LITERATURE

this is a composite entry; it is composed of the following three parts:

literature: eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
adam sonstegard

literature: 1890–1969
karla jay

literature: 1969–present
julie abraham

LITERATURE: EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES

The only term that is easy to define in a brief survey of American LGBT literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the time span. Between 1700 and 1899, what it meant for women to express love and passion for one another, for men to write of mutual affection and desire, and for writers to represent these and other emotions in something called literature varied greatly by person, place, period, and document.

A review of LGBT literary works should not imply that each writer under discussion conceived of his or her sexuality and gender in the same way, nor that we who read these works a century or two later see their sexuality and gender in the same light. Even the words in these documents that appear to imply sexual intimacy might originally have denoted exclusively spiritual, platonic friendships, and references to the latter might have served as coded references to erotic relationships. Carefully interpreting pre-twentieth-century queer literary works requires knowledge concerning individual writers' histories, hidden connotations of words, definitions of "romantic friendship," authors' motives for writing texts, and our motives for reading them.

Early Writings, Religious and Otherwise

Condemnation. Much early American literature on LGBT issues takes the form of prohibitions voiced by theologians in sermons, warnings issued by moralists, and significant silences in other texts. Many early American authorities likened England to the biblical Sodom for its supposed degeneracy and imagined America as a refuge from Old World "sodomy." The term applied to sexual relations between members of the same sex, between unmarried members of different sexes, and between humans and animals. Without differentiating between these acts, authorities harshly condemned them all. In one sermon, "The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into" (1674), Samuel Danforth sought to justify the state's recent execution of a youth accused of sodomy, invoking the biblical language of "abomination" and describing both sodomy and bestiality as "going after strange flesh."

"A Christian in His Personal Calling," Cotton Mather's sermon of 1701, has as its concluding lines, "The sin of Sodom was abundance of idleness. All the Sins of Sodom will abound Where Idleness is Countenanced." Sinful sexuality, as far as Mather was concerned, inevitably began with idleness and sloth. An anonymous work, Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (1720), went further, insisting that "wasting seed" not only encouraged sodomy but also caused physical harm. These prohibitions and dire warnings, which Jonathan Ned Katz has gathered in the Gay and Lesbian Almanac, often applied only to men, neglecting women's desires, let alone conceptions of lesbian identity then evolving.

Affirmation. Though this climate offered scant incentive for people to write potentially self-incriminating accounts of unorthodox lives, colonial literature does include some affirmative LGBT images. Women and men alike, thought the Puritans, were "brides of Christ"; women and men alike, by the same logic, possessed an immortal soul that abided in the afterlife without a conventional gender designation.

Some spiritual autobiographers described a deity who male writers wished would "ravish" them. They invoked the language of fleshly desires to symbolize spirituality. An example is the poet Edward Taylor's exhortation in his "Preparatory Meditations" to "Bring forth a birth of keys t' unlock love's chest." Taylor begs, "Lord, ope the door: rub off my rust, remove /My sin, and oil my lock." "Enlivened" and lubricated, the speaker would then be united with the Lord. In a second symbol of such a union, Taylor places himself within traditionally feminine domesticity, writing in the famous poem "Huswifery," "Make me, O Lord, Thy spinning wheel complete." Transforming spools of thread into glorious holy robes, the speaker becomes a household instrument God would lovingly, sternly manipulate.

Similar homoerotic desires, felt by Michael Wiggles-worth, evidently led to various self-castigating diary entries and to the cathartic, millennial poem "The Day of Doom." The poet—who had, as he put it, lusted after his male parishioners—attempted to banish his desires in his prolonged epic of brimstone.

Three men who lived decades later and dubbed one another "Lorenzo," "Leander," and "Castillo" seem not to have banished desires but instead found allusive means of expressing them. In the journals of two of the men, John Fishbourne Mifflin and James Gibson—journals that Caleb Crain has unearthed—the men preserve locks of one another's hair and conspire to spend their nights together. We do not know if they expressed their love sexually on the nights in question, but we do know that their contemporaries struggled to find the right words and actions for fulfilling their own desires. As Alexander Hamilton wrote to John Laurens, a fellow aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolutionary War, "I wish, my dear Laurens … it might be in my power, by action rather than words, [to] convince you that I love you."

Romantic Friendships and Boston Marriages

Expressions of love and desire from the nineteenth century cover a wider range of representations while posing interpretive challenges to readers. The cross-dressing in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) and Theodore Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme (1861) initiates a transgender tradition in American letters. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1851) hints at bisexuality in the relationship between Hester Prynne and her husband, Roger Chillingsworth; between Prynne and her erstwhile lover Arthur Dimmesdale; and between the two men, whose pursuit of one another's secrets becomes oddly erotic.

Arrangements that strike us as amorous but unusual might be better understood in light of what Lillian Faderman terms "romantic friendships" and what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has called "The Female World of Love and Ritual." The persistence of single-sex educational and vocational institutions through the century, the loss of many marriageable men in the Civil War, and the strict limitations placed upon women's spheres meant that many deemed by the outside world to be spinsters, old wives, or widows formed romantic and passionate attachments with one another. These arrangements, which Henry James parodied in another early narrative of bisexuality, The Bostonians (1886), came to be known late in the century as "Boston marriages." Twenty-first-century readers can find it difficult to determine whether or not these relationships were sexual and whether or not they should be labeled as lesbian.

Readers of Emily Dickinson's poetry engage many of these interpretive complications in reviewing her rich, often ambiguous sexual imagery, and in studying the sexually charged letters she wrote to clergyman Charles Wadsworth, Judge Otis Lord, and, most notoriously, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her neighbor and sister-in-law. Her professions of love to Sue in letters and poems—later collected and edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith in Open Me Carefully—suggest that the poet's willingness to express her affections went unrequited. Readers once grouped her poems into tidy categories and conventionalized her verse, but a more innovative Dickinson, who placed her writings in enigmatic manuscript collections called fascicles and who wrote verses that defy categorization, keeps modern readers at work. Readers conventionally picture the poet as retiring and reclusive, but a more engaged and social Emily Dickinson, who actively participated in the social circle of her family and in the sexual politics of her world, emerges from later studies.

Studies of Sarah Orne Jewett, conventionally viewed as a local-color writer and remembered for "Deephaven"(1894) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1910), show that she lived in a romantic friendship for more than twenty years with Annie A. Fields, widow of an important editor who had once published Jewett's work. Jewett lent encouragement to the aspiring young writer Willa Cather, who depicted LGBT relationships in settings that ranged from the East Coast to Nebraska and who brought Boston marriages into the next century.

Interracial and Interclass Same-Sex Relations

Admiration and exploitation. Nineteenth-century gay male literary images embrace domestic, exotic, frontier, and cosmopolitan settings. Herman Melville's novels of the 1840s and 1850s openly depict the exotic sexuality of Polynesian men and women, and suggest that sailors' camaraderie included mutual or even group masturbation. Though interpretations of Melville's sexuality become complicated by questions about his family relationships, his marriage, his iconoclasm, and the varying social codes of life at home and at sea, readers tend to agree that Melville was not alone in locating queer sexuality in maritime and distant settings.

Writing before Melville and influencing his work, particularly Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), Richard Henry Dana set his novel Two Years before the Mast (1841) in the same locales and depicted the same ambiguous friendships between comrades. Writing after Melville and following in this Polynesian tradition, Charles Warren Stoddard depicted a kind of sensual, same-sex utopia in works with telling titles, South-Sea Idylls (1874) and The Island of Tranquil Delights (1904).

In domestic settings, accounts of interracial same-sex relations include those by Anglo-American diarists who admired the physiques of Indian warriors or squaws, as well as slave-owners who carefully noted slaves' muscles and supposedly sculpted physiques. In one mid-century memoir, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), Thomas Wentworth Higginson leads a battalion of African American soldiers fighting for the Union cause but frequently pauses, as Christopher Looby has shown, to describe his delight at watching his men bathing, resting, and preparing for battle.

In another memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs mentions a cruel slave master, who, Jacobs tells us, "took into his head the strangest freaks of despotism." A slave named Luke was at the despot's mercy, and, Jacobs observes, "some of these freaks were of a nature too filthy to be repeated." In a narrative that supplies graphic details of the sexual and physical abuse of other slaves, her reluctance to detail these "filthy" acts suggests their homosexual, forced, and sadistic character. Desire in these instances did not always correspond with egalitarian relationships so much as it reveals tendencies to objectify, idealize, and manipulate those who held less power.

