William S. Burroughs

b. February 5, 1914 

d. August 2, 1997

Novelist, born as William Seward Burroughs in St. Louis, Missouri. Heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company fortune. As a teenager, Burroughs was sent off to military school at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he had his first same-sex encounters. He was educated at Harvard and Vienna universities.

Burroughs fell in love and became obsessed with Ginsberg, and they have remained lifelong friends. Following trouble with the law regarding his drug habits, Burroughs settled in Mexico City with his wife Joan. One night in 1951, after a few drinks, they were entertaining some friends with their "William Tell" routine. She put a whiskey glass on her head and he aimed a pistol at the glass. Although he was an expert marksman, the shot was low and Joan was killed instantly. Burroughs had to leave Mexico.

His sexual explicitness (he was an avowed and outspoken bisexual) and the frankness with which he dealt with his own experiences as a drug addict won him a following among writers of the Beat movement. With Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he was one of the founding members of the Beat generation. He was known to be a lover of young boys and in his later years, he lived with his long-time companion James Grauerholtz.

 Books:


Junkie: Confessions of an Unreedemed Drug Addict (1953)
Letters to Allen Ginsburg 1953-1957
The Naked Lunch (1959)
Nova Express (1960)
The Soft Machine (1961)
The Ticket that Exploded (1962)
Dead Fingers Talk (1963)
The Wild Boys (1971)
The Place of Dead Roads (1983)
Queer (1986)
The Western Lands (1987)

Gertrude Stein

Author
b. February 3, 1874
d. July 27, 1946

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears

Gertrude Stein, portrait by Picasso

Known as an influential American writer who focused on character depth, Gertrude Stein spent most of her life in Paris. While in France she met her life partner, befriended famous artists and developed into an influential literary figure and feminist.

Born into a wealthy family in Pennsylvania, Gertrude Stein grew up in Oakland, California. As an undergraduate she attended Radcliffe College, now incorporated into Harvard University, and studied under psychologist William James. She spent much of 1899-1901 at Johns Hopkins University Medical School but did not earn her degree.

Stein moved to Paris in 1902 and became an avid art collector. She turned her house into an informal salon. It soon became a hotspot for famous artists and writers - including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse and Thornton Wilder. Hemingway viewed Stein as his mentor and Picasso became her close friend. Stein later called Paris a city of "The Lost Generation."

In 1907, Stein met life partner Alice B. Toklas. Together during WWI, Toklas and Stein drove supplies to French hospitals. After the war, Stein received a medal for her contributions.

Stein wrote her first book, "Q.E.D.," in 1903, but did not publish a novel until "Three Lives" (1909), a work heavily influenced by former professor James and writer William Henry. Unique because of its similarity to the art form of cubism, Stein's writing delved into a literary area previously unexplored. "Tender Buttons," a short collection of feminist poems published in 1914, resembled Pablo Picasso's artwork, albeit in different form. In 1926, Stein explained the connection during lectures at the University of Oxford and Cambridge University. She published her lectures as a book, "Composition and Explanation" (1926).

In 1932, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," a book that told Stein's life story, excited the American public. It was her first bestseller. Composers adapted several of her works, including Virgil Thomson's "Four Saints in Three Acts" and "The Mother of Us All."

Complex and progressive, Stein's writing transformed American literature and contributed to the feminist movement. A monument on the upper terrace of Bryant Park in New York City honors her memory.

Bibliography

“An Interview with Gertrude Stein.” Writing.upenn.edu. July 3, 2007

Will, Barbara. Gertrude Stein: Modernism and the Problem of “Genius.” Edinburgh University Press, 2000

Williams, William Carlos. “The Work of Gertrude Stein.” Center for Book Culture. July 3, 2007

Selected Works

Blood on the Dining Room Floor (1948)

Brewsie and Willie (1946)

First Reader and Three Plays (1946)

Four in America (1947)

How to Write (1931)

Ida (1941)

Last Operas and Plays (1949)

Lectures in America (1935)

Lucy Church Amiably (1930)

Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein (1933)

Narration (1935)

Paris France (1940)

Picasso (1938)

Portraits and Prayers (1934)

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (1946)

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to Human Mind (1936)

The World is Round (1939)

Things As They Are (1950)

Three Lives and Tender Buttons (2003)

Wars I Have Seen (1944)

What are Masterpieces (1940)

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Christopher Marlowe

baptised 26 February 1564
died 30 May 1593

English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian,next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists and for the homoerotic situations and incidents which occur in his plays and poems more frequently and more variously that in any other major English Renaissance writer.

Two famous quotations attributed to him were "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned alwaies in his bosome, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma" and "That all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles". These may have been invented by his enemies, but they are in keeping with sentiments expressed or implies in his work.

