# List of gay novels prior to the Stonewall riots

While the modern novel format dates back at least as far as the 18th century, novels dealing with desire or relationships between men were rare during the early part of the 20th century, and nearly non-existent before then, due to the taboo nature of homosexuality at the time. Many early novels depicting (or even alluding to) homosexuality were published anonymously or pseudonymously, or like Maurice, sat unpublished until after the death of the author, reflecting authors' fear of opprobrium, censorship, or legal prosecution.
Works which are widely labeled "gay novels" generally feature overt gay attraction or relationships as central concerns. In some cases, the label may be applied to early novels which merely contain homosexual allusions or subtext, such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Works that feature only minor gay characters or scenes, such as the 1748 erotic novel Fanny Hill, are not included in this list.
Many authors of early gay novels were themselves gay or bisexual men, such as Oscar Wilde, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin. Others were heterosexual, or of unknown identity, writing under a pseudonym. One popular and influential writer of early gay novels, Mary Renault, was a lesbian woman.
Through the second half of the 20th century, as homosexuality became more visible and less taboo, gay themes came to appear more frequently in fiction. This list includes only novels written (though not necessarily published) before 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots, which are widely seen as a turning point in the gay rights movement. Gay plays such as Frank Marcus's The Killing of Sister George do not fit the definition of novel.

## Identity of the first gay novel

Owing to varying criteria for what it means for a novel to be 'gay' (and, moreover, varying criteria for what makes a work of fiction a novel), there is no single work which is widely agreed to be the first gay novel. In 2014, the magazine The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide conducted a reader survey seeking to identify the first gay novel. E.M. Forster's Maurice (written in 1913) received a plurality of 29% of votes. The next most popular selections were The City and the Pillar and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but votes were widely dispersed.

## Novels

| Year | Title | Author | Country | Notes |
| 1805 | Kyllenion - Ein Jahr in Arkadien | Duke Augustus of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg | Germany | [A Year in Arcadia: Kyllenion] Set in ancient Greece, it features several couples –including a homosexual one– falling in love, overcoming obstacles and living happily ever after. This is his only published work. |
| 1822 | Olivier ou le Secret [fr] | Duchess Claire de Duras (Claire de Coëtnempren de Kersaint) | France | [Olivier; or, The Secret] Olivier de Sancerre evokes, under cover of impotence, male homosexuality. In the first decades of the 19th century, homosexuality was manifested in stories through the representation of masculine impotence and epicene characters. |
| 1826 | Olivier | "Henri de Latouche" (Hyacinthe-Joseph Alexandre Thabaud de Latouche) | France | Set between the end of the Ancien Régime and the Bourbon Restoration, tells the story of Olivier, count de R.. Latouche's text is the most explicit of the three (Olivier by Duras and Armance by Stendhal), with its mention of Mariage blanc. The character's secret and the consequent obstacle have always been interpreted in the direction of physical impotence, and, secondarily, of homosexuality. |
| 1827 | Armance ou quelques scènes d'un salon de Paris en 1827 | Anonymous (Marie-Henri Beyle "Stendhal") | France | [Armance; or, Some Scenes from a Paris Salon in 1827] Set during the Bourbon Restoration, Octave de Malivert, a taciturn but brilliant young man barely out of the École Polytechnique, is attracted to Armance Zohiloff, who shares his feelings. The novel describes how a series of misunderstandings have kept the lovers Armance and Octave divided. A series of clues suggest that Octave is impotent as a result of a severe accident. Stendhal has very quietly inserted the theme, without talking about it openly. |
| 1829 | Aloys ou le Religieux du mont Saint-Bernard | Marquis Astolphe de Custine | France | [Aloys; or, The Religious of Mont Saint-Bernard] Tells the story of an interrupted courtship. A young fiancé breaks off his engagement a few days before the wedding ceremony, apparently the reason is the groom's secret passion for the girl's mother. After the break, Aloys takes her vows and retires to the convent. |