A loving but manly interracial fraternity. The country's classic literary canon, as Leslie Fiedler was the first to point out, seems indeed to include a great many fraternal but socially unequal relationships that cross racial and ethnic lines. James Fenimore Cooper's frontier hero Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans (1826); the Anglo-American and Christian Ishmael and Queequeg, his exotic, "pagan" companion aboard ship—and in bed—in Melville's Moby Dick (1851); and the conscience-stricken rascal and the fugitive slave in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), show the prevalence in nineteenth-century American letters of masculine interracial bonds. Even Henry David Thoreau interrupts his critique of New England economics in Walden (1854) to remark admiringly on the graceful, self-sufficient woodchopper Alek Therien, "A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find."

To read Walt Whitman's most famous poem, "Song of Myself" (1855), without noticing how much of its eroticism falls outside of the sphere of conventional, heterosexual matrimony, is to miss much of the work's startling erotic imagery. Celebrating masculine and feminine bodies alike, the poem's inclusive voice expresses wide varieties of longing and loving, encouraging readers to act upon the poem's words by touching the lives and bodies of others. Whitman depicted same-sex love in the erotic, corporeal, and phallic imagery of the "Calamus" poems, and added songs celebrating heterosexual coupling in the "Children of Adam"sequence. Whitman himself, we now know, enjoyed either romantic partnerships or extremely close, physically affectionate friendships with younger, working-class intimates Fred Vaughan and Peter Doyle, and played a nurturing role in Civil War hospitals, where, as a nurse, he would treat, embrace, and kiss the wounded.

If nineteenth-century Americans were preoccupied with the taboo subject of interracial cross-sex sexuality, which by mid-century they began to call "miscegenation," interracial bonds between men began to offer an imagined literary and mythic alternative. While heterosexual unions, to this way of thinking, could lead to children of mixed racial backgrounds, homosocial bonds allowed for platonic relationships and recast nationhood as a loving but manly interracial fraternity.

Increasing Ambiguity

If manly brothers helped shape the nation at the frontiers, socialite dandies helped shape it in the parlor rooms. The tales and novels of Henry James show how the dandy figure grew increasingly sexually ambiguous, until writers and fans, as in "The Author of Beltraffio" (1884), and teachers and students, as in "The Pupil" (1891), express amorous, mutual admiration. Fellow portrait artists work in a kind of erotic camaraderie and competition in The Tragic Muse (1890), James's counterpart to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and aging observers admire the talents and ambitions of younger men in James's Roderick Hudson (1875) and The Ambassadors (1904).

An aging Horatio Alger admired the ambitions of the young men who appear so repeatedly in Alger's classic "rags to riches" novels. The novelist Bayard Taylor fictionalized the life of Fitz-Greene Halleck, known as the "American Byron," in a subtle story of bisexuality and marriage, Joseph and His Friend (1870); and Alfred J. Cohen, who wrote as Alan Dale, penned another bisexual narrative in A Marriage below Zero (1899), a melodramatic account of a gay male affair, told from an abandoned wife's point of view.

Subtle codes for conveying rarer passions. By this time, however, clinical definitions of homosexuality had begun to take hold in Europe, Wilde had endured his public trial, and Edward Carpenter had begun writing pamphlets that spoke positively of "homogenic love." For many, literary depictions of same-sex relationships began to look more like potential perversity than benign brotherhood.

The British essayist and memoirist John Addington Symonds even asked Whitman if his poems actually depicted sexual contact between men, and if he enacted in life what he represented in verse. Whitman's famous denial (that in a kind of brawling, reckless heterosexuality he had fathered six illegitimate children), his revisions of the more explicit passages in some of his poems, and his written reminiscences prompted readers to ask how literally and biographically they should read his poems.

Women's amorous relationships also seemed more suspicious to Willa Cather's readers than they had to previous generations; their representation in literature seemed increasingly taboo. Cather and her contemporaries, from pioneering autobiographers Claude Hartland and Earl Lind to the novelist Henry Blake Fuller to the early feminist theorist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, made literary careers out of pushing the limits of such taboos ever further.

The stories that queer literature has to tell from before the twentieth century flirt with these subtly shifting taboos. This literature finds subtle codes for conveying rarer passions, works with or against the negative attitudes that words like "sodomy" and "deviancy" implicitly convey, and awaits the conscientious sympathy readers of a latter day, such as ourselves, can supply.

Bibliography

Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Crain, Caleb. American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.

D'Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper, 1988.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1955.

——. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958.

——. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith. Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press, 1998.

Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Man: Romantic Friendships and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981.

Farr, Judith. The Passions of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books, 1960.

Godbeer, Richard. The Sexual Revolution in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Habegger, Alfred. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Random House, 2001.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Edited by Christopher Looby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster. New York: Norton, 2001.

Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay and Lesbian Almanac. New York: Harper, 1983.

——. Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Leavitt, David, and Mark Mitchell, eds. Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English, 1748–1914. London; Vintage, 1999.

Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass." Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Pollak, Vivian R. The Erotic Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Rupp, Leila J. A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Schmidgall, Gary. Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. New York: Dutton, 1997.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America." In Feminism and History. Edited by Joan Wallach Scott. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism. Edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: Norton, 1973.

Adam Sonstegard

see alsoalger, horatio; colonial america; dickinson, emily; gilman, charlotte perkins; interracial and interethnic sex and relationships; jewett, sarah orne; romantic friendship and boston marriage; slavery and emancipation; stoddard, charles warren; whitman, walt; wigglesworth, michael.

LITERATURE: 1890–1969

Scholarship since the Stonewall Riots (1969) has continually pushed and expanded the understanding of homosocial identity and its genealogical ancestors. Many nineteenth-century literary figures have been put under new lenses, while new visions of familiar texts by innovative scholars and ever-curious readers have augmented the list of cultural ancestors. As novelist Richard Hall pointed out in a New Republic article (1979) about Henry James: "Lives, like carpets, have many strands. They may be perceived in many designs. What the biographer picks out depends not only on the keenness of his vision but on what he is empowered to see." Twenty-first-century scholars, students, and literary aficionados know that nineteenth-century writers such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson are only the beginning of a rich American heritage.

Turn-of-the-Century Literature

The fiction of Henry James (1843–1916) is a prime example of how post-Stonewall literary criticism explored the canon and reconfigured readings of turn-of-the-century literature. The traditional scholarship of Leon Edel (written between 1950 and 1972) and the work of other Jamesians posited that James's grief over the death of his beloved cousin Minny Temple in 1870 had left the author a confirmed bachelor. But starting with Richard Hall's perceptive questioning in the New Republic of James's "life unlived, the beast forever crouched," queer theorists soon uncovered a different set of readings.

Even the most traditional of male critics such as Leon Edel, Irving Howe, and Lionel Trilling could not ignore the lesbian overtones in James's The Bostonians (1886). Other critics, including Michael Moon and Eve Sedgwick, ventured beyond the more obvious homo-erotic connections. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Tendencies (1993), Sedgwick explored more subtle and coded homo-erotic references in Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904).

None of the scholars who have reread James suggest that he consciously saw himself as a homosexual. James was horrified by the 1895 conviction and imprisonment on sodomy charges of Oscar Wilde in England, but refused to sign an 1896 petition supporting a pardon. In fact, like a good many other writers, James may have taken Wilde's downfall as a dire warning against writing that could be deemed too provocative. He therefore relied on exploring friendship between older and younger men, which still had benign connotations at the turn of the century.

American Expatriates in Europe

James moved to England permanently in the 1870s after traveling around Europe and living in Paris. Like many other American writers and painters, he viewed Europe as a place to learn his craft, to earn a living, and to view his native land at a distance with some dispassion and clarity.

