American Literature
Rather than standing apart from the experience of being African American because of his homosexuality, poet and novelist Melvin Dixon embraced his community and demanded that his community embrace him in return.
The bisexual poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle, who published under the initials H. D., wrote poems and autobiographical prose works that celebrate women's romantic relationships with each other.
Author of several volumes of poetry and memoirs, Mark Doty has helped bring the AIDS narrative and the experiences of gay men to a wider audience through resonant prose and a richly stylized poetic voice.
Historian, biographer, essayist, playwright, and academic, Martin Bauml Duberman is an astute commentator on gender and race issues and a pioneer in glbtq studies.
Robert Duncan wrote a remarkable series of poems that deal directly with the love of men for other men.
Lambda Award-winning author Larry Duplechan is best known for Blackbird (1987), a coming of age novel about a black teenager growing up in the bland outer suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1970s.
A fiercely comic playwright, as well as actor and screenwriter, Christopher Durang often incorporates gay themes and characters in his plays.
In both her poetry and prose, Elana Dykewomon presents the lesbian as an active, dynamic hero on center stage.
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.
Perhaps the most accomplished of the "Generation X" writers, Bret Easton Ellis creates works distinguished by transgressive themes, a fascination with popular culture, and a spare but resonant prose style.
Erotic and pornographic works have been written in many cultures since ancient times and recently have flourished with the relaxation of censorship.
In his novels anatomizing gay life at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, David Feinberg used humor as a defense mechanism, a means to avoid madness and despair in a world that had become nightmarishly absurd.
Political organizer, grassroots historian, and accomplished writer, Leslie Feinberg is a pioneer of transgender activism and culture.
American novelist Robert Ferro explores homosexual integration into the traditional family.
Edward Field's poetry is an account of coming to terms with homosexuality in the literary world of New York in the second half of the twentieth century.
Award-winning Harvey Fierstein is one of the finest gay male playwrights currently working in the American theater.
An expatriate journalist, novelist, and translator, Janet Flanner spent most of her adult life in Paris with her lover Solita Solano.
Members of New York's early twentieth-century avant-garde, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler are also the authors of a widely suppressed and largely unread experimental novel of 1930s gay life, The Young and Evil.
Writer and editor Katherine V. Forrest has played a major role in bringing lesbian fiction to the forefront of the mystery and science fiction genres.
The pseudonymous Diana: A Strange Autobiography, first published in 1939, is a coming out story that explores the relationship between lesbians and the larger culture and between lesbians and the medical profession.
Many of the celebrated short stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman are characterized by intense love and passionate devotion between women.
Lesbian local colorist Alice French wrote coded stories that celebrate independent, financially self-sufficient, women-centered women.
An American-born Israeli, Robert Friend was both an accomplished poet in his own right and also an exceptionally skillful translator of poetry from many different languages.
The network of independent gay and lesbian bookstores that arose in the 1970s served as incubators for the literary and cultural development of the modern gay rights movement in the United States and abroad.