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ABSTRACT This article examines the subject and visual representation of the gay fantasy figure, with specific reference to the male sexual outlaw character and its embodiment in the archetypes of [...]

NO ONE SPEAKS of A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) as a gay novel; it's a novel about fin-de-siecle Paris, about the rarefied world of [...]

A COMPELLING CASE can be made for E. M. Forster's Maurice as the first gay novel. Completed 100 years ago this year, Forster's boldness lay in his revolutionary decision to [...]

This article explores Willa Cather's erotic investment in melancholic seclusion. Her 1925 novel The Professor's House has been interpreted as an exemplary work showcasing the author's ambivalence about her closeted homoeroticism. Rather than seeing Cather's evasiveness about her own and her characters' sexuality as an indication of a backward sexual politics, however, I argue that it constitutes a refusal to participate in a bifurcated discourse of modern sexuality. The novel's representation of the protagonist's profound attachment to the quasi-closet that is his den disrupts an object-choice-based sexual binary by suggesting an erotics of the closet. When read in light of Sigmund Freud's and Julia Kristeva's ideas about melancholia, the professor's closet becomes not a symbol of repression, but a locus of a self-sufficient erotic economy of narcissism, whereby melancholic identification makes it possible for the subject to merge with a lost object. Keywords: Willa Cather/The Professor's House/melancholia/narcissism/ closeted sexuality, THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE AS A 'NOVEL DEMEUBLE' The novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished,' declares Willa Cather in her 1922 essay 'The Novel Demeuble' (Not Under Forty 43). [...]

Personal literature may be written either as a life story such as an autobiography or memoir or as an autobiographical novel. Using the three volumes comprising the memoir of author Paul Monette and the three volumes comprising the autobiographical fiction trilogy of journalist and novelist Edmund White, this article explores the goal of each author for selecting a particular genre in which to write about lived experience. Each author enjoyed an elite education and came to adulthood in postwar America in the decade prior to the gay rights era beginning in the 1970s, and each writer participated in the sociosexual culture emerging over the succeeding decade. Each writer became HIV+ in the 1980s (Monette died of complications attending AIDS in 1995), and each writer experienced the loss of his lover to AIDS. While Monette and White each experienced the anti-gay prejudice of postwar American society, Monette's youth was less troubled than that of White who grew up in a complex family with a distant yet harsh father toward whom he was also sexually attracted. While Monette's goal in writing a memoir was that the suffering of his generation of gay men should be remembered, White's goal was more personal, choosing autobiographical fiction in his effort to overcome his feelings of shame about being gay founded on his desire for his father. KEYWORDS. Life-writing, memoir, autobiographical fiction, homosexuality, Paul Monette, Edmund White, gay lives, shame

1. Introduction: The Gay Twenties For any New Zealand writer in the decades after the First World War, but especially for the many gay writers who made the voyage, the [...]

IN HIS MEMOIR Christopher and His Kind, Christopher Isherwood describes his relationship with E. M. Forster, who was 25 years his senior. When they met in 1932, Isherwood felt that [...]

WHEN James Baldwin presented a manuscript of Giovanni's Room to his agent, Helen Strauss, she told him to burn it. It was his second novel. His first, Go Tell it [...]

BEST KNOWN for her historical novels set in ancient Greece, many with overtly homosexual themes and scenes, Mary Renault began her career with a novel set in modern times called [...]

GORE VIDAL died in 2012, at 86, and The New York Times obituary reluctantly conceded that his claim of having been blacklisted by the newspaper for writing The City and [...]

THE AUTHOR of this piece passed away in 2011, having contributed many articles to this publication over the years, including this feature-length review of a book with the somewhat salacious [...]

The relationship between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's 'Brideshead Revisited' should be seen as a romantic friendship. This special kind of relationship was common in 19th-century England at sex-segregated locations, and although they might include sexual behavior were generally discontinued in adulthood.

Jean Genet's 'Notre-Dame des Fleurs' is discussed, with a focus on linguistic aspects of the division between masculine and feminine. The male homosexual characters do not have fixed gender identities, but tend to shift between poles of hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity.

Four sonnets debatedly attributed to Cecco Angiolieri illustrate the use of sexual orientation as a symbolic coordinate similar to gender and class. The sonnets represent a mock-amorous cycle that ultimately upholds social orthodoxy.

Readers of Sartre's biographies often have the impression that they reveal more about Sartre than about Baudelaire, Flaubert or Genet. The reason for this is our awareness of Sartre's philosophy [...]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel 'A Raw Youth' explores homosexuality, especially the unconventional trajectory of desire. The book's main character appears to demonstrate awareness of his reader while failing to provide a coherent narrative until he enters a relationship with a female character.

An exploration is made of the underlying sexuality portrayed in artistic and literary representations of St. Sebastian's martyrdom, focusing on paintings by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi and the poem 'San Sebastiano de Sodoma' by Tennessee Williams. Topics include the gradual shift from nudity used to represent innocence and purity to the increasingly effeminate and homoerotic depiction of masculine beauty.

