focus on sexuality, memory, and growing up gay in the 1950s and 1960s.
Controversial writer Dennis Cooper is best known for his series of strikingly original, critically acclaimed, albeit transgressive and contentious, novels exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, brutality, and death.
The popular English novelist Marie Corelli is now known chiefly as a camp figure who inspired E. F. Benson's Lucia.
The acclaimed novelist Michael Cunningham examines gay culture within the context of the larger society.
In the last two centuries, Danish writers have explored gay male and lesbian issues both indirectly and directly.
Indian playwright, screenwriter, dancer, director, and actor Mahesh Dattani is an important figure in South Asian gay culture by virtue of his recurrent depiction of queer characters.
Nineteenth-century Decadent literature either describes aspects of decadent life and society or reflects the decadent literary aesthetic.
Writer of science fiction, memoirs, erotica, cultural studies, and postmodern criticism, and winner of multiple Nebula, Hugo, and Lambda Literary Awards, Samuel R. Delany is widely regarded as one of the finest science fiction writers of his generation.
Australian translator, editor, essayist, travel writer, and novelist Robert Dessaix did not publish his first book until he was fifty; two novels later he is recognized as an important voice in Australian gay literature.
Rather than standing apart from the experience of being African American because of his homosexuality, poet and novelist Melvin Dixon embraced his community and demanded that his community embrace him in return.
A prolific writer of novels, plays, scholarly studies, and short stories, the lesbian author Emma Donoghue has emerged in recent years as a major contemporary literary figure.
The bisexual poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle, who published under the initials H. D., wrote poems and autobiographical prose works that celebrate women's romantic relationships with each other.
Historian, biographer, essayist, playwright, and academic, Martin Bauml Duberman is an astute commentator on gender and race issues and a pioneer in glbtq studies.
Maureen Duffy has published novels that present both lesbian and gay male characters within a broad social and political panorama.
Although a heterosexual, Durrell created in his novels a sophisticated literary world in which both male and female homosexuality are significant and recognized presences.
The history of gay and lesbian literature in the Low Countries is rich and varied, reflecting the changing concepts of intimate relations between people of the same sex.
Film Actors: Gay Male
Film Actors: Lesbian
Photography: Gay Male, Pre-Stonewall
Subjects of the Visual Arts: Nude Females
Chamberlain, Richard
Erotic and Pornographic Art: Gay Male