| 1835 | Séraphîta | Honoré de Balzac | France | In a castle in Norway near the fjord Strømfjord, Séraphitüs, a strange and melancholic being, conceals a terrible secret. He loves Minna, and she returns this love, believing Séraphitüs to be a man. But Séraphitüs is also loved by Wilfrid, who considers him to be a woman, Séraphîta. In reality, Séraphitüs-Séraphîta is a perfect androgyne, born to parents who by the doctrines of Swedenborg have transcended their humanity. The novel introduces bisexuality and androgyny. |
| 1836* | Chi mi difenderà dal tuo bel volto? | "Stendhal" (Marie-Henri Beyle) | Italy | [Who will defend me from your beauty?] Narrates the romance between the 57-year-old painter Michelangelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Cavalieri, the young 23-year-old Roman aristocrat who inspired many of the poems of the Renaissance genius. Written between 1832 and 1836. He never wrote it as such, except for sketches of the novel in loose notes, which were published in 1995. |
| 1849 | Pin Hua Bao Jian | Chen Sen | China | [Beautiful mirror with arranged flowers] It is a pornographic novel written during the Qing dynasty, focusing on the life of a famous Peking Opera actor, Du Qinyan, and the homosexual love between him and the young scholar Mei Ziyu. Pin Hua Bao Jian did not acquire much research attention until the twenty-first century because of the sensitivity of its content. At present academic researches on the novel are mostly at the macro level concentrating on the author’s biography finished time of the book definition of homosexual relationship gender studies and the art of literature creation and drama research. |
| 1851* | Hançerli Hanım Hikaye-i Garibesi | Anonymous | Turkey | [The Strange Story of the Dagger Lady] Published by Cerîde-i Havâdis Publishing House in 1851-1852, is a folk tale told by maddahs based on oral tradition. It is a mixed type of story in verse and prose told by the lovers of the storytellers. The prose parts are sung with imitations and gestures, and the verse parts are sung while playing the saz. It is not known who wrote the folk tales, however, it is known that this is one of the popular stories about the reign of Murad IV, and an example of the literature of the Tanzimat period. This realistic folk tale begins with the relationship between Kamer and Süleyman, who loved each other during the reign of Murad IV. It then continues with the unorthodox sexuality between Ghulam i Nâyab, with whom Sultan Cemşid fell in love, and Seyfi Dil, with whom Nâyab fell in love. |
| 1858* | I Neoplatonici | Luigi Settembrini | Italy | [The Neoplatonics] Set in ancient Greece, it tells the story of the erotic and sentimental education of two beautiful boys, Callicles and Doro, united by a strong passion since they were children, who discover and experience sexuality in a strangely joyous and natural way –open and without exclusions. It was published until 1977. |
| 1859 | Monsieur Auguste | Joseph Méry | France | [Mr. Auguste] The story begins with a ball given at the Lebretons' house. Louise, the only daughter of the wealthy widower Mr. Lebreton, is in love with Auguste Verpilliot. The latter is in love with his friend the painter Octave, and the latter is in love with Louise. Auguste pretends to want to marry Louise in order to thwart the plans of Octave, the man he desires. |
| 1861 | Cecil Dreeme | Theodore Winthrop | US | Robert Byng has recently returned from his Grand Tour of Europe to settle in New York City. An old friend lends Byng his rooms at Chrysalis College. It is there that Byng meets his mysterious and reclusive neighbor Cecil Dreeme, and the two strike up what scholars have identified as a romantic friendship. |
| 1870 | Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania | Bayard Taylor | US | The title characters have a close, affectionate friendship, but are not physically intimate, and both have romantic relationships with women. Scholars disagree as to whether the story should be understood as having a gay subtext. |
| 1871 | La historia de Chucho el Ninfo | "Facundo" (José Tomás de Cuéllar [es]) | Mexico | [The Story of Chucho the Nympho] Introduces the first clearly effeminate character, who does not identify as a man. |
| 1875 | Fridolins heimliche Ehe | Adolf von Wilbrandt | Germany | [Fridolin's secret marriage] First German author presenting homosexuality in a positive light. It narrates a mutual crush between two men with a happy ending, justifying all the love options in a brash parody of Platonic dialogues, and does so in a comedy tone. |
| 1876 | Geri ou un premier amour | Louis Beysson [fr] | France | [Geri; or, A First Love] Tells us the love story between two boys -Victor and Geri- in a boarding school in Switzerland, in the middle of the 19th century. It is the first story in which a homosexual relationship is described in French literature. |