Modern American poetry has moved its concern with formal meter and figurative language to autobiographical topics and open expression of sexuality. Plainer poems suggest a poet's responsibility is to continue the art and to change the art's social terms.

A critique is presented of heroes in Chinese folklore from a homosexual perspective, examining emotional and physical interactions between male characters. It is argued that previous theories of hero asexuality may be flawed as they were conducted from a heterosexual perspective.

Russian literature that explores homosexuality is often limited to 'home-made' gay magazines and newspapers and has a small audience. The works of openly gay Russian writers usually deal with acceptance of the gay person's sexuality after a difficult and tragic process. Several recent works dealing with homosexuality are reviewed, including Vassily Aksyonov's 'Around Dupont,' Konstantin Pleshakov's 'A Great Storyline' and Nikolai Koliada's 'Slingshot.'

Homosexuals can always wonder whether the texts of Jean Genet adequately offer helpful knowledge to the text readers. The process of criticism destroys the texts. But in the case of his novel 'Querelle' the images of doubling in the characters reflect the processes of a gay persons' labor to understand themselves in society. Gays can see in the character of Querelle the act of loving and the beloved, the tormented and the tormentor. The inability to clearly see the doublings as a single self challenges the reader to form an accurate self-representation.

An exploration is presented on male passion and relationships in Ford Madox Ford's 'The Good Soldier,' focusing on the characters John Dowell and Edward Ashburnham. Topics include subverted desire for men, sexual inadequacy with women, money and power, and patriarchy.

Jim Morrison's citing of John Rechy in the Doors' song 'L.A. Woman' demonstrates his rejection of romanticism and presumptive stereotyping. The innuendo of homosexuality and hustling reinterprets Morrison's identity from the assumed heterosexuality of rock music to homoerotic spectacle, highlighting potential homosexuality in male audience admiration.

French writings concerning homosexuality have differences in the function and effect of textual and intertextual reference in different representations of gay sexuality. Most of the French authors refuse to distinguish between fact and fiction and treat reading as a metaphor for the process of comprehending homosexuality. Some of these works include 'Le Petit Galopin de nos coeurs' by Yves Navarre, 'Le Garcon de joie' by Eric Jourdan and 'La Faute de l'abbe Mouret' by Zola.

How might gay and lesbian literature be read not as a mimetic representation of homosexuality, but as an activity linked to problems of subjectivity and historiography? Reading Dale Peck's novel Martin and John alongside passages from Friedrich Nietzsche's 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life' and Sigmund Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia,' this essay argues for an understanding of Peck's text as an attempt to link two apparently different processes of import to contemporary gay male subjects in particular: the writing of what Nietzsche terms 'critical history,' and the mourning of those lost to HIV disease. It concludes by linking Martin and John to feminist critiques of identity and traditional historiography, as well as noting the connection between these two critiques.

This article argues that the 1976 novel (reprinted in 1993) Lover by Bertha Harris, though receiving little critical attention in the past, can be considered an exemplary novel within discussions of both postmodern fiction and lesbian (or queer) theory. The article analyzes in particular the novel's self-consciousness as manifested by characters who cross-dress and who are artists (including the writer of the novel we are reading). The article calls for Harris to be added to the group of writers such as Wittig, Anzaldua, Lorde, and Winterson, who are discussed within the context of a postmodern lesbian narrative.

This paper uses two teaching experiences with Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country to frame a discussion of the complicated critical history of this literary work and its relation to Baldwin's literary reputation. The contested relationship between the categories of race and sexuality in the novel is tracked and its political implications explored.

This article treats Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as culturally antagonistic but also as culturally conservative: Dorian's liminal position as a male who knows--who has experienced sexual contact with other males--is linked in the text both to a position of cultural/ epistemological superiority (the 'Greek' sexual act constructed as index of canonical mastery, back to Greek texts and artwork) and to a position of disease and dis-figurement. The latter association, read by other commentators particularly in the final pages as punishment for narcissism, hedonism, or homosexual activity, is here glossed as an accusation against Victorian injunctions against same sex sexual activity constitutive of homosexual identity: the marks of disease accrue in the sphere of cultural representation, which then mark and mar the individual body. Dorian Gray as a text then launches a kind of 'homosexual panic' on the part of subsequent writers in 'decadent modernism,' notably Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose Il Piacere attempts to revalorize the ephebe as the bearer of canon--and must now do so as an avowedly heterosexual male, but in the context of the danger of the dandy: the Wilde figure as 'Humphrey Heathfield' must be introduced in order to have been experienced, even if only in disgust. D'Annunzio's turn toward fascist politics is not accidental in this respect: the literary phenomenon of 'fascist modernism' appears to hew very closely to the fear of the cultural ascendancy of the dandy, often read in such texts as a subcultural homosexual male, who must be both experienced and extinguished. (ESB)

For poets working in the contemporary avant-garde, the role of community in determining choices in language and form, as these instruct a poetics, has been decisive. Rather than being a [...]

The short piece 'El paseo de Buster Keaton' by Federico Garcia Lorca can be understood as a tragicomic allegory of sublimated homosexuality. The work represents a self-dramatization of the author's personal problems through literary bricolage. Frustrated paternity is a common theme in Garcia Lorca's work, for example. The piece cannot be regarded simply as a declaration of homosexuality, however, as the work also touches on universal themes. Article text is in Spanish.

