American Literature
Lesbian poet and novelist Rita Mae Brown, best known for the highly successful Rubyfruit Jungle, resists neat categorization.
American novelist John Horne Burns used his outsider status as a homosexual to critique America's class-coded heterosexist morality and its ethnocentrism and marketplace mentality.
Both in his life and his novels, American writer William S. Burroughs was an outlaw and a provocateur, focusing on sexual repression as the fundamental element of social control and writing in a surrealistic and bitterly satirical mode.
It is impossible to understand twentieth-century lesbian literature without recognizing the significance of butch-femme relationships.
Controversial for defending sadomasochism and pornography, gender outlaw and sexual anarchist Patrick Califia, who recently underwent gender reassignment, is widely admired as a defender of individual freedom.
American writer Peter Cameron is renowned for his astute explorations of the shifting, impulsive emotions of his characters and for his elegant, intoxicating dialogue.
Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.
Truman Capote's fiction and autobiographical works helped establish what might be called the quintessential homosexual writing style of the 1950s and 1960s.
One of America's premier literary artists in the earlier twentieth century, Willa Cather reflected her own lesbianism in the creation of strong women characters and in the exploration of male homosexuality.
Jane Chambers was one of the first American playwrights to create openly lesbian characters who were comfortable with their own homosexuality.
John Cheever, who was bisexual, gradually came to invest homosexuality with redemptive and transforming powers.
Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff explores issues of race, class, and sexuality in her prose and poetry.
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 coming out experience is so important to gay men and lesbians that it is a primary focus of much of their literature.
Since Stonewall, gay and lesbian drama has flourished, especially in the United States.
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.
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.
A successor to Walt Whitman, Hart Crane found spiritual transcendence in homoerotic desire.
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.
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.
Emily Dickinson's poems and letters to her sister-in-law Susan are both passionate and elusive in their homoeroticism.
Hughes, Langston
Beat Generation
Comedy of Manners
Sedaris, David
Novel: Lesbian
Baudelaire, Charles