| 1879 | The Lady of The Aroostook | William Dean Howells | US | The two main characters in this novel are men in their 20s traveling together from Boston to Venice as passengers on a sailing ship, a journey six weeks long. Both are given women love-interests, but there are homoerotic elements of the men's friendship, described by the body language throughout the novel. |
| 1881 | The Sins of the Cities of the Plain | "Jack Saul" (John Saul) | UK | A pornographic novel purporting to be the memoirs of a male prostitute. |
| 1884 | À rebours | Joris-Karl Huysmans | France | [Against Nature] The narrative focuses on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, lonely and sick esthete, who tries to retire to an ideal artistic world created by himself. |
| 1885 | Manor: Eine Novelle | Karl Heinrich Ulrichs | Germany | [Manor] The story tells the love story between two young men, and uses vampirism and its rejection as a metaphor for homosexuality and the public reaction to it. |
| 1885 | Um Homem Gasto | "Ferreira Leal [pt]" (Lourenço Ferreira da Silva Leal) | Brazil | [A Spent Men] The unhappiness of a badly contracted marriage generates discomfort between Luiza and Alberto. In a letter from Alberto to Paulo, we learn the reasons that made him a “spent man”, a life of excesses and perversions, including homosexuality, a “nefarious error” that he began to practice in his youth. |
| 1888 | O Ateneu | Raul Pompeia | Brazil | [The Athenaeum] Depicts situational homosexuality among students in an all-male boarding school. |
| 1889 | A Marriage Below Zero | Alan Dale | US | A melodrama told from the point of view of a woman whose marriage is threatened by her husband's love for another man. The story ends with her husband's suicide - an early occurrence of what would become a recurring trope of gay characters dying or facing otherwise unhappy endings. |
| 1890 | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde | UK | The novel's allusions to homosexuality and homosexual desire were seen as scandalous when it was first published serially in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. Wilde subsequently made several revisions to excise homoerotic themes before the work was published in book format. An unexpurgated version was published in 2011 which further included passages deleted by an editor at Lippincott's before initial publication. |
| 1890 | O cortiço | Aluísio Azevedo | Brazil | [The Slum] Tells the stories of Portuguese and other European immigrants, mulattos, and former African slaves living and working together in a single community. Among them, it presents Albino, an effeminate male character and stereotype of the homosexual of the time, it also shows a sexual relationship between two women. |
| 1890 | Un exil volontaire. Un roman | Marc-André Raffalovich | France | [A Willing Exile. A Novel] Two-volume of an unusual novel about marriage and cheating with interesting cast of secondary queer characters with a completely unexpected ending. |
| 1891 | Tim: A Story of School Life | Howard Overing Sturgis | UK | Describes the love of two young boys in a boarding school. It is based on the author's unhappy days at Eton. Tim of Sturgis can be considered a precursor of Maurice of Forster. |
| 1891 | O barão de Lavos | Abel Botelho | Portugal | [The Baron of Lavos] Sebastião, Baron de Lavos, one night seduces Eugénio, a sixteen-year-old boy who makes a living on the streets of Lisbon and with whom he will end up falling in love. When the boy is aware of his power over the baron, he begins to exploit it, beginning the collapse of the baron's life. |
| 1891* | Billy Budd | Herman Melville | US | The novel remained unfinished at the author's death in 1891, was finally published in 1924. Billy Budd, a "handsome sailor", inadvertently beats and kills his false accuser, master-at-arms John Claggart. The ship's captain, Edward Vere, acknowledges Billy's lack of intent, but claims that mutiny law requires that he sentence him to hang. |
| 1891 | Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald | "Xavier Mayne" (Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson) | US | It is considered the first Gay novel of youth literature. He recounts the friendship of two boys, Philip and Gerald, and his long trip from New York to Canada so that the latter meets his father, having to face a series of obstacles. The hidden subtext of the two boys who manage to enjoy a hopeful future in which after overcovering many difficulties will remain united forever, went unnoticed by the general public, but not for homosexual boys, who could decipher their message when they saw their own feelings in those of the protagonists. |
