Poetry
A. E. Housman's poetry is inextricably rooted in homosexual experience and consciousness and is also a significant reflector of gay history.
Langston Hughes, whose literary legacy is enormous and varied, was closeted, but homosexuality was an important influence on his literary imagination, and many of his poems may be read as gay texts.
Like other minority groups, gay men and lesbians have had to develop both a particular sense of humor among themselves in order to make their marginal social status endurable and also a defensive awareness toward the rest of the world in order to disarm their adversaries with laughter.
J. K. Huysmans, an important figure in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, exemplified a style of homosexuality at a pivotal moment in the emergence of a gay identity.
Sponsor of the English translation of the Bible that bears his name and himself an accomplished author, James VI of Scotland (and later James I of England) was well known for his passionate attachments to handsome young men.
A precursor of surrealism and credited with having invented the Theater of the Absurd, Alfred Jarry included homosexual characters and themes in most of his works.
Jewish-American gay and lesbian literature is marked by its rich heritage, diverse subject matter, and thriving vitality.
Playwright and poet Ben Jonson was probably never himself involved in same-sex sexual relationships, but he deserves attention for his depictions of same-sex relationships in both dramatic and nondramatic works.
In both her poetry and her essays, June Jordan called for the rejection of stereotypical views of bisexuality, and she associated sexual independence with political commitment.
The gay and lesbian press is of prime importance in sustaining a frequently embattled minority and has been crucial in the development of a national mass movement for gay rights.
The works of satirist Juvenal are crucial for exploring attitudes toward (homo)sexuality in ancient Rome.
Maurice Kenny combines a gay and Native American consciousness to create poetry that is located in multiple cultures.
Rudyard Kipling, England's "Laureate of Empire," fashioned himself as the conscience of the English-speaking world, but the great love of his life was a young man who spurned him and whose sister he married after his friend's sudden death.
The Russian writer and translator Mikhail Kuzmin wrote poems and novels that present sympathetic, often idealistic, portrayals of gay love and desire.
Latina lesbian literature is a fast-growing, vibrant, and diverse literary tradition that offers readers innovative models for creating alliances among diverse peoples.
Latino gay men have published novels, poetry, drama, and essays that deal directly with gay themes, but the cultural forces of machismo and Catholicism have slowed the development of a Latino gay identity.
Although Ursula Le Guin does not address homosexual issues directly, she includes homosexuals as minor characters in works that cause readers to reexamine their assumptions about sex roles and stereotypes.
A major Latin-American literary figure, Cuban José Lezama Lima included problematic homosexual passages in his two best known novels.
The work of African-American activist and writer Audre Lord was greatly influenced by her lesbianism.
Almost as renowned for his homosexuality and depravity as for his literary achievements, Jean Lorrain was a French poet, novelist, and journalist of the "decadent movement" during the Belle Époque.
Much of Amy Lowell's poetry is extremely frank, forthrightly sensual, and often overtly lesbian.
The Scottish-German John Henry Mackay, who wrote in German, dedicated himself to the cause of gaining sympathetic recognition of man-boy love.
Versatile Colombian-born author Jaime Manrique has written novels, short stories, poetry, and works of nonfiction with gay themes.
Christopher Marlowe represents homoerotic situations and incidents in his plays and poems more frequently and more variously that any other major English Renaissance writer.
American publisher and writer Robert McAlmon made significant contributions to twentieth-century literature, both by publishing avant-garde writers and by depicting a queer subculture in his own works.
Poet J. D. McClatchy, Jr., a master of traditional poetic forms, most notably the sonnet and sonnet sequence, ranks as a significant voice in contemporary American letters.
The poems and songs of the amazingly prolific Rod McKuen express a bittersweet, aching tenderness that has endeared him to millions of fans.
Swiss actor, cabaret performer, and stage director Karl Meier was, under the pseudonym "Rolf," editor of Der Kreis, the leading European homophile publication, from 1943 until its demise in 1967.