The subsequent generation of literary expatriates who followed James to England, France, and Italy was much more cognizant of their homosexuality or "inversion." Their sexual difference became a significant factor in their decision to emigrate. By the turn of the century, for example, Natalie Clifford Barney was calling herself "naturally unnatural." Far ahead of her contemporaries, she rejected the "third sex" theories of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis and tried to claim her place as a beautiful woman in search of others. Barney looked to lesbian prototypes—however negative—in the French literature of Théophile de Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Émile Zola that were lacking in her own literary heritage. For Barney as well as for other lesbian expatriates such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Janet Flanner, the cultural reality was that the native French paid little attention to the morality of foreigners as long as it did not affect their own daughters. Americans were less liberal-minded. Barney's first book, Quelquesportraits-sonnets de Femmes (Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women, 1900), a collection of French poetry praising the beauty of women, was savaged in the American press. Her distraught father, Alfred Barney, purchased all the copies of the book that he could find and destroyed the plates. In contrast, the French critics were more appalled by her lapses in rhyme and meter.

With the harsh criticism of her work in America, Barney developed several strategies for expressing lesbian subject matter with impunity. The first was to create a series of plays, poems, and pseudo-Socratic dialogues about the life of Sappho, a figure from ancient Greece who was simultaneously still popular yet removed and exempt from contemporary values. Nineteenth-century poets and historians generally portrayed Sappho as a heterosexual mother who had leapt over the Leucadian cliffs after she had been spurned by the sailor Phaon. Barney and her lover, British-born poet Renée Vivien (born Pauline Mary Tarn) recast the Greek poet as a lover of women. By recreating Sappho in their own likeness, Barney and Vivien established a literary foremother who validated both their writing and lifestyle; for Barney, these two elements were inseparable.

Literary Amnesia

Barney was Gertrude Stein's friend and neighbor on the Left Bank of Paris, but their philosophical differences were many. Unlike Barney, Stein was reticent about her private life. Stein's first novel, Q.E.D., written as early as 1903, was published posthumously and privately in 1950. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein claims that she placed the work in a desk drawer and forgot about it—a rather unlikely explanation for the "genius" she has Toklas label her in the same work.

Compared to Stein's major works, however, Q.E.D. is best forgotten. The lesbian triangle in the novel is largely of interest for what it reveals about Stein's early life and her unfortunate involvements. In Q.E.D. a character named Adele (Stein) becomes passionately attached to Helen (in real life, May Bookstaver), only to discover that she is financially and romantically controlled by Mabel (in real life, Mabel Haynes).

This bitter triangle of Stein's college days haunted her for many years, and the breakup played some part in her expatriation. Stein eventually found a way to voice this story by heterosexualizing it, first in Fernhurst (written c. 1904–1905) and later in "Melanctha" in Three Lives (1909). References to lesbianism were retained, but they were intricately coded, such as the repeated refrain of Melanctha biblically "knowing" Jane Harden.

The Gay Grotesque

The 1920s and 1930s ushered in a golden age of LGB writers, artists, and filmmakers. Their talents spanned the Atlantic and embraced the black as well as the white communities, as the Harlem Renaissance blossomed in New York and beyond.

One common trope of LGB writing is the "carnivalesque." Although the roots of the grotesque may be traced back to writers of all sexual persuasions and nationalities, including Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, and James Joyce, the carnivalesque has a special place for deviant writers who perhaps instinctively identify with its rebellious traditions. In the twentieth century, "monstrosity" in its many forms was often analyzed according to moral, medical, and psychological models, but some writers and artists refused to be cowed or defined by modern systems of labeling and limitation as they rebelliously explored and reclaimed the carnivalesque.

Two salient examples of this form are Strange Brother (1931) by Blair Niles (born Mary Blair Rice Beebie), and The Young and Evil (1933), coauthored by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. Little is known of Niles, except that she was a white author who was interested in not only writing but also personal exploration. Ford, born in Mississippi, and Tyler, born in New Orleans, migrated to Greenwich Village in New York City.

Both novels use Greenwich Village and Harlem as the setting for the gay grotesque. The rich, creative spirit of black LGB writers, artists, and musicians who populated Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s was in and of itself an inversion and subversion of the social order as the ruling class of the United States envisioned it. Harlem, like Greenwich Village, was a place to flee to, a fertile city of the imagination where African Americans gathered, leaving their native towns for a place where their artistic aspirations would not be considered abnormal.

In both novels, the protagonists wander the nocturnal landscape of New York City in search of sex, cigarettes, and illegal alcohol. They sample many of the seamy offerings of the thriving homosexual world: the characters cruise bars, pick up strange men in the streets or public bathrooms, and attend a drag ball in Harlem.

Lesbian Carnivalesque

The literary expatriates continued to flourish in Paris, which remained another primary site for American authors. Salons run by Natalie Clifford Barney, Gertrude Stein, and Mina Loy reopened at the close of World War I. These salons and a Left Bank Anglo bookstore run by lesbian Sylvia Beach embraced those members of the "Lost Generation" who remained in Europe, as well as new arrivals, such as Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay.

One of the new émigrés was Djuna Barnes. As someone who had to earn a living, Barnes realized that lesbian content was literary suicide, especially in the wake of the obscenity trials regarding The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall, whom Barnes knew and even satirized in Ladies Almanack (1928). Barnes resorted to several strategies to protect her name from the legal dangers of censorship and the threat of public condemnation. First, she did not identify herself as a lesbian. Although she is generally considered bisexual, she doggedly refused to label herself as either lesbian or bisexual. She imagined herself as a heterosexual writing on a controversial subject with a long literary history. Furthermore, the hermetic quality of her work, especially her modernistic riffs and mock historical narratives such as Ladies Almanack, kept her works out of the hands of the general nonliterary public (those most likely to find her work offensive).

Influenced by her friend Charles Henri Ford, Barnes embraced the grotesque. In Nightwood (1936), Nora Flood meets Robin Vote at the circus. Nora's passion for Robin seems relatively palatable when set against an inverted twilight world of "monstrous" freaks, including tattooed circus performers and the eccentric and verbose transvestite Matthew O'Connor. As Carolyn Allen points out in Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss (1996), Barnes, like Stein and Barney, discouraged attempts to read her lesbian characters (Robin and Nora) as a couple in which one is the "congenital invert" while the other is more traditionally feminine—that is, a couple that would be more like Stephen Gordon and Mary Llewellen in The Well of Loneliness.

Encoded Longings

Few accounts of the Harlem scene by black writers were as open as Strange Brother, with the noteworthy exception of Richard Bruce Nugent's infamous story "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," which was printed in the first and only issue of the magazine Fire!! (1926). In this impressionistic story, punctuated only by ellipses (which often mark the space for something that cannot be said), the character Alex longs for Beauty, "because his body was beautiful … and white and warm." Nugent daringly celebrates both interracial relationships and bisexuality: "one can love two at the same time."

Nevertheless, although many of the most celebrated writers of the Harlem Renaissance were homosexual or bisexual, their works were deeply encoded. Gloria Hull (1993) has demonstrated, for instance, that some of the love poems of Angelina Weld Grimké contained a feminine pronoun in the manuscript that was altered to the masculine form for publication purposes. A few poems have been published, such as "Brown Girl" and "Naughty Nan," that extol feminine beauty. Grimké's scant literary production was due, Hull posits, to the restraints resulting from widespread homophobia.

Post-Stonewall critics such as Hull and Barbara Smith have begun to explore the intersections of sexuality and race in order to reevaluate the texts of acknowledged bisexual poets such as Countee Cullen and the possibly bisexual Langston Hughes. The latter's work exhibited very little homosexual content and whose sexual tastes seemed a mystery even to those closest to him. In the context of new scholarship, Hughes's "dream deferred" (in "Harlem") and Cullen's lack of "peace/Night or day, no slight release/… Walking through my body's street" (in "Heritage") take on a new resonance, though for some, a homosocial interpretation of these poems might seem strained.

The same conundrum applies to Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen, a novel that has received much attention due to the implicit similarities in the ways femme lesbians, masculine homosexual men, and light-skinned blacks have passed in the dominant culture. Just as many lesbians married men who virulently hated homosexuals, Larsen's passing protagonist Clare Kendry married a malicious racist. Whether Larsen intended this dual reading is not entirely clear, although Deborah E. McDowell, in introducing the 1986 edition of Passing, makes a strong argument for reading lesbianism into the text. McDowell points to Irene's (the narrator's) erotic descriptions of Clare as a "lovely creature" with a "tempting mouth," as well as the repeated images of heat and fire that Clare's presence conjures up.

