Fiction
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.
Lambda Award-winning author Larry Duplechan is best known for Blackbird (1987), a coming of age novel about a black teenager growing up in the bland outer suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1970s.
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 Sexual Revolution, 1960-1980
Clause (or Section) 28
Hijras
Milk, Harvey
YMCA