| 1892 | Cycle Patibulaire | Georges Eekhoud | Belgium | [The Patibular Cycle] Reedited in 1896 as Le Cycle patibulaire, was the first volume of short stories published by Eekhoud. Many of these stories contain brazen love stories between men. The book includes the stories Le Quadrille du Lancier y Partialité. |
| 1893 | Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal | Anonymous | UK | Pornographic novel published anonymously. Believed to be the work of multiple authors, possibly including Oscar Wilde. Set in fin-de-siècle Paris, its concerns are the magnetic attraction and passionate though ultimately tragic affair between a young Frenchman named Camille Des Grieux and the Hungarian pianist René Teleny. |
| 1893 | A Florida Enchantment | Fergus Redmond and Archibald Clavering Gunter | US | It is notable for its cross-dressing lead characters, much later discussed as bisexual, lesbian, gay, and transgender. |
| 1894 | The Priest and the Acolyte | John Francis Bloxam | UK | The story details the love affair of a young Anglican priest and his lover, a 14-year-old boy. It was thought that it was authored by Oscar Wilde, which is why it was used against him during his legal proceedings. |
| 1894 | The Green Carnation | Anonymous (Robert Hichens) | UK | The novel is a Roman à clef and a gentle parody of aestheticism whose main characters, Esmé Amarinth and Lord Reginald Hastings, are based upon Oscar Wilde and his disciple, Lord Alfred Douglas. |
| 1894 | Surma uuringud | Count Eric von Stenbock | Estonia | [The True Story of a Vampire] Also known as The Sad Story of a Vampire, is inspired by Le Fanu's Carmilla, and is one of the short stories included in the collection entitled “Studien zum Tod”. Set in 19th century Styria. Hungarian vampire Count Vardalek visits the castle of elderly baron Wrondki and falls for Gabriel, a beautiful young boy for whom he develops a predatory passion. Vampirization is emotional, affective and materializes through the kiss. |
| 1894 | Nartsiss | Count Eric von Stenbock | Estonia | [Narcissus] One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Studien zum Tod. Tells the story of Nartsiss, a young man who was born an orphan but with a title and a fortune. A passion of his life is beauty, and he leads it to egocentrism. |
| 1895 | Bom-Crioulo | Adolfo Caminha | Brazil | [Bom-Crioulo: The Black Man and the Cabin Boy] The novel was the first major literary work on homosexuality to be published in Brazil, and one of the first to have a black person as its hero. The novel caused a stir upon its publication but was almost forgotten in the first half of the 20th century. In the second half of the 20th century, the novel has been republished several times in Brazil and translated into English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. |
| 1895* | The Story of a Scapular | Count Eric von Stenbock | UK | [The Story of a Scapular] One of the short stories included in the collection entitled The Child of the Soul & Other Stories. Tells the story of Bernard and Francis, two monks who, upon being deposed, dedicate themselves to hedonism, but who keep their scapulars on Mount Carmel as an unusual sign of religiosity. Due to the sudden death of the author, and his subsequent censorship, the book was published until 1999. |
| 1895 | Mes Communions | Georges Eekhoud | Belgium | [My Communions] Second volume of short stories published by Eekhoud. Many of these stories contain brazen love stories between men. |
| 1897 | Himmelig Ve | Knut Hamsun | Norway | [Secret Suffering] One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Siesta. The story is very clearly about sexual desire between two men. |
| 1899 | Escal-vigor | Georges Eekhoud | Belgium | [A Strange Love: A Novel of Abnormal Passion] The young Count Henry of Kehlmark returns to his homeland to settle in Escal-Vigor, the castle of his ancestors, located on a wild island in the North Sea. There, the aristocrat falls in love with Guidon Govaertz, a handsome peasant youth, who is rejected by his own family. |
| 1899 | Impotência | "João do Rio" (João Cristóvão dos Santos Coelho Barreto) | Brazil | [Impotence] The story explores the story of a 70-year-old man and his unfulfilled homosexual desires. |
| 1899 | Pílades e Orestes | Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis | Brazil | [Pylades and Orestes] In this short story, two friends, Quintanilha and Gonçalves, two adult men in their early thirties, who live together and, because they are single, end up falling in the mouth of the people. Everything changes when Camila appears in the story, arousing interest in one of them and bitterness in the other. The friction ends up revealing unexplored feelings for the two friends. |
