Authors
In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer uses homosexual relations and desires as a means to cast moral judgments on characters and to satirize them.
John Cheever, who was bisexual, gradually came to invest homosexuality with redemptive and transforming powers.
French feminist theorist and novelist Hélène Cixous celebrates female homoeroticism and feminist solidarity.
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.
Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff explores issues of race, class, and sexuality in her prose and poetry.
Carlo Coccioli, Italian-born trilingual writer and author of the landmark gay novel Fabrizio Lupo (1952), depicted the struggle to find and keep religious faith in spite of the absurdity of life and the propensity of human beings to dehumanize each other.
An outspoken homosexual, Jean Cocteau was a prolific poet, novelist, critic, essayist, artist, and filmmaker.
One of France's most beloved authors, Colette wrote novels with strong lesbian subtexts.
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.
Award-winning writer Bernard Cooper blurs the boundaries between autobiography, essay, poetry, and fiction in his elegantly crafted works that focus on sexuality, memory, and growing up gay in the 1950s and 1960s.
Controversial writer Dennis Cooper is best known for his series of strikingly original, critically acclaimed, albeit transgressive and contentious, novels exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, brutality, and death.
The popular English novelist Marie Corelli is now known chiefly as a camp figure who inspired E. F. Benson's Lucia.
An intelligent observer and chronicler, and a master of poetic technique, Alfred Corn has been praised as one of his generation's finest poets and included in a line of gay visionary poets.
Although Coward's plays are about heterosexual couples, they are written in the language and spirit of camp and reject traditional domestic values.
A successor to Walt Whitman, Hart Crane found spiritual transcendence in homoerotic desire.
"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.
Playwright Mart Crowley deserves honor for having blazed the trail for gay-themed theater with his 1969 groundbreaking play The Boys in the Band.
Countee Cullen, an important member of the Harlem Renaissance, has coded references to homosexuality in much of his poetry.
The acclaimed novelist Michael Cunningham examines gay culture within the context of the larger society.
In the Divine Comedy Dante treats male homosexuality first as violence against God and then more sympathetically as merely one of the kinds of love.
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.
Funnyman Frank DeCaro has found success both in serious journalism as a fashion writer and editor and in comedy as a writer, performer, and radio talk show host.
Writer of science fiction, memoirs, erotica, cultural studies, and postmodern criticism, and winner of multiple Nebula, Hugo, and Lambda Literary Awards, Samuel R. Delany is widely regarded as one of the finest science fiction writers of his generation.
Australian translator, editor, essayist, travel writer, and novelist Robert Dessaix did not publish his first book until he was fifty; two novels later he is recognized as an important voice in Australian gay literature.
Drag Shows: Drag Queens and Female Impersonators
European Art: Neoclassicism
Sports: Transgender Issues
Erotic and Pornographic Art: Gay Male
Film Directors