Reading Nancy Drew with no biases to her heterosexual icon status reveals the potential of popular literature to privilege both straight and lesbian readers. Using the subtext as text, what seems desirably feminine at first can turn out to be a non-traditional female attribute. Nancy Drew's ability to excel at anything, for example, and her independence from the dictates of men. Even by simply asking an unpopular question can enrich one's reading, making each adventure a metaphor for the lesbian child's many difficulties., 'She is as immaculate and self-possessed as a Miss America on tour. She is as cool as Mata Hari and as sweet as Betty Crocker,' says Bobbie Ann Mason of [...]

Rather than signalling Rochester's agreement with the presumptive biblical imprecation against sodomy and consequent divine vengeance, the apocalyptic denouement of The Farce of Sodom bespeaks defiance of divine judgment and a willingness to persevere in the pleasure of homosexual anal sex despite what might seem certain divine retribution. A Bakhtinian reading of the play's carnivalesque features concludes that it is the failure of all sexual endeavor, rather than of sodomy per se, that is dramatized in the farce's concluding scene. Sodom anticipates both the modem attitude towards the open male body that has come to dominate contemporary gay discourse, and the transgressive uses to which modem writers have put the Bible by which they undercut its authority and the presumptive morality that it is otherwise used to sanction.

E. M. Forster's short story 'The Life to Come' intersects the concerns of both his colonial fiction (A Passage to India) and his homosexual fiction (Maurice). The confrontation in the story between a native chief and a missionary serves initially to explore the differences between permissive and prohibitional readings of the Bible, which reflects Forster's dislike of restrictive English morals. However, contextualizing the story within the project of translating Vedic scripture that attended British imperialism near the turn of the century demonstrates that Forster, like his contemporary and mentor Edward Carpenter, found within colonialism access to a mode of thinking that ultimately questioned the validity of either permission or prohibition as foundations for political argumentation.

This essay examines L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, a seventeenth-century text written in Venice. L'Alcibiade is a sort of Platonic dialogue between a sodomite teacher and his young and attractive pupil. The teacher tries to convince his student to let him penetrate him. The discourse of the sodomite teacher is similar to Lacan's 'discourse of the master.' Maggi brings to the fore the intrinsic ambiguities of the sodomite discourse. On the one hand, since he posits himself outside society, the sodomite is able to manipulate and distort any sort of discourse. The sodomite teacher believes that women embody the religious/political power that oppresses sodomites. The master knows that any discourse exclusively aims to acquire a certain power. On the other hand, the sodomite discourse is nothing but another form of power/oppression. The master subjugates the other through his 'sodomite rhetoric,' based on lies and puns.

Gay and lesbian activists as well as sexually orthodox individuals use the Bible to justify their respective positions on the issue of homosexuality and its moral and ethical dimension. Gays point to the proliferation of homoerotic themes such as the friendship between David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi. Homophobic heterosexuals, on the other hand, focus on the many injunctions against sodomy in the Old Testament.

Most novels about gay men use the concept of aging as a prejudicial subtext. The focus of gay writing on youth creates several implicit stereotypes about aged gay men, including that they are isolated, promiscuous, attract young men with money or power in place of their lost beauty, and serve to remind young gay men of their approaching old age. Gay writers have often used age to explicate youthful gay life.

Michel Foucault's groundbreaking History of Sexuality paved the way for numerous studies of the politics informing attitudes toward gender and sexual issues. The Early Modern period has particularly attracted investigations [...]

An unpublished twelve-poem sequence by Walt Whitman, an openly gay poet, entitled 'Live Oak, with Moss,' was discovered. Detailing the course of a gay relationship, the brave, homosexual manifesto was in direct contrast with the printed 'Live Oak with Moss,' a shuffled and revised version of the twelve poems. The latter is a narrative of homophobic oppression that dwelt on the pain and confusion of being gay. Since coming out may be tragic for today's teenagers, they should read and be guided by the 'Live Oak, with Moss' version than the shame-drenched, without-a-comma one.

The centrality of sexual and gender politics in Andre Gide's book 'Corydon' is seen as a precursor of the subsequent homosexual liberation movement. The text dissents from normative sexuality and presents a radical ideology that vindicates homosexuality and offers an intrepid perspective on pederasty. The theories in the book appear dubious in their implications for sexual politics as they ascribe varying capacities and divergent roles to men and women. In this respect the book subscribes to the normative views of its period. The book is relevant to current issues of gender and gay studies.

Studies of Roland Barthes' writings usually tackle the absence of any open admission on the writer's part regarding his suspected homosexuality. The issue became more marked with the publication of 'Incidents,' which presented a geography of Barthes' supposedly homosexual activities in Morocco. An analysis of the descriptive constraints in Barthes' works as they generate a different body and other affects will reveal a Barthesian sensuality that is friendly and loving as it avoids combat or aggression. On the other hand, a more sympathetic reading of Barthes will show that his concept of sex is one that is reserved yet full of intentions.