| 1899 | Jaspar Tristram | "A.W. Clarke" (Edward Ashley Walrond Clarke) | Italy | Based on the author’s boarding school experiences at Radley College in the late 1870s. Is an extraordinary psychological study of the eponymous hero, tracing his thoughts and emotions as he proceeds from boyhood towards young adulthood: his unhappiness at school, his affection for the older boy Orr and later his love for his friend L. C. ‘Elsie’ Southwood. |
| 1899 | Monsieur Antinoüs et Madame Sapho | “Luis d’Herdy” (Louis Didier) | France | [Mr. Antinous and Mrs. Sappho] Didier's first two novels deal with homosexual relationships and the myth of androgyny through pairs of characters with complex relationships. M. Antinoüs et Mme Sapho tells the story of a marriage of convenience between Jacques de Mortheure and Marthe Barnède, both homosexuals, but who end up finding solace for their disappointed loves in the company and affection of each other. Didier's aim is to rewrite the Platonic myth of the androgyne and at the same time desexualise marital relations between men and women. The two homosexual characters, Jacques and Marthe, find in their marriage of convenience a tenderness and complicity that soften the painful impossibility of their inverted loves. |
| 1899 | L’Homme-Sirène | “Luis d’Herdy” (Louis Didier) | France | [The Mermaid Man] Both of Didier's novels deal with homosexual relationships, but this second novel takes the theme of androgyny much further, as it describes the gradual destruction of the marriage between Jeanne and Georges d'Athis by a young dandy, Édouard d'Ore, strongly inspired by Jean Des Esseintes, from the novel À rebours. The androgyny claimed by the dandies that d'Herdy chooses as main characters corresponds with the sisterhood of the female figures introduced through the theme of collaboration. His contemporaries saw in these novels true studies of “legal medicine” rather than literary works that sought to provoke and subvert bourgeois morality from a decadent perspective. |
| 1900 | Ercole Tomei | "Fritz Geron Pernauhm" (Guido Hermann Eckardt) | Germany | They had learned to love each other in high school: the musician Ercole Tomei and the sometimes pedantic professor Gerhart Büchner. After Ercole's marriage, Büchner confines himself to the role of the good family friend, but his jealousy awakens when Ercole makes new friends with men. |
| 1900 | Ódio, ou Páginas de um diário | "João do Rio" (João Cristóvão dos Santos Coelho Barreto) | Brazil | [Hate, or Pages from a Diary] It is about a man named Fábio who remembers the mixture of desire and contempt he felt for his neighbor for years. |
| 1900 | La Destinée | “Luis d’Herdy” (Louis Didier) | France | [Destiny] In this autobiographical novel, or autofictional account, the spirit of Louis d’Herdy shines through in the figure of a dandy pianist famous for his mysterious elegance, barely disguised under the pseudonym of Lucien d’Everly. In La Destinée the figure of the female double becomes more explicit. Although the main character has a mother, a sister and a potential fiancée, all these female roles are relegated to the background compared to the mysterious figure of the sexagenarian landlady, concierge and occultist in her spare time, Madame Verlet. She becomes a true initiator of the character and a complex tutelary figure throughout the novel. Women allow the meeting of the two poles of a desexualized androgyne, thus resolving the erotic crisis of the end of the century, haunted by the spectre of impotence and lack of love. |
| 1901 | Dédé | Achille Essebac | France | Marcel Thellier, an adult in his thirties, tells of the astonishment he felt at the beauty of a comrade, André Dalio -affectionately nicknamed Dédé- from the time they met at the age of fourteen until his early death at the age of sixteen. |
| 1901 | The History of Sir Richard Calmady | "Lucas Malet" (Mary St Leger Kingsley) | UK | The novel was shocking in this moment because the protagonist is disabled and portrays the frank depiction of his quest for romantic and sexual fulfilment. Richard struggles to come to terms with his disability, and after an abortive attempt to marry a neighbouring aristocrat's daughter, he undertakes a ‘Rake's Progress’ around Europe, giving himself up to dissipation. The novel was based on the life of Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh. |
| 1902 | L'Immoraliste | André Gide | France | [The Immoralist] Narrates the story of Michel, his recovery from tuberculosis; his attraction to a series of Algerian boys and to his estate caretaker's are his; and the evolution of a new perspective on life and society. |