Reflections in Southern Eyes

By the 1940s, southerners were the most influential writers in the United States. Many of them, including Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams were also homosexual or bisexual.

The presentation of what has often been called a "homosexual sensibility" is often subtle. Though there is no blatant homosexuality or lesbianism in the works of Capote or McCullers, homosexuality is often hinted at through role reversal. The two authors employed the southern Gothic tradition (as envisaged by William Faulkner) and transformed it to investigate the "freakish" quality of their own existence. Role reversals include the girl who is a tomboy and the boy who is too feminine. Both Capote and McCullers successfully employ this strategy. In Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), Joel does not look like a "real boy.""He was too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned." His playmate, Idabel, calls him "sissy-britches," and she is so filthy and rough that Miss Roberta, the proprietor of the café in Noon City, tells Idabel not to come into her store. McCullers uses tomboys as the protagonists of two important novels—Mick in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and Frankie Adams in Member of the Wedding (1946).

Both Capote and McCullers see their characters as outsiders. In Other Voices, Other Rooms, the paralyzed father, the eccentric Randolph with his effeminate ways, the bird-killing Amy, the centenarian Jesus Fever, and the mutilated Zoo form a household of outcasts. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, all the characters are "freaks" of sorts, including the deaf mute John Singer, the dwarflike Jake Blount, and the awkward and tomboyish Mick Kelly. Although homosexuality is not mentioned amid all this Faulkner-inspired Gothic grotesqueness (something pointed out by Tennessee Williams), the most tender relationship in the novel exists between Singer and his mute friend Antonapoulos, who is confined to a mental institution for most of the story.

World War II

The major catalyst of the 1940s was World War II, which transformed the way homosexuals were portrayed in literature, a change best represented by Gore Vidal in The City and the Pillar (1948). Vidal's protagonist, Jim Willard, is the epitome of a southern gentleman: a tall, blond, polite tennis player from Virginia. He, too, turns out to be an outcast. He falls in love with the boy next door, Bob Shaw, and one sultry idyllic night while camping out together in an old slave cabin by the river, they wrestle and make love.

Despite their individual quirks, the central male figures are doggedly "normal" men who pass effortlessly in the heterosexual world. Their masculinity is underscored by their participation in World War II: Jim enters the army, Shaw serves in the navy. Homosexual servicemen in uniform are in the background of every bar and party, perhaps suggesting the impact that World War II had on the development of homosexual consciousness.

The novel was a breakthrough in presenting Jim's obsession with Bob, not his homosexuality per se, as the problem. Nevertheless, in his work Vidal replicates the homophobic Freudian wisdom of the day: Jim's father "represent[s] bleakness and punishment," while his mother is overly doting and protective. One could interpret Jim's fixation on Bob as his failure to develop beyond adolescent fantasies.

The McCarthy Era

The political backlash of the 1950s that often lumped "commies" and "queers" into a single category created frightening times for many writers and artists. Material that could be construed as leaning to the Left might be banned or earn its creator an unwelcome subpoena to be questioned by a congressional committee. As anticommunism, as promulgated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his political allies, spread across the United States and as far away as New Zealand, many writers found it safest to disguise their material or, at the very least, to distance themselves from it in some way so that they could claim it was truly a "fiction" in every sense of the word. When the political climate of the era is considered, it is amazing to see how much overt gay and lesbian material was nonetheless published during this period.

McCarthyism's emphasis on the holiness of the nuclear family unit as the antidote to "pinko commie queers" affected most literary output, all the way down to dime store novels such as lesbian pulp fiction. After wartime restrictions on paper were lifted, Gold Medal began to publish heterosexual thrillers and lesbian pulp novels with tawdry, suggestive covers. Many of the lesbian pulps were actually written by men or homophobic women, and they portrayed lesbian life as desperate and unhappy, but others by Paula Christian, Vin Packer, Valerie Taylor, and Ann Bannon presented more positive images and won an abiding place in lesbian culture, so much so that some of these authors are still in print.

One of the most famous pulps was Women's Barracks by Tereska Torrès, translated from the French by her husband, Meyer Levin; it had sold millions of copies by the 1960s. The novel focuses on the lives of a half dozen women in the Free French forces living in London during World War II. In "Making the World Safe for the Missionary Position" (1990), Kate Adams aptly summed up the plot of the novel as "the sexual revelations of four or five young women soldiers who, if the novel's word is taken literally, did nothing during their army years except have affairs with men, have affairs with women, talk to each other about the affairs they were having, and try to get over the affairs they had already had." Although the novel seemed to support post–World War II ideology that the best and safest place for women was in the home, not the armed forces, Women's Barracks was singled out by the Gathings Committee of the U.S. Congress in 1952 as one of sixty paperback novels that included "obscenity, violence, lust, use of narcotics, blasphemy, vulgarity, pornography, juvenile delinquency, sadism, masochism, perversion, homosexuality, lesbianism" and descriptions of a host of other sins.

Although the government worried that cheap paperbacks were spreading perversion, lesbians became concerned with the negative tilt of many of these works. For example, one nonfiction book, Ann Aldrich's We Walk Alone (1955), provoked a debate at the May 1957 meeting of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in San Francisco. Helen Sanders, then DOB president, attacked the book for its "undue stress on the obvious and bizarre 'types' of Lesbians" and suggested the author "seek the 'cure' she believes possible since she so obviously hates and resents her lot" (Ladder, vol. 1, no. 9, June 1957). The titles of other pulp novels—for example, Warped Women by Janet Pritchard (1956)—made their prejudices clear. With negative paperbacks available in every drugstore while Jeannette H. Foster had to contract with a vanity press to publish her groundbreaking Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956), lesbian readers must have felt extremely frustrated indeed.

Nevertheless, some lesbian pulp novels were more positive in their characterizations and images, and served a useful social function. Laura, Ann Bannon's central character in Odd Girl Out (1957), I Am a Woman (1959), and Women in the Shadows (1959), runs away to New York City, where she dates Jack, a homosexual man, to cover up her "deviance." He, in turn, takes her to the homosexual haunts of Greenwich Village, where Laura meets up with Bannon's most memorable lesbian, Beebo Brinker. Although Bannon's Village was not geographically accurate, it provided readers with a travel guide of sorts, along with tips on what to wear, how to stand, how to cruise, and how not to make a sexual pass at a heterosexual roommate.

Lesbians Write Gay Men

Although pulp novels far outnumbered more serious endeavors, a few classics emerged in the 1950s. In order to be taken seriously, the authors of these novels took great pains to distance themselves from their subject matter, a strategy that gave their works the cache of objective and dispassionate interest. It was no accident, therefore, that at mid-century two lesbian novelists—Mary Renault (born Mary Challans) and Marguerite Yourcenar (born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Brayencourt)—became two of the most important voices on male homosexuality. Yourcenar, who was born in Belgium, lived in Maine with her lifelong companion and translator Grace Frick. Her Memoires d'Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian, 1954) became her most successful novel. In Yourcenar's book, Hadrian evokes the glory of ancient Greece, in particular the emperor's passion for the young and handsome Antinous, and this couple often compare themselves to Achilles and his beloved friend Patrocles. Thus, the novel establishes what appears to be a historical timeline tracing homosexuality back to ancient Greece and beyond that, to the mythological times before Homer. Although Hadrian drives Antinous to suicide by his affairs with other men and women, homosexuality was presented as an accepted form of love, even for those in power. Obviously, such a work had enormous appeal for male homosexuals, who could escape through fiction into a better reality and forget for a moment the malodorous politics of the present.

Even Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), set during World War II in bomb-ravaged London, was replete with images drawn from antiquity. Though Renault was not an American, the novel—a rare and serious look at homosexuality—was one of the most enduring and popular books in the United States in the 1950s.

Baldwin's Homosexual Masterpieces

James Baldwin's distancing strategy in Giovanni's Room (1956) is to make David, the American narrator, and Giovanni, his Italian lover, both white and to set the novel in gay Paris, where, many Americans assumed, anything goes for "five dirty minutes in the dark." While several critics have posited that Baldwin's choices of setting and race are geared to elude homophobic critics, the transposition may also be a sensible way to keep the focus on homosexuality and American values rather than race. It would be unfair, however, to suggest that Baldwin created only white homosexuals. During the same decade he addressed the desires of black protagonists for other black males in "The Outing," (1951), Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), and Another Country (1962).

