American Literature
James Merrill's significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry.
Poet and playwright Edna Saint Vincent Millay expressed her bisexuality in both her life and her work.
The fiction of Isabel Miller explores and celebrates relationships between women, often across class lines.
Historian and journalist Neil Miller has attempted to widen the understanding of gay and lesbian life by moving away from the major metropolitan areas, focusing instead on small cities and rural areas.
Bisexual feminist literary and social critic Kate Millett is best known for her pioneering critique of patriarchy in Western society and literature, Sexual Politics (1970).
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.
In novels, poetry, and a memoir, Paul Monette wrote about gay men striving to fashion personal identities and, later, coping with the loss of a lover to AIDS.
In her own works, Cherríe Moraga defines her experience as a Chicana lesbian; and in her capacity as editor/publisher, she provides a forum for traditionally silenced lesbians of color.
Best known for his four volumes of short fiction comprising a series of interconnected stories about gay life in New York City, Ethan Mordden is also the author of novels and over twenty works of nonfiction on opera, film, and musical theater.
Howard Moss, one of the leading figures of American letters in the latter half of the twentieth century, is the author of a significant body of elegant, erudite, and urbane work, especially poetry.
There has always been homosexual involvement in American musical theatre and a homosexual sensibility even in straight musicals, and recently the Broadway musical has welcomed openly homosexual themes and situations.
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.
From the two-spirits of traditional culture to contemporary writers, Native North Americans have produced a considerable body of gay and lesbian literature.
Mystery writer Michael Nava has increasingly been recognized as an important novelist whose mature work transcends the limited expectations of a popular and highly specialized genre.
Through her writing, teaching, editing, and activism, Joan Nestle has devoted her life to promoting awareness of glbtq culture and advancing glbtq equality.
Prolific Jewish femme lesbian-feminist writer of poetry, fiction, and children's books, Leslèa Newman draws on her own multiple identities to describe the complex tapestry that results when a variety of identities are woven together.
The bisexual novelist Anaïs Nin is best known for her sexually frank diaries and the erotica published after her death.
Often categorized as a Beat writer, poet and memoirist Harold Norse created a body of work that uses everyday language and images to explore and celebrate both the commonplace and the exotic.
Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.
From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.
The influential poet Frank O'Hara wrote works informed by both modern art and the world of urban gay male culture.
Although Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver has not been an outspoken lesbian activist, her poetry is deeply resonant with contemporary lesbian consciousness, and many lesbians claimed her as one of their own before she publicly came out.
Suze Orman rose from hardscrabble roots to become a financial manager, radio and television personality, and best-selling author in the field of personal money management.
Erotica and Pornography
African-American Literature: Lesbian
Hemingway, Ernest
Forster, E. M.
Williams, Tennessee
St. Sebastian