Poetry
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.
A lesbian theme runs throughout the works of Marina Tsvetaeva, widely considered one of the four greatest twentieth-century Russian poets.
The Uranian poets, who lived and wrote from the close of the Victorian era to the middle of the interwar period, celebrated love for adolescent boys.
The poetry of Paul Verlaine celebrates both heterosexual and homosexual activity, including lesbian relationships.
The homosexuality of the French libertine Théophile de Viau must largely be inferred from his highly personal poetry.
Virgil wrote approvingly of male love in many works, and his second eclogue became the most famous poem on that subject in Latin literature.
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.
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.
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.
Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.
In the 1930s, Gale Wilhelm contributed significantly to the lesbian literary heritage by publishing two novels in which lesbianism was presented unapologetically.
Jonathan Williams was the author of more than a hundred books and booklets of gay poetry that merges flesh and spirit with a sense of history.
Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, poet, painter, and activist Fran Winant helped define the role and sensibility of lesbians in the contexts of gay liberation and radical feminism.
Throughout her varied career as a writer, editor, teacher, and performance artist, Terry Wolverton has consistently worked to document glbtq history and increase the visibility of the community.
Erotica and Pornography
Poetry: Gay Male
García Lorca, Federico
Wilde, Oscar
Hughes, Langston
Baldwin, James Arthur
Aestheticism