Whereas Baldwin's works about his upbringing are often laced with biblical references, Giovanni's Room is a trove of allusions to a hidden canon of homosexual texts. They are symbolically held in Giovanni's room, a "maid's room"(thus not intended for someone of Giovanni's gender) that is not centrally located, but is in fact "far out. It is almost not Paris." The room becomes the site of David's physical initiation into adult homosexuality, but it also holds Giovanni's "regurgitated life," "boxes of cardboard and leather," out of which peep "sheets of violin music," a hint of the artistic contents hidden within. The novel is a catalog of quotes and allusions, deftly referred to throughout the book starting with the names of the central characters and their reference to the biblical David and Jonathan. The purpose of so many allusions is to bestow a long homosexual literary heritage on Giovanni's Room and to claim in an oblique way that imaginative ground was actually broken long before Baldwin's novel.

A Woman on Women

Not all novelists felt the need to displace race or gender, but for Patricia Highsmith, a daring lesbian novel, The Price of Salt (1952), caused her to adopt a nom de plume. Author of the successful novel Strangers on a Train (1950), which she then adapted for a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Highsmith claimed to have used the pseudonym Claire Morgan so she would not be pigeonholed as a lesbian writer; the disguise protected her true identity. Like Baldwin, Highsmith alludes to other texts and incorporates theories from other fields, most particularly psychology. But instead of using them to buttress her characters or her theme, Highsmith satirizes them in order to move beyond their limitations. For instance, Highsmith embeds and then deconstructs a number of references to popular psychology of the day. She has one of her protagonists, Therese, work in the toy department of a store, selling dolls, and as if that were not enough to suggest infantilism, Therese is a quasi-orphan abandoned at an institutional home, where she becomes fixated on Sister Alicia. Carol, older and richer with a child of her own, more or less "adopts" Therese by inviting the young woman to her home, where Therese winds up tucked in bed and fed hot milk while Carol smokes a cigarette.

As the novel develops, however, Carol and Therese take off on a cross-country journey that leads Carol away from her marriage and Therese into adulthood; it is not just a picaresque road story in which neither character grows. At the end, Carol loses her child to her ex-husband. Although these may seem dire consequences to contemporary lesbians, they actually represented an improvement over the usual fictional denouement in which the runaway mother—whatever her sexual proclivities—was killed by a speeding train like Anna Karenina or driven to suicide like Emma Bovary. Even more amazing, Therese and Carol are reunited at the end of the novel. While the ending is indeterminate—and not the happy conclusion some lesbians have read into it—the possibility exists, perhaps for the first time in a serious lesbian novel, of at least a fulfilling and equal relationship, one that may be worth more than the modest "price of salt" of the book's title.

The Beat of a Different Drummer

In the 1950s the Beat generation rebelled against everything post–World War II America tried to represent. Mostly products of an Ivy League education, they embraced poetry, poverty, and, in some cases, crime and insanity in a capitalist society that valued financial success, hard work, and conventional careers. They were rootless travelers at a time when most Americans wanted to migrate no further than the suburbs. And in a predominantly Christian society, they embraced Eastern religions and exalted mysticism over ritual, meditation over prayer. In a culture where "real men" drank beer, they smoked pot and used other mind-altering drugs. And more than was evident during their heyday, they rebelled against sexual normativity by engaging in "free sex" with multiple female sexual partners, other men, and each other.

The Beatniks were spawned by an eclectic set of ancestral inheritances, including Arthur Rimbaud's synesthesia, Baudelaire's mal du siècle, Walt Whitman's emotional intensity, and the language and drug culture of jazz musicians. According to Steven Watson in The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters (1995), Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac) defined their "new vision" of writing as early as 1944. This "new consciousness" had three main premises: "1) Uncensored self-expression is the seed of creativity. 2) The artist's consciousness is expanded through nonrational means: derangement of the senses, via drugs, dreams, hallucinatory states, and visions. 3) Art supersedes the dictates of conventional morality" (p. 40).

By the 1950s, the Beat generation (a term coined by Kerouac) had become a major force in American literature. Seminal works included William S. Burroughs's Junky: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971), and Queer (1985); Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), The Subterraneans (1958), The Dharma Bums (1958), Big Sur (1962) and Visions of Cody (1971); and the poetry of Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Robert Duncan. The Beat circle also included Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady, Carl Solomon, Diane di Prima, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). West Coast poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened City Lights Books in San Francisco, which was the first U.S. bookstore to sell only paperbacks and which published Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1956. Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao, the manager of his store, were arrested on obscenity charges for selling Howl, but on 3 October 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn found them not guilty despite the poem's raw language and obvious homosexuality. The acquittal was a major stepping stone for the publication of works with homoerotic content. Although Ginsberg lived quite openly with his partner and fellow poet Peter Orlovsky, some of the other Beat writers typically downplayed their homosexual acts by transposing them into heterosexual couplings within their novels.

The Beats left behind a body of spontaneous, raw, introspective poetry and prose that revolutionized American writing and turned the Beats into cult figures.

Places for Us

Despite the contention of the gay liberationists of the following decade, the 1960s were a relatively rich time for LGB culture. Several prominent authors wrote books with major gay or lesbian characters.

In her nonfiction work Lesbian Images (1975), Jane Rule recounts—with some dismay—the publication saga of Alma Routsong's "gentle" novel A Place for Us (1969). Unable to find a publisher for her new novel, despite the fact that she had previously published two others, Routsong privately printed the work at the Bleecker Street Press and sold it at DOB meetings and similar venues. Despite such careful control of her audience, Routsong still felt compelled to employ a pseudonym, Isabel Miller, which combined an anagram of "lesbia" with her mother's surname, Miller.

Routsong dared to place lesbians in new landscapes and plots where the conflict was something other than a woman-loving identity. Her A Place for Us is an interesting case in point. According to Routsong, her novel "was suggested by the life of the painter Mary Ann Wilson and her companion Miss Brundidge, who lived and farmed together for many years … [in] Greene County, New York State, in the early part of the nineteenth century" (Miller, 1972). Having found evidence of their "romantic attachment" to one another, Routsong researched the period and imagined the circumstances that brought the two women together. A Place for Us transforms the real-life women into Patience White, a painter, who falls in love with her neighbor, Sarah Dowling, a woman raised in a family of daughters to fulfill the role of the son on her father's farm. Out of scant historical material, Routsong was able to spin a convincing tale of two lesbians from very different social and economic classes, who knew no other women like them and thus had to proceed with absolutely no role models.

Rule's Desert of the Heart (1964) focused not on history, but on contemporary psychological conventions about lesbians. In her opening lines, Rule warns the reader that "conventions, like clichés, have a way of surviving their own usefulness." Rule then proceeds to turn those very clichés on their heads, first presenting Evelyn Hall, an English professor in Reno awaiting a divorce, and Ann Childs, a casino employee, as tempting doubles. "Ann was almost young enough to be her own child. But only a parent could be allowed to feel tenderness for his own likeness. In a childless woman such tenderness was at best narcissistic." Rule dares the readers to measure the couple against contemporary psychological profiles of homosexuals as "narcissistic," and then she presents a warm and thoroughly normal romance, beset with differences in social class and lifestyle that many heterosexual couples face as well. Still, some critics, blinded by their prejudices, were not convinced and judged the novel by the characters' unhappiness, which they thought was the lesbians' due. Thus, in the end, when Rule declines to kill off her protagonists in a sandstorm or to have Evelyn return to her wimpish husband, George, the critics viewed Ann and Evelyn's attempt to build a life together in Reno (if only "for the while then …for an indefinite period of time") as a borrowed heterosexual plot.

At the time, there were few gay and lesbian publications to counteract mainstream homophobia, yet groups such as the DOB and its publication the Ladder, along with word of mouth, ensured that these all-too-rare novels got into the hands of grateful lesbian readers who developed an enduring affection for them. Other lesbians read against the grain of mainstream reviews and rushed to buy any book that hinted, however negatively, at lesbian content.