The most important American novelist of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville reflects his homosexuality throughout his texts.
James Merrill's significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry.
Charlotte Mew's poetry encodes the emotional pain of hiding her lesbian identity in a world of compulsory heterosexuality.
Best known for his genius in art and architecture, Michelangelo was also an accomplished author of homoerotic poetry.
The expression of male homoerotic sentiment is one of the dominant themes in classical Arabic literature from the ninth century to the nineteenth.
Over a period of two millennia, sodomy has been by turns condemned and celebrated in Persian literature.
Poet and playwright Edna Saint Vincent Millay expressed her bisexuality in both her life and her work.
While Milton accepted the biblical condemnation of sodomy, some of his works suggest that his attitude toward same-sex relations was enlightened for his age.
Chilean educator, journalist, feminist, diplomat, and Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral celebrated women and motherhood in poems and essays that are frequently homoerotic.
Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.
In novels, poetry, and a memoir, Paul Monette wrote about gay men striving to fashion personal identities and, later, coping with the loss of a lover to AIDS.
Count Robert de Montesquiou was a writer during France's Belle Epoque, but he is best remembered as a dandy and an aesthete, who inspired the literary creations of others.
In her own works, Cherríe Moraga defines her experience as a Chicana lesbian; and in her capacity as editor/publisher, she provides a forum for traditionally silenced lesbians of color.
Howard Moss, one of the leading figures of American letters in the latter half of the twentieth century, is the author of a significant body of elegant, erudite, and urbane work, especially poetry.
From the two-spirits of traditional culture to contemporary writers, Native North Americans have produced a considerable body of gay and lesbian literature.
Prolific Jewish femme lesbian-feminist writer of poetry, fiction, and children's books, Leslèa Newman draws on her own multiple identities to describe the complex tapestry that results when a variety of identities are woven together.
Often categorized as a Beat writer, poet and memoirist Harold Norse created a body of work that uses everyday language and images to explore and celebrate both the commonplace and the exotic.
Although same-sex relations have existed in Norwegian culture since at least the Middle Ages and some contemporary Norwegian writers are openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual, they do not necessarily create gay characters or raise gay issues in each one of their works.
The influential poet Frank O'Hara wrote works informed by both modern art and the world of urban gay male culture.
Although Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver has not been an outspoken lesbian activist, her poetry is deeply resonant with contemporary lesbian consciousness, and many lesbians claimed her as one of their own before she publicly came out.
A prolific writer and respected teacher, Sheila Ortiz-Taylor has bracketed her career with groundbreaking achievements.
English war poet Wilfred Owen combined the homoeroticism latent in the elegy tradition with precise observation of the horror of trench warfare.
The creativity of Russian poet Sophia Parnok was closely linked to her lesbianism.
Most of the fiction and much of the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the great Marxist homosexual artists of the twentieth century, was shaped by his fascination with the lives of subproletarian youths.
Both the elegiac and the romantic pastoral have been associated with homoerotic desire from their beginnings in classical literature to their echoes in contemporary literatures.
One of France's leading lesbian theorists and political activists, Geneviève Pastre is a writer and publisher who has made lesbian feminism the root of her political and literary work.
For Sandro Penna boyhood was the embodiment of desire and the inspiration for all of his poetry.
Although his sexuality cannot be documented, the Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote homoerotic verse, much of it in English.
A vigorous gay and lesbian literature emerged in the Philippines in the last two decades of the twentieth century.
Two-thirds of the poems of Katherine Philips, "The Matchless Orinda," concern erotic relationships among women.
The poems of Count August von Platen are homoerotic expressions of Platonic love, idealism, beauty, friendship, and longing.
Although overt homosexuality is absent from William Plomer's novels and poems, the relevance of his sexuality to his work is evident.
The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.
Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.
The fifteenth-century Italian scholar and poet Poliziano wrote many homoerotic Greek and Latin epigrams, published when he was seventeen.