Born two months before Shakespeare, Marlowe was the son of an established and respect­able shoemaker in Canterbury, where he attended the King's School, later going on to take both his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. One month before he was to appear for his commencement in 1587, amid rumors of his conversion to Catholicism and flight to France, the university received a letter from the Queen's Privy Council excusing his absence and assuring them of his loyal service to Elizabeth. This letter has cre­ated a great deal of speculation about the dashing and iconoclastic young man's activities, suggesting that he was probably working as a government spy.

The final six years of his short life were spent in London where "Kit" Mar­lowe was usually involved in something scandalous or illegal, resulting in several scrapes with the law and at least one prison confinement. During these years, he pro­duced his slender but highly important and influential canon: Dido Queen of Carthage (1586), Tamburlaine I and II (1597), The Jew of Malta (1589), The Mas­sacre at Paris (1590), Edward II (1591), Doctor Faustus (1592), and the unfinished narrative poem Hero and Leander. The first genuine poet to write for the English theatre was killed, perhaps assassinated, under highly suspicious circumstances by a knife wound to the head in a private dining room in an inn in Deptford on May 30, 1593.

Twelve days before his death, Marlowe had been arrested on charges of atheism, stemming in part from his repu­tation and from accusations made against him by fellow playwright Thomas Kyd, who had been charged earlier; Kyd's claim was based on documents seized during a search of the rooms both men used for writing. This sort of sensation followed Marlowe throughout his life and, seem­ingly, was fostered by the poet himself.

After his death, claims about him became more personal and explicit. In the proceed­ings of his inquest, government informer Richard Baines claimed that Marlowe had said that "all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles," and in 1598, Francis Meres wrote that he "was stabbed to death by a bawdy seruing man, a riuall of his in his lewde loue." However characteristic of what we do know of Marlowe's life, these posthumous comments do little to estab­lish his homosexuality.

However, Marlowe's work does demonstrate an understanding and com­passion for mythological and historical homosexuality. His Hero and Leander deals directly with Jupiter's passionate infatuation for Ganymede, a story which is also mentioned in Dido, and his masterwork, Edward II, based on fact, can be considered the first gay play in English.

An effeminate child, Edward was given as a companion the orphaned son of a Gascon knight at age 14 by his royal father, who hoped that the handsome and virile 16-year-old Piers Gaveston would exert a positive and masculine influence on his son. However, Edward fell passion­ately in love, and the king banished Gaveston in 1307. Marlowe's play begins shortly after this point with Edward (who had become king upon his father's death) immediately recalling his love to court, much to the anger of his barons, who demand Gaveston's permanent banish­ment. Edward, more the lover than the ruler, will accept nothing of this and even shares his throne with Gaveston, who is eventually seized and beheaded. Enraged in his grief, Edward involves himself in a bloody civil war, eventually taking an­other lover, young Spenser, who also is killed by the barons. Edward himself is seized, forced to abdicate, and, in 1327, is murdered by having a heated poker in­serted into his anus, "intended as just retribution for his sins." In this one play, Marlowe surpasses the achievements of many explicitly gay writers in his sensi­tive and complex portrayal of a doomed and passionate relationship between two men caught up in a repressive and homo­phobic society.

Mary Renault (1905 - 1983 ) UK / South African /English

Writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. However, her early novels had a contemporary setting,and dealt with lesbian love. After she and her partner emigrated to South Africa in 1949, she found in Durban a community of gay expatriates and a society, which was more sexually tolerant, but racially repressive.

In South Africa Renault was able to write forthrightly about homosexual relationships for the first time, especially in a series of historical novels, all set in ancient Greece; her sympathetic treatment of love between men would win Renault a wide gay readership. Though Renault appreciated her gay following, she was uncomfortable with the "gay pride" movement that emerged in the 1970s after the Stonewall riots.

William Plomer (1903 – 1973) South African

Author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He became famous in South Africa with his first novel, Turbott Wolfe (1925), which had inter-racial love and marriage as a theme. He was co-founder of the short-lived literary magazine Voorslag ("Whiplash") with two other South African rebels, Roy Campbell and Laurens van der Post; it promoted a racially equal South Africa. In the 1950s and 60s he edited several of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels.

Although he never spoke openly about his sexuality, his biographers record that during a period when he lived in Japan, he was in a sexual relationship with a Japanese man. Although overt homosexuality is absent from William Plomer's novels and poems, the relevance of his sexuality to his work is evident. He confided to the editor of his revised, posthumously published autobiography that he expected his biographer to take his sexual orientation seriously because it was important to his work.

After settling in England in 1929, he associated with a circle of homosexual literary people, and for the last thirty years of his life, his devoted companion was Charles Erdmann.

Isabel Miller (1924 - 1996) U.S.A. Lesbian novelist

b. November 26, 1924
d. October 4, 1996

A novelist, best known for her lesbian fiction, which she published under the pen name Isabel Miller

She was born as Alma Routsong in Traverse City, Michigan, and graduated from Michigan State College in 1949. Her pen name, Isabel Miller, is the combination of an anagram for "Lesbia" and her mother's birth name. Her first novel, A Gradual Joy (1953) is the story of a young married couple, MSU students living in a quonset hut apartment.