The Changing Tide

While Rule expatriated herself to Canada, by World War II many European writers began to immigrate to the United States. Among the most prominent was Christopher Isherwood, who moved to southern California in 1939 and became a citizen in 1946. Beginning with The World in the Evening (1954) and continuing with Down There on a Visit (1962), Isherwood set much of his work in the United States, whereas the bulk of his earlier work takes place in Berlin. One of his American novels, A Single Man (1964), is perhaps his finest work. The almost Aristotelian structure of the novel, which takes place in Los Angeles in one day, presents George's homosexuality as a state of being rather than as a premise for development. George's day in various milieus around Los Angeles—from the university to a friend's hospital bed to a gay bar to his midnight dip in the surf—bears an implicit comparison with James Joyce's Ulysses, although Leopold Bloom's journey through Dublin on foot is replaced by a car trip on the Los Angeles freeway, just as George's homosexuality stands in for Bloom's outsider status as a Jew. As Claude Summers points out in Gay Fictions (1990), "rather than being subject to overt persecution, George most commonly experiences attitudes of condescending tolerance or studied indifference to his sexuality." As an aging gay man, he feels alienation from the denizens of the bars and to a degree from his own students. George mostly suffers in his "singleness": his past relationship with Jim has been so private and discreet that after Jim's death, he cannot mourn publicly. Though his grief should (through its very commonality) tie him to the rest of humanity, it separates him all the more.

Not Your Average Man

Not all writers, however, presented homosexuality as simply another facet of a normal life. Indeed, some reveled in the seamier sides of gay existence, as did Samuel M. Steward, writing pornography under the name of Phil Andros (his most notable work being Stud, 1966), and Latino writer John Rechy. Published in 1963 by Grove Press—the same year as the American publication of Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers—Rechy's City of Night follows the adventures of the unnamed narrator, who, as Rechy himself did, migrates from El Paso, Texas, to New York City's Times Square and eventually to the gay haunts of New Orleans and Los Angeles as well. As much an Everyman as Isherwood's George, the narrator lives not for relationships but for paid sex that proves his worth as well as his heterosexuality. The narrator, like an inverted saint subjecting himself to temptations, allows dozens of men he spurns to pay for sexual acts with him—only to avoid the dreadful temptation each time to recognize that he is gay too, thus uniting with them. Unlike the novels of Rule, Routsong, and Isherwood, Rechy revels in presenting the grimiest details of a hustler's life. The most outlandish customers, including one man who rents an apartment to house his leather collection and another who invites the narrator home only to mother him, are the ones who catch the narrator's eye. Normality is not of interest here.

Rechy's next novel, Numbers (1967), follows the adventures of Johnny Rio (whose name perhaps pays homage to Tennessee Williams's "Joy Rio"), a former hustler, who now obsessively cruises in Griffith Park and other areas of Los Angeles as he tries to have sex with enough gay men to somehow extract his own identity from them. Here the reader is presented with another outsider, someone who moves closer to accepting his gay identity through anonymous sexuality. Thus, Rechy (as did Steward) embraces in a rather revolutionary way the very promiscuity that was downplayed and whispered about by political groups of the era. His unapologetic passion for the seamiest and most secretive sides of homosexual life almost presages the "anything goes" sexuality of the gay liberationists of the next decade.

Rechy's and Steward's works remind us that the literary road to the Stonewall Riots of 1969 was both long and well-paved. The richness of the LGB literary heritage of the first seven decades of the twentieth century is particularly astonishing when one takes into account the lack of public acceptance for the thematic material that inspired its authors. When the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first gay and lesbian bookstore in the country, opened its doors in Greenwich Village in 1967, such works found themselves, for the first time (with the exception of private collections), side by side on bookshelves, joined in what would later be deemed a queer literary canon.

Bibliography

Abelove, Henry, et al. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Abraham, Julie. Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Adams, Kate. "Making the World Safe for the Missionary Position: Images of the Lesbian in Post–World War II America." In Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. Edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Allen, Carolyn. Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

——. Pulp Fiction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps. New York: St. Martins Press, 2003.

Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Daughters of Bilitis. Ladder. Vols. 1–16 (1956–1972). Reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Farwell, Marilyn R. Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Ferguson, Blanche E. Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Foster, Jeannette H. Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Quantitative Survey. Reprint. Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad, 1985.

Haggerty, George E., and Bonnie Zimmerman, eds. Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995.

Hall, Richard. "An Obscure Hurt: The Sexuality of Henry James, Part I." New Republic, 28 April 1979: 25–29.

Hoogland, Renée C. Lesbian Configurations. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1997.

Hull, Gloria T. "'Lines She Did Not Dare': Angelina Weld Grimke, Harlem Renaissance Poet."In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Edited by Henry Abelove et al. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Jay, Karla, ed. Lesbian Erotics. New York: New York University Press, 1995.

Jay, Karla, and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Lewis, David Levering, ed. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Lilly, Mark. Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1993.

Mattachine Society. Mattachine Review. Vols. 1–13 (1955–1966). Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Miller, Isabel. Afterword in Patience and Sarah. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.

Pollack, Sandra, and Denise D. Knight, eds. Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Roof, Judith. Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Rule, Jane. Lesbian Images. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.

Sarotte, Georges-Michel. Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theater from Herman Melville to James Baldwin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

——. Tendencies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

Summers, Claude J. Gay Fictions, Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. New York: Continuum, 1990.

Summers, Claude J., ed. The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present. New York: Holt, 1995.

Vicinus, Martha, ed. Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960. New York: Pantheon, 1995.

——. The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930. New York: Pantheon, 1995.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

Karla Jay

see alsoanderson, margaret, and jane heap; auden, w.h.; baldwin, james; bannon, ann; barnes, djuna; barney, natalie; beats; bowles, paul and jane bowles; burroughs, william s.; capote, truman; cather, willa; cheever, john; cullen, countee; delaney, samuel; dunbar-nelson, alice; ford, charles henri; foster, jeanette; fugate, james barr; ginsberg, allen; grimkÉ, angelina weld; goodman, paul; gunn, thom; harlem renaissance; highsmith, patricia; hughes, langston; isherwood, christopher; mccullers, carson; mckay, claude; niles, blair; nugent, richard bruce; prime-stevenson, edward i.; pulp fiction: gay; pulp fiction: lesbian; sarton, may; smith, lillian; stein, gertrude, and alice b. toklas; thurman, wallace; vidal, gore; wilhelm, gale; williams, tennessee; yourcenar, marguerite.

LITERATURE: 1969–PRESENT

From the last decades of the nineteenth century onward, literary works—and their writers—have been key to the development of both mainstream understandings of homosexuality and transgenderism, and of modern LGBT cultures themselves. However, the development of the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements in the years immediately following the late 1960s upheaval that is signaled with the shorthand "Stonewall" produced in the United States a particularly intensified focus on literary works. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 also marked fundamental changes in both the content of the literature produced and the places in which it was published; the new publishing venues that appeared were inseparable from the new ideas. At the same time, there were significant continuities across the cultural divide represented by Stonewall—within the careers of individual writers and in terms of reader expectations—in the ways in which homosexuality and transgenderism might be represented in literature.

In the decades after Stonewall, LGBT literature continued to be shaped by developments in LGBT politics, as well as by changes in the economic and social options available to white women and women and men of color and by changes in public discussions of gender and racial difference. The development of LGBT literature, like the development of LGBT politics, was also profoundly affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic that, beginning in the early 1980s, took away a host of writers and readers, became the subject of a trove of extraordinary artistic work, and irreversibly heightened the cultural visibility of LGBT people in the United States. Consequently, by the end of the twentieth century, literature—in the form of novels, poetry, plays, and memoirs—had become part of a broader array of forms for cultural work available to a very diverse group of LGBT-identified artists, including many different combinations of class, racial, gender, and sexual identifications.

New Ideas, New Forms of Publication

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay liberationists and lesbian feminists challenged mainstream views that regarded homosexuality as either an illness or a moral failing and of heterosexuality as the norm and ideal. They challenged conventional understandings of gender (masculine and feminine) and conventional understandings of lesbians and gay men as confused about their gender, as illustrated by masculine women and effeminate men. Alongside activists in other social movements, including the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's liberation movement, gay liberationists and lesbian feminists rejected the authorities who had traditionally controlled public opinion; in the case of homosexuality these were, in particular, doctors, legislators, and religious leaders. Instead, they advocated listening to ordinary people speaking about their own experiences. This shifting of authority was especially crucial for lesbians and gay men because, as they had faced significant penalties for making themselves visible by speaking on their own behalf, the public discussion of homosexuality had been almost exclusively the province of hostile social authorities. Gay liberationists and lesbian feminists argued that gays and lesbians, whenever possible, should come out, and come out with things to say.

