Homosexual Literature

Hey guys, i'd love you forever if you could recommend some books that deal with homosexuality. (Homosexual author/character.) Uh to  kick start this thread, here's some queer lit that I recommend.

Oscar Wilde - complete works
Edward Carpenter - Iolaus
Book 12 of the Greek Anthology
Plato - The Symposium
E. M. Forster - Maurice
Shakespeare - Merchant of Venice
            - Twelfth Night
Marlowe - Edward 2nd
Jean Genet - Our Lady of the Flowers

If you could add to this list it would be awesome.

The Lord of the Rings

Brideshead Revisited

It's got subbuttsextext. It's also a really interesting read. There was also a really good miniseries of it with Jeremy Irons filled with subbuttsextext.

Also:
The Aenied
Becket
The Lion in Winter
Sputnik Sweatheart
Coin Locker Babies
Almost Transparent Blue

Samuel R. Delaney is a gay, black, Hugo-winning Sci-fi writer. I really recommend his works. Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand is one of my favorites by him

Don't ever ever reach for "Rainbow Boys" or "Wreathru" because they're terrible in a slash written by 13 year olds who don't get sex sort of way.

Wikipedia has a very large list of fiction that deals in whole or part with homosexuality.

Brideshead Revisited

It's got subbuttsextext. It's also a really interesting read. There was also a really good miniseries of it with Jeremy Irons filled with subbuttsextext.

Also:
The Aenied
Becket
The Lion in Winter
Sputnik Sweatheart
Coin Locker Babies
Almost Transparent Blue

Samuel R. Delaney is a gay, black, Hugo-winning Sci-fi writer. I really recommend his works. Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand is one of my favorites by him

Don't ever ever reach for "Rainbow Boys" or "Wreathru" because they're terrible in a slash written by 13 year olds who don't get sex sort of way.

Wikipedia has a very large list of fiction that deals in whole or part with homosexuality.

sorry about the repeated response.

I'd also add that Arthur C Clarke (2001) writes under the presumption that everyone is potentially bisexual when under the right circumstances.

Why do you want books that specifically deal with homosexuality?

James Baldwin was gay. But also incredibly boring.

Clive Barker is gay and writes some really good fantasy...his horror is a little more run of the mill.

And there is a new book out called "Will", it's a teen novel that deals with gay characters in a high school setting. Not sure on the author thought.

Assfelchers the new refolution

Lynn Flewellings "Nightrunner" fantasy trilogy has a gay romance in it, the books aren't bad either. Not very deep, but fun light reading.

SHIGITY SHIGITY SHIGITY

If you want to include classic lesbian lit too, here are a few titles:

Orlando - Virginia Woolf
Rubyfruit Jungle - Rita Mae Brown
Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg
The Ladies Almanack - Djuna Barnes

Boy meets Boy

>>9
Seconded, her books are fun. Her other series, the Tamir Trilogy is a kind of about transsexuality, and deals with a lot of gay stuff too.

Almost anything by William Burroughs, especially, erm, Queer.

>>6
BECAUSE I'M A FAGGOT, FAGGOT.

Thanks a lot guys! Awesome titles here.

>>15
That's a really, really stupid reason.

Harry potter

Fried Green Tomatoes- Fannie Flagg

All Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles are gay. And gothic dark. Enjoy.

>>19
Ooh, I forgot all about that one. It's pretty good.

If you want a turn of the century lesbian wankfest you could try slogging through The Well Of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall. It's a giant, depressing, literary love-letter to Natalie Barney and it put me to sleep when I tried reading it. Then again, I WAS 17 at the time.

Palimpsest, memoir by Gore Vidal

Mercedes Lackey?

what the fuck does The Merchant of Venice have to do with homosexuality you imbecile

Pale Fire. Not necessarily the point of the book but the homos are in there

Harry Potter is full of fags.

I will second Clive Barker as gay author, however he only touches on homo sex obliquely in most of his books. There was one story in one of his Books of Blood series that had hot gay sex scene though.

robin hobb - farseer trilogy [a bit] and mostly tawny man trilogy
fitzxfool <3

>>26
Not canonically, sadly. The closest would be Remus x Sirius, but that's stretching.

So, wait; are we talking about gay writers in general,or gay writers and thier works talking about the lifestyle/experiernce/reflections?

The Black Magician trilogy, by Trudi Cannavan

Everything by Mary Renault.  A lesbian who wrote about gay men.  Especially The Last of the Wine and anything with Alexander the Great in it.  The books about Theseus not so much, because the story of Theseus was in a time in Greece where gay men were still considered wussy.  These were the days before the Iliad.

>>- Twelfth Night

A Gay pirate that is the victim of an epic cockblock. Awesome.

Also, Anyone interested in hearing about how Shakespere was a big ole' butt-pirate (Or at least he swung both ways) should check out an EXCELLENT play called "The Beard of Avon." I saw a premier of it in Seattle. It was epic.

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

>>24

What The Merchant of Venice has to do with it is that one proposed explanation / interpretation for Antonio's "sadness" is unrequited love for Bassanio - the interpretation is clearly though subtly implied in the recent Irons / De Niro film of the play.  Virtually any Shakespearean comedy involving cross-dressing has an element of at least borderline homoeroticism, and remember that at the time female parts were played by boys, which added to that.  This is also the origina of Bob in the "Bells" episode of Black Adder II.