| 1902 | Mikaël | Herman Bang | Denmark | In Paris at the end of the 19th century, the painter Claude Zoret leads a life of celebrity and luxury with his protégé, the young Czech Mikaël. They are at the same time father and adopted son, teacher and student, painter and model, and lovers. Everything is going well until, unfortunately, the young man falls madly in love with the Russian princess, Lucia Zamikov. |
| 1902 | Extravagância | "Symphrônio Perillo" | Brazil | [Extravagance] One of the short stories included in the collection entitled A casadinha. Tells the story of a man who decides to have sex with a sex worker nicknamed Oscar, and who the next morning gives little importance to the fact by stating that it was just an "extravagance". |
| 1903 | Tonio Kröger | Thomas Mann | Germany | The novel has unequivocally autobiographical features, and sees an insurmountable contrast between art and the bourgeoisie. Tonio's conflict is not limited to his social and artistic identity, but also to his sexual one. His friendship with Hans Hansen has a homoerotic resonance. The subject of homosexuality is not dealt with explicitly but tabooed: Tonio descends into lust and feels guilty, without explaining what happened. |
| 1904 | Belchamber | Howard Overing Sturgis | UK | The story follows the life of Sainty, Marquis of Belchamber, he is shy, physically weak, likes knitting and dislikes sports. The Noblesse oblige to marry, however, it turns out that they find it disgusting and the marriage is not consummated. |
| 1904 | The Island of Tranquil Delights: A South Sea Idyl and Others | Charles Warren Stoddard | US | Is a collection of his homoerotic tales of the olive-skinned natives of the South Seas. |
| 1904 | Anders als die Andern | "Bill Forster" (Hermann Breuer) | Germany | [Unlike The Others] The primary student Herbert Wolters falls in love with the tertiary student Erich Mertens, who feels flattered but cannot return the feelings. When Herbert is reciting poems in a literary circle and he is asked which hot-blooded creature these verses are about, he replies: 'This girl is a boy!' A mocking 'Graf Platen' resounds at him, and his bourgeois existence is destroyed. |
| 1904 | Der junge Kurt | "Fritz Geron Pernauhm" (Guido Hermann Eckardt) | Germany | [The Young Kurt] Hehrmeister, a well-travelled composer, has returned to Riga, where he meets 17-year-old Kurt. He only realizes how deep his feelings for Kurt are after he lets his mother catch him. Before the confusion of his feelings, he wants to flee to Paris - for Kurt a double betrayal that breaks him. Due to the author's Baltic German origin, it can be considered one of the first gay novels from the Baltic countries. |
| 1904 | L'Autre Vue | Georges Eekhoud | Belgium | [The Other View] Laurent Paridael is a young man from a good bourgeois family, who is completely out of touch with his environment, and prefers to hang out with thugs from working-class neighborhoods. He is seduced by their freedom, their lack of culture, but also by the slenderness of their bodies, their naturally graceful gestures and wild charm. The book was reedited in 1926 under the title Voyous de velours ou L'autre vue. |
| 1905 | The Garden God – A Tale of Two Boys | Forrest Reid | UK | Graham is a friendless boy whose only companion is an imaginary character, a Greek boy, who visits him while he sleeps. At sixteen he enters a boarding school to continue his training, and there, his secret and invisible companion disappears during his sleep. But one day he meets Harold, another student at the school who, to his surprise, turns out to be the living embodiment of his imaginary friend. |
| 1905 | Messes noires. Lord Lyllian | Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen | France | [Black Masses. Lord Lyllian] The author conceived the work as a satire of the scandal that led him to jail and exile. The young Lord Lyllian is seduced by Harold Skilde who embarks him on an authentic odyssey of sexual debauchery, which will lead him to share his body with men and women. Not without humour, it is a Roman à clef in which many reputedly homosexual characters appear under almost transparent transposed names: Supp (Friedrich Alfred Krupp), Sar Baladin (Joséphin Péladan), Montautrou (Robert de Montesquiou), Achille Patrac (Achille Essebac), Chignon (Édouard Chimot), Claude Skrimpton (Claude Simpson), Guy de Payen (Albert François Hamelin de Warren), Jean d'Alsace (Jean Lorrain), among others. |
| 1905 | The Hill: A Romance of Friendship | Horace Annesley Vachell | UK | The story gives an idealized view of life at Harrow and of the homoerotic friendship between two boys, two boys compete for the love of a third. The story exalts aristocracy, constantly talks about importance of “breeding” and explains all of the shortcomings of Scaife’s character by his low birth. |
