gay and lesbian literature

gay and lesbian literature consists of texts by homosexual/bisexual writers and texts amenable to gay/lesbian readings. The central controversy in the defining of gay literature concerns Shakespeare's sonnets (1609), the first 126 of which are addressed to a young man. Their homoeroticism was troublesome from the start: John Benson republished them in 1640, leaving out some sonnets altogether and even heterosexualizing others by regendering their pronouns. Modern readers continue to debate whether the poems express platonic friendship or sexual love. Most male homosexual writing in English before the 20th cent. is based on a narrow range of classical precedents: Plato's Symposium, the erotic epigrams of the Greek Anthology, the homosexual narratives from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The English tradition of male friendship elegies invariably contains echoes of Theocritus' Idylls and the second of Virgil's Eclogues. These classical authors offered persuasive alternatives to the hellfire warnings of Leviticus and the Sodom myth. Their influence is pervasive from Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and the poems of R. Barnfield to the bucolic nostalgia of A. E. Housman and the poetry of the First World War.

With the exception of the residua of Sappho, lesbian writing lacks these strong classical precedents. Apart from extraordinary early figures like ‘the English Sappho’, Katherine Philips, lesbian literature was born among the ‘ephemera’ in which women privately wrote down their affections for each other: letters, diaries, commonplace books. Among the most celebrated of these are the diaries of Eleanor Butler (?1739–1829) and Anne Lister (1791–1840). The influence of bisexual libertines like Rochester (1647–80) and the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) looms over the atmosphere and many of the characters of the Gothic novel, which ultimately helps shape the homosexual villain of mid-20th-cent. fiction.

But homosexual literature proper dates from the late 19th cent., expressing the newly pathologized concept of homosexuality as a lifelong condition. Although cowed by the prosecutions of Wilde and of R. Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), homosexual/bisexual authors began to voice the newly defined identity in coded ways. Such playful texts as Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and the fiction of R. Firbank (1886–1926) effected a transition from decadence to camp Modernism. E. M. Forster's Maurice, written in 1913 but unpublished until 1972, argues for the normality of homosexuality and sets itself in opposition to decadence, effeminacy, and camp. This anticipates the American-influenced mid-century period, which produced much didactic, often apologetic fiction in which a central character was used to represent homosexual people in general. Many such novels ended in death. One English novelist who did much to break this tendency was Angus Wilson.

In the 1970s a more outspoken generation of writers emerged from the women's and gay liberation movements. Among other tendencies of their self-celebratory texts has been a determined appropriation of popular genres. This generation includes A. Mars-Jones (1954– ), meticulously attentive to narrow stretches of a universe transformed by AIDS; Neil Bartlett (1958– ), who applies a detailed map of homosexual history to the cityscapes of postmodern queerness; and J. Winterson (1959– ), whose robustly physical language tells extravagant fables of gender ambiguity.

The most comprehensive summaries of a fast-developing field are Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men (1979) and Gregory Woods's A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998). Recent critical writing has been dominated by queer theory, which calls into question conventional versions of both sexual identity and literary value.