English Literature
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the Romantic period, writers who treated the subject more or less positively were forced to encode it or leave it unpublished and were themselves frequently forced into exile.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.
Drag Shows: Drag Queens and Female Impersonators
European Art: Neoclassicism
Sports: Transgender Issues
Erotic and Pornographic Art: Gay Male
Film Directors