They should, moreover, create new records. Multiple social movements promoted the idea that everyone—even those who for reasons of education, gender, race, ethnicity, and so on did not fit the conventional cultural model of the "writer"—could write meaningfully about their lives. People were encouraged to take up poetry, drama, and fiction. But autobiographical writing, and coming out stories in particular, became particularly important forms of lesbian and gay writing in the 1970s.

Independent journals, magazines, and newspapers (Aphra Sinister Wisdom, Conditions, Christopher Street, Gay Community News, and others), independent small presses (Daughters Inc., Alyson Press, Naiad Press, Firebrand Books, and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, for example), a network of lesbian and gay and women's bookstores, and reading series and conferences for LGBT writers sprang up across the country, accompanying the spread of gay liberation, women's liberation, and lesbian feminist groups and providing contexts, publishers, and distributors for all of this new writing. Such work was also often anthologized in collections of stories, poems, and plays; collections of particular types of writing, such as coming out stories; or combinations of political and literary writings. While some of these newspapers, journals, magazines, presses, and bookstores lasted for years and others for decades, and while some of the anthologies stayed in print, new newspapers, journals, and (often glossier) magazines appeared and new bookstores opened as older ones faded. New anthologies also appeared, offering new ways of thinking about LGBT literature and experience. By the 1990s mainstream newspapers, journals, magazines, and bookstores also began to publish or stock LGBT writing.

LGBT writers' networks have been maintained over the years by conferences and literary awards, such as the now annual Outwrite conferences and the Lambda Literary Awards. Increasingly, the lesbian and gay writers of the 1990s—Paul Monette, Tony Kushner, Dorothy Allison, and Michael Cunningham, for example—were nominated for, and sometimes won, national literary awards.

New Writers

By the time of Stonewall, there were already many lesbian and gay writers—mostly white, many from elite backgrounds—with established careers, including novelists such as Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin; poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and May Swenson; and playwrights such as Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. In many cases their homosexuality had become an open secret. Many of them had written—though sometimes briefly, grimly, or without anyone noticing—about homosexuality. But as it became possible, after Stonewall, to come out in a newly public fashion, new types of gay or lesbian writers could emerge—those for whom same-sex desire might be an ongoing subject and for whom LGBT cultures explicitly provide a perspective for their work. Some of these were writers who had already begun their careers, such as the poets Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich; influenced and taken up by gay liberation and lesbian feminism, they developed broad new audiences. Others were writers who emerged out of the flux of the civil rights movement and women's liberation movements, as well as gay liberation and lesbian feminism, including Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, June Arnold, Bertha Harris, or in the next generation Jewelle Gomez, Dorothy Allison, Essex Hemphill, and Melvin Dixon.

Place/Space: Class, Race, and Gender

While literary works are most often focused on, directed toward, and accessible to middle-class and elite persons, the novels dealing with homosexuality available before Stonewall were sought out by a wide range of people, whether from neighborhood lending libraries in urban centers in the 1920s and 1930s or as pulp paperbacks available in gas stations and drugstores across the country in the 1950s and 1960s. Such novels most often focused on either elite individuals—often living abroad—or persons who, by virtue of their homosexuality,

were downwardly mobile. Homosexuality could thus be distanced from the everyday reality of the middle class—located in a shadowy social underworld, for example, or a foreign capital, or both—as in the Parisian bars of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956) or among the hustlers and queens of John Rechy's City of Night (1963).

After Stonewall, poets and novelists wrote more attentively about working-class life, from Judy Grahn's The Common Woman (1969) and A Woman Is Talking to Death (1973) and Maureen Brady's Folly (1982) to Dorothy Allison in Trash (1988) and Bastard Out of Carolina (1992). It likewise became possible for both literary authors such as Jane Rule and Edmund White and popular writers such as Armistead Maupin and E. Lynn Harris to represent complex middle-class LGBT lives. Everyone could represent social worlds in which LGBT and heterosexual stories and lives were integrated.

The city was a central setting and subject in LGBT literature before and after Stonewall. That gay men and lesbians needed to leave the rural, small-town, or suburban places in which they had grown up for urban centers where they could comfortably be lesbian or gay was the common message. Frequent locations were Paris and, in the United States, New York City and San Francisco—as in Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1978). This pattern was especially important in the work of male writers, though there were such notable exceptions as George Whitmore's Nebraska (1987). But LGBT life outside of northern urban centers and away from the East and West coasts gradually became more visible, beginning with women's work and work published by small presses, such as the writings of June Arnold in the 1970s and Mab Segrest and Minnie Bruce Pratt in the 1980s. In the 1990s a range of African American and white, working- and middle-class LGBT novelists, story writers, playwrights, and essayists focusing on the South—such as Dorothy Allison, Randall Kenan, and Jim Grimsley—began to be published by mainstream presses.

During the 1970s and 1980s, lesbians and gay men developed distinct public cultures and distinct literary worlds. This was especially the case among whites. These divisions broke down socially, politically, and in literary terms over the course of the 1980s in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when women and men began working together to a greater extent. Lesbians began appearing more frequently in the writings of white gay men, such as Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story (1982) and David Leavitt's Lost Language of Cranes (1986), and gay men in white women's fiction, often at first in fiction about the epidemic, such as Sarah Schulman's People in Trouble (1990) and Rebecca Brown's The Gifts of the Body (1994).

Mainstream publication opportunities appeared earliest—beginning in the late 1970s—for white gay male writers, such as the members of the Violet Quill Club, including most notably Edmund White and Andrew Holleran. White gay male writers have consequently developed the broadest array of literary voices among LGBT writers, from the middlebrow comedy of Stephen McCauley to the shock tactics of Dennis Cooper to the literary experiments of Dale Peck. Nevertheless, as literature, especially the novel, has historically been the most accessible cultural form for those with the least economic as well as cultural capital, literary works remained culturally central longer for white lesbians and lesbians and gay men of color than for white gay men, for whom a wider range of opportunities for cultural representation—in theater, film, television, and so on—also became available soonest.

Despite exceptions—for example, African American women writing about lesbianism in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde—the development of a large body of LGBT writing by women of color began largely in the small press arena, where the work of Native American writers such as Paula Gunn Allen and Asian American writers like Kitty Tsui first appeared. That development was significantly shaped by expanded discussions of race within feminism by lesbians of color in the 1980s, which was a consequence of the groundbreaking work of African American writer and activist Barbara Smith and Latina writers and activists Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. African American gay men working to develop a literature through small press publication—including Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill, who created anthologies and collections of poems—were very much influenced by their female peers. African American gay male novelists who emerged into mainstream publications, including Melvin Dixon in the 1980s and Randall Kenan in the 1990s, invariably had to contend with being compared to Baldwin. Popular African American writers published by mainstream presses, such as E. Lynn Harris, only emerged in the 1990s. Like their white counterparts, the newest generation of LGBT writers of color, such as Alexander Chee and Achy Obejas, appear both in small press and mainstream contexts, and those who are politically self-conscious most likely have been influenced by the queer politics of the 1990s.

Genre

The novel, the literary form from which most readers expect a chronicle of social, sexual, and emotional experience and the one accessible to the widest audience, has been the central source of literary representations of LGBT lives. At the same time, the form of the novel has been a central problem in LGBT literature. Most readers expect a narrative, a story, from a novel and, in addition, a more-or-less familiar story. Certainly before Stonewall, and to a large degree since, that familiar story has most often been a story of heterosexual lovers, in which LGBT persons have appeared as deviant, whether the deviation is presented as tragic or benign.

For LGBT writers the form of the novel as a story of growing up meshed most easily with the form of the coming out story, as demonstrated first and most effectively by the great success of Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). Consequently, the story of growing up gay or lesbian has been a persistent subject of LGBT literature. The drawback of this pattern is that it still allows for, even requires, the persistent representation of homosexuality as a problem that must be dealt with.

