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.
Drag Shows: Drag Queens and Female Impersonators
European Art: Neoclassicism
Sports: Transgender Issues
Erotic and Pornographic Art: Gay Male
Film Directors