Some anon mentioned Mary Renault:  there's also The Charioteer, set during the Second World War, and drawing on imagery from Plato.  The Theseus novels do include female homosexuality;  male not so much, mainly because Theseus is not really a character amenable to such interpretation (unlike, say, Heracles or Achilles).

Marguerite Yourcenar is another well-known female writer about gay men, notably in the early novella Alexis, and Memoirs of Hadrian.

Among the moderns, there's Alan Hollinghurst (esp. The Swimming Pool Library, The Line of Beauty) and Edmund White (A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, The Married Man), and for lesbian characters Sarah Waters (who's a jolly good read for anyone), Barbara Wilson;  even Val McDermid (wrote the novels on which Wire In The Blood is based).  Oh, and for gay male and female characters also recent P. D. James in mainstream fiction - Death In Holy Orders, The Murder Room, and The Lighthouse.

Also:

Corydon (Andre Gide)
The Finishing Touch (Brigid Brophy - most amusing short novel, transposing the male homosexual milieu of Anthony Blunt [one of the so-called "Cambridge Spies"] to a girls' finishing school)
An Arrow's Flight [a. k. a. Pyrrhus] (Mark Merlis)
Second Son (Robert Ferro)
In the Absence of Men (Phillpe Besson)

>>35

The author of "In the Absence of Men" is Philippe Besson.

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

And since the OP mentioned Plato, be sure to get a translation that does not elide or bowdlerize the dialogues, such as Tom Griffith's version of the Symposium.  Also interesting (for revealing the attitudes of different periods - in particular the kind of attitude to the classics found at Oxford in Forster's Maurice - and the results of different translations) is Eugene O'Connor's edition of Benjamin Jowett's translations of The Lysis, Phaedrus and Symposium in Prometheus Books (ISBN 0879756322 / EAN 9780879756321).  What O'Connor does is to print Jowett's version in full, but add comments and retranslations of specific passages in the notes.  If you want to look in more depth into the Greek and Roman texts that both reveal ancient attitudes and practices, and remain an important source of ideas for writers of the last few centuries, you could do worse than Thomas K. Hubbard's, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome.  A Sourcebook of Basic Documents (Berekeley, LA and London : University of California Press 2003) ISBN 0520234308 / EAN 9780520234307.  The translations are not always ideal, but overall the collection does give a good representative picture, and includes some things not easily found otherwise.

More still:  There's a lot more by Edward Carpenter, of course, and there have been fairly recent editions (like those from GMP in the UK in the mid-1980s), but he's the kind of writer who will get a revival every few decades, then slip back under the publishing radar.  There's a fair amount of his stuff on the Internet Archive (archive.org), though.  Also look for John Addington Symonds' Problem in Greek Ethics and Problem in Modern Ethics.  Partial texts on-line.  See

http://rictornorton.co.uk/symonds/index.htm

Also interesting in showing how a figure has been reinterpreted over time according to the priorities and attitudes of different periods and people is Margaret Reynolds' The Sappho Companion.

The Naked Civil Servant - Quentin Crisp

Also, if you're interested in significant gay characters in mainstream fiction, there's DS Edgar Wield in Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe novels (and also the BBC TV adaptations, until the actor David Royle left the series around 2002).

A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice was good.
I truthfully only picked it up because the author is Anne Rice's son, but it was seriously good, though a bit too angsty.

Fellow Travellers by T. C. Worsley (An epistolary novel based on Stephen Spender and his circle during the Spanish Civil War.)

Books on genreal. Cuz books are gay!

Also Christopher Isherwood.

Isn't the phrase 'Homosexual Literature' a redundancy?

Since OP asked about authors as well as characters, much of Stephen Fry's output might be relevant, including:
The Liar
The Hippopotamus
Making History
The Stars' Tennis Balls
Paperweight
Moab is my Washpot

I think heterosexual literature is a horrible undermined genre.

>>49
'Homosexual literature' is not a generic label, unless one is being extraordinarily semantically promiscuous.

The Well of Loneliness
Keeping it a Secret
Annie on my Mind

Anime on my Mind

>>51

Jeanette Winterson - not "lesbian literature" per se, but a lesbian author who writes really interesting novels, in which her sexuality is clearly one influence.  Her books - she writes children's literature as well as literary fiction for adults - are listed at http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/

Among lesser known authors, I very much enjoyed Faultline (Tallahassee, Florida : Naiad Press / London : The Women's Press 1982) by Sheila Ortiz Taylor;  and Helen Hodgman's Broken Words (London : Virago 1989) and J. E. Hardy's Stranger Than Fish (London : Onlywomen Press 1989) are not bad.

Also look out for Margaret Reynolds' The Sappho Companion (London : Chatto & Windus 2000;  Vintage 2001) - this traces the Nachleben of the Greek poet from antiquity to the end of the 20th century, and lesbian writers and characters inevitably get a look-in.

James Davidson's The Greeks and Greek Love (London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2007) might also be of interest - it's intended as a reappraisal of scholarship on homoeroticism in ancient Greece, and as such is flawed, but is written in a non-academic style (which has frustrated more than one academic reviewer).

>>28
It was more of a Fool→Fitz, though.
Also, I really loved both trilogies.

I would recommend Waterways by Kyell Gold. If you're a cool enough dude to look past the whole anthro setting.

Wow, this thread is [spoiler]GAY