In 1963, Isabel Miller moved to New York and began writing her best known book, A Place for Us (1969), printed in an edition of 1,000 copies, paid for and sold by the author. With this title, based on a true story of a 19th-century couple from New York state, Miller began her career as lesbian novelist. In 1971 the novel won the first annual Gay Book Award of the American Library Association.

Under its later title Patience and Sarah (1972) Miller's novel became the most-cherished lesbian love story of all time. The title story in A Dooryard Full of Flowers and Other Short Pieces (1993) is a sequel. Ms. Miller died shortly before her last novel, Laurel was published.

Paula Gunn Allen, (1934 – 2008) US Poet / Literary Critic / Lesbian activist / Author

b. October 24, 1939
d. May 29, 2008

Allen in 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Paula Gunn Allen was a Native American poet, literary critic, lesbian activist,and novelist. Of mixed Laguna, Sioux, Scottish, and Lebanese-American descent, Allen always identified most closely with the people among whom she spent her childhood and upbringing.

Allen's studies would eventually result in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, a controversial text which argues that the accounts of Native beliefs and traditions were subverted by phallogocentric European explorers and colonizers, who downplayed or erased the central role that woman played in most Native societies. Allen argued that many Native tribes were "gynocratic", with women making the principal decisions, while others believed in absolute balance between male and female, with neither side gaining dominance.

Allen's arguments and research were much criticized in the years following publication of The Sacred Hoop. Gerald Vizenor and others have accused her of a simple reversal of essentialism, while historians and anthropologists have disproved or questioned some of her scholarship. However, her book and subsequent work also proved hugely influential, provoking an outpouring of feminist studies of Native cultures and literature. It remains a set text within many Native American Studies and Women's Studies programs.

Allen was well-known as a novelist, poet and short story writer. Her work, like that of fellow Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko, drew heavily on the Pueblo tales of Grandmother Spider and the Corn Maiden, and is noted for a strongly political streak.

Her novel, The Woman Who Owned The Shadows, was published in 1983. The story revolves around Ephanie, a mixed-blood like Allen herself, and her struggle to express herself creatively. As a poet, Allen's most successful collection so far is probably Life Is a Fatal Disease : Collected Poems 1962-1995. Allen has also been responsible for a number of collections of Native American writings, including Spider Womans Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women.

Allen was awarded an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation, the Native American Prize for Literature, the Susan Koppelman Award, and in 2001 she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.

Oscar Wilde, (1854 - 1900): Playwright and gay icon

b. October 16, 1854
d. November 30, 1900

"Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world, there are only individuals."

Oscar Wilde gloried in flaunting his individuality during the Victorian Era, a period synonymous with social conformity and sexual repression.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin to a mother who was a noted poet and Irish nationalist, and a father who was an eye surgeon. Wilde showed brilliance from an early age, winning prizes at school and university. At Magdalen College, Oxford Wilde adopted his signature flowing hair and flamboyant style of dress, openly scorned "manly sports," and decorated his rooms with peacock feathers and beautiful objects.

Wilde first became a public figure as a spokesman for the Aesthetic Movement, whose motto was "art for art's sake." After a lecture tour through the United States, where he met poet Walt Whitman, Wilde said that "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."

In 1892, the debut of his first play, Lady Windermere's Fan, introduced London theatergoers to such Wildean trademark witticisms as, "My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's," and "I can resist anything but temptation." Wilde's plays sparkle with keenly observed satirical wit that punctures the stuffy pretenses of Victorian society.

A turning point in Wilde's life came in 1891 when Wilde, who was married and the father of two children, began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, known as "Bosie," son of the Marquess of Queensbury. Infuriated by his son's involvement with Wilde, the Marquess instigated legal actions that ended with Wilde's conviction on a charge of gross indecency for "a love that dare not speak its name."

In April 1895, the night he was arrested for "indecent acts," Wilde's name was removed from the playbills outside theatres in London and New York where his hit plays "The Importance Of Being Earnest" and "An Ideal Husband" were playing.

Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at hard labor. He spent the last three years of his life in poverty and self-imposed exile. He died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46, his life undoubtedly shortened by the rigors of imprisonment

The continued popularity of Wilde's plays and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray,as well as numerous films and books about his life, have made him an icon of popular culture. His grave in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris has become a pilgrimage site.

Oscar Wilde us listed at  number 3 in Paul Russell's ranking of The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present.

Bibliography:

• CMG Worldwide: Official Web Site of Oscar Wilde
• Ellman, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Vintage, 1998.
• McKenna, Neil. Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography. Basic Books, 2006.

Selected works by Oscar Wilde:

• The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays (See all Contemporary Literature)
  
• The Importance Of Being Earnest
• The Picture Of Dorian Gray
  

DVD:

• The Oscar Wilde Collection
• Wilde
• The Trials of Oscar Wilde (aka The Green Carnation)