English Literature
Benjamin Jowett, classical scholar and translator whose bowdlerization of Plato illustrates the dishonesty made necessary by Victorian homophobia, was probably homosexual in orientation.
Indian writer Firdaus Kanga has explored the intersection of two kinds of marginality: that based on being a member of a sexual minority and that based on being a disabled person.
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.
Although he does not employ the idiom of identity politics, Hanif Kureishi frequently gives gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals significant roles in his works.
Best known as a screenwriter, Gavin Lambert was also a novelist and biographer who captured the essence of life in the film community in a perceptive and witty fashion.
For his time, D. H. Lawrence was a maverick in his open and adventurous discussion of all sexual issues and especially homosexuality, both male and female.
Although he chose celibacy, Lawrence of Arabia formed close romantic attachments to young men.
Although Vernon Lee does not explore lesbian themes directly in her literary or aesthetic works, she was committed both intellectually and emotionally to other women, and her creative writings reveal a fertile lesbian imagination.
One of the most distinguished and discerning British men of letters of the mid-twentieth century, John Lehmann is best known as an editor and publisher.
Matthew Lewis's scandalous masterpiece, The Monk, is one of the great works in the gay and lesbian literary tradition.
Between 1817 and 1840, the diarist Anne Lister recorded in code her romantic and sexual relationships with several women.
Although gay, lesbian, and queer theory are related practices, the three terms delineate separate emphases marked by different assumptions about the relationship between gender and sexuality.
Though Katherine Mansfield was reticent in the depiction of lesbianism in her short stories, she had close female friendships and was always deeply concerned with the status of women.
Christopher Marlowe represents homoerotic situations and incidents in his plays and poems more frequently and more variously that any other major English Renaissance writer.
Author and editor Adam Mars-Jones has written short stories as well as longer fiction on gay themes, including AIDS.
The defiantly homosexual scion of a powerful family, Robin Maugham became a popular and prolific writer who regularly features homosexual themes and homoerotic situations in his work.
Frightened by the Oscar Wilde trial, Somerset Maugham avoided treating homosexual themes and characters in his novels and plays.
Award-winning mystery writer Val McDermid writes three successful series of novels, including one featuring lesbian investigative reporter Lindsay Gordon.
Charlotte Mew's poetry encodes the emotional pain of hiding her lesbian identity in a world of compulsory heterosexuality.
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.
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.
Before Stonewall, censorship of the theater caused authors to encode homosexual content in publicly-presented plays.
The talented and prolific Anglo-Welsh journalist, historian, and travel writer Jan Morris was one of the first transsexuals to tell her story publicly in a memoir.
In the decades since Stonewall, gay male mystery fiction has burgeoned in United States, both in quantity and in quality, and has increasingly been issued by mainstream presses.
Although most lesbian mystery fiction reflects a political stance, the most effective lesbian crime novels have been those that have most enthusiastically embraced the need to entertain the reader.
Erotica and Pornography
African-American Literature: Lesbian
Hemingway, Ernest
Forster, E. M.
Williams, Tennessee
St. Sebastian