The work of Australian lesbian poet Dorothy Porter presents a cheeky challenge to a literary establishment whose poetry has often been defined by pretension and obfuscation.
Bisexual artist Fairfield Porter is recognized as a major twentieth-century American Intimist painter.
Award-winning author Minnie Bruce Pratt has written moving and erotic poems and stories that explore sex and gender issues, as well as powerful essays that decry bigotry in its many forms.
Adrienne Rich, who has aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, is America's most widely read lesbian poet.
Because his writing stresses liberation, the French "boy-poet" Arthur Rimbaud, whose art is based solely on his individual creativity, is a progenitor of modern gay poetics.
In his poetry and his dramatic farce Sodom, the Restoration rake Rochester depicts heterosexual love as imperfect or incomplete and offers homosexual intercourse as a natural alternative.
Poet, translator, literary and art critic, and short story writer, Edouard Roditi was associated with most of the twentieth-century's avant-garde literary movements from Surrealism to post-modernism.
Roman writers on homosexual or bisexual themes generally followed Greek models; but unlike the Greeks, Romans condoned sex with slaves.
Her sexuality repressed by religion, Christina Rossetti wrote poetry that included highly-charged erotic female-to-female affection.
Muriel Rukeyser's poetry, which breaks the silence of many aspects of female experience, has been enormously important to many feminist and lesbian readers.
The Persian poet Rumi, who originated the "whirling dervish" order of Sufis, developed passionate relationships with other men and mixed spirituality with eroticism in his love poetry.
Since the eleventh century, Russian literature has included treatments of homosexual themes.
The bisexual poet who published under the name Umberto Saba wrote poems that expressed his love both of his wife and daughter and of adolescent boys.
Best known for her relationship with Virginia Woolf and for her scandalous love affairs, Vita Sackville-West was a prolific author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
The thirteenth-century Persian known as Sa'di wrote prose and poetry that included passages on the passionate love between men and boys.
The French aristocrat Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin wrote and circulated in manuscript sophisticated and witty poems that celebrated sodomy, especially with male partners.
Although late in fully understanding his sexual preference, George Santayana wrote a series of sonnets celebrating his love for a friend who died young and described his male friendships in rhapsodic terms in his autobiography.
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.
Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.
May Sarton, who gradually revealed her lesbianism in her writing, worked successfully in poetry, the novel, essays, and the journal.
For war poet and memoirist Siegfried Sassoon, the grueling years of World War I left an indelible impression of devastation and futility that colored his entire life.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Schuyler, a prominent member of the New York School of poets and painters, wrote openly about his homosexuality.
One of the best known English women poets of her time, Anna Seward had several romantic friendships with women and celebrated the Ladies of Llangollen in verse.
As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.
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.
In his poetry and his autobiography, Stephen Spender wrote about his homosexual experiences in his early life.
A brilliantly original gay writer, Jack Spicer wrote poetry noted for its lyric beauty, intellectual power, and formal invention.
The male athlete has been an important gay icon in several cultures from ancient times to the present.
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.
One of America's most inventive and incisive poets, May Swenson wrote many love poems celebrating lesbian sexuality.
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.
John Addington Symonds was the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness.
In his explicitly gay work, internationally recognized poet and playwright Mutsuo Takahashi celebrates homosexual desire.
As reflected in her poetry, the strongest emotional relationships in Sara Teasdale's life were with women.
Although he was sexually attracted to women, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote poetry suffused with homoeroticism, including the most beautiful homoerotic elegy in the English language.
The ancient Greek poet Theocritus is the first great voice in the homoerotic pastoral tradition in Western literature.
In essays, journals, and poems, Henry David Thoreau recorded impassioned expressions of the beauty and the agony of love between men.
Erotica and Pornography
Poetry: Gay Male
García Lorca, Federico
Wilde, Oscar
Hughes, Langston
Baldwin, James Arthur
Aestheticism