English Literature
Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.
Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.
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.
In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer uses homosexual relations and desires as a means to cast moral judgments on characters and to satirize them.
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.
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 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.
Since Stonewall, gay and lesbian drama has flourished, especially in the United States.
The popular English novelist Marie Corelli is now known chiefly as a camp figure who inspired E. F. Benson's Lucia.
Although Coward's plays are about heterosexual couples, they are written in the language and spirit of camp and reject traditional domestic values.
"Not merely a self-confessed homosexual, but a self-evident one," actor, writer, performance artist, and wit Quentin Crisp left as his most significant legacy an example of courage.
An important figure in the European occult movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Aleister Crowley was publicly reviled in his time, but he was recently cited by the BBC as one of England's most influential citizens.
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.
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a Cambridge classicist and friend of E. M. Forster, is significant for the glbtq legacy as the author of an immensely popular book on ancient Greece and a posthumously published, surprisingly frank autobiography.
Michael Dillon, the first person known to have transitioned both hormonally and surgically from female to male, was a man of singular determination who articulated his life as an evolving struggle toward corporeal, intellectual, and spiritual integrity.
England's supreme poet of heterosexual love in the late Renaissance, John Donne also wrote a series of homoerotic verse letters to a young man and a remarkable dramatic monologue in a lesbian voice.
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.
Lord Alfred Douglas is remembered today for his tumultuous association with Oscar Wilde and as a minor poet.
Norman Douglas, who wrote travel books and autobiographical works, is best known his explorations of the pleasures of the hedonistic life.
Maureen Duffy has published novels that present both lesbian and gay male characters within a broad social and political panorama.
Although a heterosexual, Durrell created in his novels a sophisticated literary world in which both male and female homosexuality are significant and recognized presences.
A poetic response to the death of a greatly loved person, the elegy has had since classical times a homoerotic component.
Although Eliot tried to suppress the fact, The Waste Land is an elegy for a young Frenchman whom he met and loved in Paris and who died in the Great War in 1915.
Although it occasionally celebrates homosocial bonding, surviving medieval English literature is condemnatory of homosexual behavior.
From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.
Homosexuality is writ large in English Renaissance literature, but its inscription is only rarely direct and unambiguous.
Throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, sodomitical characters were both presented and pilloried in literature.
Since homosexuality was severely persecuted during the Romantic period, writers who treated the subject more or less positively were forced to encode it or leave it unpublished and were themselves frequently forced into exile.
Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.
Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.
Lesbian lovers Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, writing as Michael Field, collaborated on a number of plays and eight volumes of verse, many of which had lesbian contents.
Ronald Firbank's witty, campy novels mock the dominant homophobic, materialistic culture of early twentieth-century England.
One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.
English novelist Patrick Gale draws on his own varied background to explore gay men and lesbians in complex, often dysfunctional family units set within the worlds he finds most meaningful: London, Winchester, and Cornwall.
Both male and female homosexuality or homosexual elements appear throughout the broad scope of ghost and horror fiction.
The Gothic has always offered writers and readers the chance to experience the excitement of transgressive sexuality of various kinds, including male and female homosexuality.
Thomas Gray, the best-loved English poet of the eighteenth century, wrote several poems that express the love he felt for other men.
The Anglo-American writer Thom Gunn was a major gay poet and a perceptive critic of gay poetry.
Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly and proudly, is best known for The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.
English novelist and short story writer L. P. Hartley created psychologically subtle works of fiction in which the danger of abandoning oneself to love is a recurrent theme.
Glbtq historical fictions creatively interweave fiction with facts in ways that have not only won them a large readership but also have offered that readership insightful illuminations of glbtq histories.
Noted for his elegant prose style and subtle representations of moral ambiguities, Alan Hollinghurst has in recent years emerged as Great Britain's most significant contemporary gay novelist.
In some of the most original poetry of the Victorian period, the sexually-repressed Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated male beauty as one of the most splendid witnesses to the divine.
A. E. Housman's poetry is inextricably rooted in homosexual experience and consciousness and is also a significant reflector of gay history.
Aesthete Brian Howard is notable for being a most extraordinary failure, remembered mostly as an interesting secondary figure among the "Brideshead Generation," the mostly homosexual "Bright Young Things" of Oxford in the 1920s.
A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.
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.
In both his films and his writings, Derek Jarman's explicit project was to celebrate gay sexuality and imagine a place for it in English culture.
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.
Erotica and Pornography
Poetry: Gay Male
García Lorca, Federico
Wilde, Oscar
Hughes, Langston
Baldwin, James Arthur
Aestheticism