| 1906 | Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß | Robert Musil | Austria-Hungary | [The Confusions of Young Törless] Depicts homosexuality in an Austrian boarding school. First English translation published in 1955. A German film adaptation was released in 1966. |
| 1906 | Imre: A Memorandum | "Xavier Mayne" (Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson) | US | Notable for being among the earliest sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality. The main characters, lovers Imre and Oswald, are happy and united at the end of the story. Only a small printing of 500 copies was issued in Italy (Stevenson was an American writing in Europe). Reissued in 2003. |
| 1906 | Kryl'ya | Mikhail Kuzmin | Russia | [Wings] The novel deals with teenager Vanya Smurov's attachment to his older, urbane mentor, Larion Stroop, a pederast who initiates him into the world of early Renaissance, Classical and Romantic art. The book became one of the first “coming out” stories to have a happy ending and his private journals provide a detailed view of a gay subculture, involving men of all classes. |
| 1906 | O Sr. Ganimedes | Alfredo Gallis [pt] | Portugal | [Mr. Ganymede] A shy and effeminate boy, Leonel, grew up to become a slender and elegant young man who makes all the maidens of Lisbon sigh. But Leonel is in love with Liberato, a corpulent, rude, fighting man with a bushy mustache, who liked to see him dressed like a fine lady. |
| 1906 | Los cuarenta y uno: novela crítico-social | "Eduardo A. Castrejón" | Mexico | [The Forty-One: A Critical-Social Novel] Five years after the Ball of the Forty-One, this work came out that reproduced the atmosphere of scandal, and in a satirical, moralizing and denigrating tone, it delves us into the perception of contemporaries of the event. The story imagines the planning and development of the ball. |
| 1906 | Die Infamen | "Fritz Geron Pernauhm" (Guido Hermann Eckardt) | Germany | [The Infamous] With many references to time, the novel describes the adaptation strategies of middle-class homosexuals in the mid-19th century who live in Berlin in their own secret world or who only dare to be themselves when traveling abroad. Richard, a young musician, does not want to be satisfied with "the happiness of catacomb dwellers". His openness also compromises his friends. |
| 1907 | Le baiser de Narcisse | Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen | France | [The Kiss of Narcissus] Set in Ancient Greece, it tells us the life of Myles, a boy born in Byblos destined to be a priest in the temple of Adonis, but after fleeing he will end up in Athens as a slave. |
| 1907 | Aus der Freundschaft sonnigsten Tagen Der Liebling Kurt | "Hans Waldau" | Germany | [From the Friendship; or, From the Sunniest Days of Friendship of Darling Kurt] Tells the story of the joint journey of two young men who then remain friends from afar. |
| 1907* | Une jeunesse | Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen | France | [A Youth] The plot revolves around Robert Jélaine, a twenty-three-year-old French painter who is in love with Nino, a sixteen-year-old seminarian. The antagonists of the couple are Father Seraphino, also in love with Nino, and a girl, Michaëla, whom Nino loves. In the end, the girl dies and Nino is forced to suffer confinement and solitude in a seminary in Verona, but in that city he will also have the opportunity to experience new relationships. The Baron began writing it in the summer of 1905 in Taormina, during a trip to Sicily, and finished it the following year in Oxford, but it would not be published until his return to Paris in 1907, and is dedicated to his secretary and long-time lover, Nino Cesarini. |
| 1907 | Román Manfreda Macmillena | Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic | Austria-Hungary | [The Story of Manfred Macmillen] The first of the three wizard novels (Romány tří mágů). A decadent dandy, the noble Manfred Macmillen, is haunted by visions that he is one of many reincarnations of the long-dead wizard, the demonic Count Cagliostro, a protégé of his grandfather. His journey in his footsteps takes him to Prague, where he is also haunted as a ghost by the mysterious stranger Walter More, who may also be an incarnation of the old wizard, or Manfred's shadowy alter ego, whose magical practices he eventually cannot resist. |
| 1908 | Homoszexuális szerelem - Tuzár detektív naplója | Guthi Soma [hu] | Austria-Hungary | [Homosexual Love – Detective Tuzár's Diary] The novel revolves around a tragic love story between two well-placed gentlemen. Gúthi was inspired to write his tragedy by the Harden-Eulenburg Affair that broke out in 1906. Is considered one of the earliest gay novels in Hungary. |
