Poetry
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.
Film Actors: Gay Male
Film Actors: Lesbian
Photography: Gay Male, Pre-Stonewall
Chamberlain, Richard
Erotic and Pornographic Art: Gay Male
Comic Strips and Cartoons