In pursuit of alternative patterns, some LGBT writers chose to bypass the need for a story, a narrative, altogether. In the 1970s, for example, Bertha Harris and June Arnold, and in the 1980s and 1990s, Rebecca Brown, Carole Maso, and Randall Kenan, drew on the modernist tradition of experimental work by such early twentieth-century LGBT writers as Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. Many other LGBT fiction writers have instead chosen to focus their work in a particular genre, such as detective fiction (Joseph Hansen, Mary Wings) or science fiction (Samuel Delaney, Joanna Russ). In detective fiction, homosexuality—or homophobia—can be the key to the mystery, or the writer can treat the detective's homosexuality quite neutrally, because the plot of the novel is determined by the unfolding of the mystery rather than the details of the detective's life. Science fiction offered to LGBT as to feminist writers opportunities for playing with sex, gender, and sexuality and for drawing on the social possibilities of new worlds or commenting on this one, but doing all of this free of assuming homosexuality as a problem. Historical fiction has also been a significant genre in LGBT writing, allowing the exploration of LGBT history in such novels as David Leavitt's While England Sleeps (1993) and Mark Merlis's American Studies (1994).

Autobiography has been a form of special importance in post-Stonewall LGBT literature, from the work of Kate Millett and Audre Lorde to the responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic by writers such as Paul Monette and Mark Doty, even as a broader interest in memoir developed across the culture. Autobiography provides a form capacious enough to capture kinds of experience not usually the focus of literature. Homosexuality can be a given rather than a problem; that is, it need not be at the center of the writer's attention.

Poetry, while a less popular literary form than the novel in the United States in the twentieth century, has been a significant medium for LGBT writers after Stonewall. LGBT poets from Ginsberg, Rich, and Lorde to Marilyn Hacker, Essex Hemphill, and Mark Doty have had an unusually broad public audience. Poets are free from the conventions of narrative—of having to "tell a story" that anyone can understand—that constrain writers of fiction. Like memoirists, they can attempt to convey a wider range of experience and feeling than fiction often allows. Some LGBT poets, especially those influenced by the social movements of the 1960s, have seen themselves in the role of witnesses testifying to their own experience as LGBT persons and that of others in their communities, as in Pat Parker's Movement in Black (1978), Judy Grahn's Work of a Common Woman (1978), and Cheryl Clarke's Narratives: Poems in the Tradition ofBlack Women (1982). There is, however, no thematic unity among LGBT poets, nor is there any formal consistency. This is a group whose practices range from the formalism of Marilyn Hacker to the open forms and prosy colloquialism of Edward Field.

Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1968), explicitly focused on a group of New York City gay men, was a theatrical breakthrough for gay playwrights. Following Crowley's work, more plays explicitly identified as lesbian or gay began to appear in the 1970s. Particularly significant, however, in terms of the theater being produced during the 1970s and 1980s, was the development of the camp tradition by men such as Charles Ludlam with his Ridiculous Theater Company and by the women's experimental theater associated with the WOW Cafe in New York City, where Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw were central figures. Plays addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic, from Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985) to Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1993), contributed significantly to shaping public discourse about the epidemic and establishing explicitly gay theater in the cultural mainstream. Individual lesbian and gay playwrights who have by now developed substantial careers include Terence McNally and Paula Vogel. Also during the 1980s and 1990s, LGBT writers and performers such as Holly Hughes, Danitra Vance, Luis Alfaro, Tim Miller, and the Pomo Afro Homos theater troupe had very visible roles in the development of the new field of performance art.

Cultural Politics: Art, Community, Expectations, Boundaries

Some post-Stonewall LGBT writers have had explicit political agendas and have seen it as their responsibility to represent their group, while others have not. Reviewers seeking to validate LGBT work that impresses them are prone to praise the literature in question for addressing "universal" subjects rather than "merely" LGBT concerns—implying that LGBT concerns are not a sufficient subject for truly impressive writing. At the same time, all openly LGBT writers have had to contend, as all "minority" writers have in the American context, with the tendency of reviewers to see each LGBT writer as representative of the group rather than as an individual with particular skills and goals. LGBT writers have also had to contend, again like all so-called minority writers, with the expectation on the part of some readers that they will present only positive images of, in this case, LGBT life. The demand for positive images can be intensely felt—born out of frustration at mainstream distortions of LGBT life and the belief that fully realized images would dispel homophobia and transphobia. But no one writer or work can be expected to represent all LGBT people. And in practice, realistic images will not always be positive.

The organizing principles of LGBT social worlds are, moreover, continually being revised. In response to the work of bisexual and transgender activists, there has been growing recognition of bisexual and transgender identities within and in relation to lesbian and gay communities. LGBT literature has long contained stories of women and men choosing between homosexual and heterosexual relationships, as well as portraits of masculine women and feminine men. But certainly before and, still, after Stonewall there was in the literature an emphasis on deciding between heterosexual and homosexual desires. Accepting both was rarely presented as an option. Moreover, masculinity in women and femininity in men were historically understood to be evidence of homosexuality rather than expressions of gender identifications that might be understood as separable from sexual orientation. In the past two decades, however, numerous anthologies of writings about bisexuality have been published, as well as explorations of the subject by established writers such as novelist and essayist Jan Clausen. Transgender literature now includes memoirs of changing gender and cross-gender identifications such as Jan Morris's Conundrum (1974); fiction like Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues (1993); and writing for the theater, most notably the work of performance artist Kate Bornstein. There has also been a great deal of theoretical writing on bisexuality and transgender identities.

One underlying question that has taken different forms over the decades has been definitional, namely, what is LGBT literature? Is it work by LGBT persons, about LGBT subjects, or including LGBT characters? Such questions, of course, lead immediately to questions about who or what constitutes an LGBT person, subject, or character. At base, the significant question is, probably, why do we care?

That question has two dimensions. Why do we care about the sexual and gender identifications of the authors or the characters in the works we read? (Literary works themselves are not usually understood to have sexual or gender identifications, though sometimes that is not apparent when we discuss gay or lesbian or transgender novels, for example.) And why do we care about policing the borders of sexual and gender identity categories and, by extension, the literature identified with those categories?

On the one hand, there is a legitimate desire for cultural visibility—an aspiration for an identifiable LGBT literature—that has been fulfilled in the decades since Stonewall broached the possibility of coming out, and then of living LGBT lives in public, in ways not previously imaginable. On the other hand, there is often the concern about misidentifying an author or work, perhaps because after decades of social stigma, identifying someone or something as LGBT, when they or it might not be, still seems like an insult—or liable to produce insults. It does seem to be the case that, once the possibility of establishing a group or culture emerges, some people become deeply invested in the nature of that group, and their investment takes the form of a desire to control the meaning of group identification.

There is also real anxiety among writers and readers about being shut off from the universal, being ghettoized. There has long been in the United States a broad cultural proscription against identification with any group that is understood as socially, culturally, or politically marginal—women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, lesbians and gay men—much less any combination of marginal positions. Writers are subtly encouraged to see themselves as marginalizing themselves by such identifications, even when they might in fact belong to one of those groups. That proscription was somewhat weakened in the 1970s and 1980s, but came back with increasing force in the 1990s—just as LGBT writers were gaining more mainstream recognition.

If, however, accepting the idea that to identify oneself as an LGBT writer is to establish oneself as marginal, claiming a somehow less valuable perspective from which to view the world than the perspectives of those who are heterosexual, means not only agreeing to second-class status, but propping up the cultural assumption that gender-normative heterosexuals do not have their own, equally specific, perspectives. Perhaps there is no universal literature after all.

Julie Abraham

see alsoalbee, edward; allen, paula gunn; anzaldÚa, gloria; arenas, reinaldo; beam, joseph; bishop, elizabeth; bookstores; brant, beth; brown, rita mae; censorship, obscenity, and pornography law and policy; chrystos; cornwell, anita; crisp, quentin; daly, mary; delaney, samuel; dÍaz-cotto, juanita; fierstein, harvey; gidlow, elsa; grahn, judy; islas, arturo; johnston, jill; kenny, maurice; kim, willyce; kramer, larry; le guin, ursula k.; lorde, audre; millett, kate; monette, paul; moraga, cherrÍe; morgan, robin; newspapers and magazines; noda, barbara; parker, pat; poma, edgar; preston, john; publishers; rechy, john; reyes, rodrigo; rich, adrienne; rule, jane; shockley, ann allen; smith, barbara; taylor, valerie; tsui, kitty; white, edmund; woo, merle.