| 1908 | Allegoria di novembre [it] | Aldo Palazzeschi | Italy | [Allegory of November; or Riflessi] The novel revolves around the figure of Prince Valentino Core, abandoned by his English friend and lover John/Johnny, he returns to his villa abandoned for years and locks himself up there, with the passage of time he becomes increasingly visionary and almost paranoid. |
| 1908 | Pathologieën: De ondergang van Johan van Vere de With | Jacob Israël de Haan | Netherlands | [Pathologies: The Downfall of Johan van Vere de With] The adolescent Johan lives a secluded life with his father and their elderly housekeeper in a large house. For a number of years Johan has been plagued by erotic fantasies and dreams about classmates, which he finds deeply worrying. After feeling attracted to his father, he decides to leave home and meets René, a confident young artist. Johan falls madly in love and the two men enter into a sadomasochistic relationship. |
| 1908 | O bebê da tarlatana rosa | "João do Rio" (João Cristóvão dos Santos Coelho Barreto) | Brazil | [The Baby of the Pink Tarlatana] In this story, the protagonist meets a man during the Brazilian Carnival but upon touching him he discovers that it was actually a woman in disguise. |
| 1908 | Scarabaeus | Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic | Austria-Hungary | [The Beetle] It is the second novel in the symbolist and decadent trilogy Romány tří mágů (The Three Magicians' Novels). In Venice, young Gaston falls in love with Orestes, who is thus freed from his unequal relationship with the cynical and cruel Marcel for a time. When Oreste disappears, the search leads Gaston to Marcel's abandoned Ducal Palace. There Marcel organizes secret ceremonies of the cult of the goddess Isis, whom he serves and whose sanctuary is underground. |
| 1909 | Narkiss | Jean Lorrain | France | [Narcissus] Tale loaded with subtle homoeroticism that transfers the myth of Narcissus to Pharaonic Egypt. Narkiss, prince of Egypt, son and grandson of pharaohs, possesses superhuman beauty. He carries within him the blood of the great goddess Isis, for this reason, the priests of his cult took him away from his mother to keep him in an ancient sanctuary of Osiris, where he is kept cloistered, without contact or knowledge of his real birth, even away from anything that could reflect him. |
| 1909 | Wita sekusuarisu | "Mori Ōgai" (Mori Rintarō) | Japan | [Vita Sexualis] It is a story about a philosophy professor, Shikuza Kanai, who recalls his passage from childhood to adulthood, focusing on those moments that affected his sexual awakening. |
| 1910 | Lucien | "Binet-Valmer" (Jean-Auguste-Gustave Binet) | Switzerland | Lucien Vigier is the son of a famous psychiatrist who tries to establish himself as an artist, but fails miserably and is too clumsy even to commit suicide. Behind him is the masculine, self-assured -and dissolute- Reginald Lovell, who helps Lucien leap to freedom at the last moment. |
| 1911 | La fuente envenenada [es] | Alberto Nin Frías | Uruguay | [The Poisoned Fountain] The novel tells the story of a very intimate friendship, set in Paris, between two young men, the Greek writer Sordello Andrea and the Cuban Jorge de la Torre, a boy with a dissolute life. The text is replete with literary and artistic codes and allusions for educated homosexual men capable of understanding them. |
| 1911* | Les Fréquentations de Maurice: Mœurs de Londres | "Sidney Place" (Xavier Marcel Boulestin) | France | [Maurice's Frequentations] The text follows the amoral Maurice Verdal, an androgynous dandy and man about town, member of a picturesque homosexual subculture in Edwardian London, and of a society on the verge of disappearing, made up of wealthy, frivolous and socially insensitive characters, who move in elitist and desirable environments. This novel, published in 1911, first appeared in serial format in 1909 in the magazine Akademos. |
| 1912 | Der Tod in Venedig | Thomas Mann | Germany | [Death in Venice] The main character, an aging writer, develops an infatuation with a beautiful adolescent boy. Subject of a number of adaptations, most notably a 1971 film by Luchino Visconti. |
| 1912 | La vejez de Heliogábalo | Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent [es] | Spain | [The Old Age of Heliogabalus] The Count of Medina la Vieja, a weak, cerebral and perverse hero, who moves between the sublime and the grotesque, seeks to enjoy his latest passion. |
| 1912 | Les Libertins d'Anvers: Légende et histoire des Loïstes | Georges Eekhoud | Belgium | [The Antwerp Libertines: Legend and History of the Loists] Set in the 16th century, it follows the story of the roofer Éloi Pruystinck -called Loïet le Couvreur- prophet of an anarchic movement, which constitutes the center of the Antwerp Libertines, nicknamed Loïstes. This historical novel contains notions of homosexuality. |
| 1913 | À la recherche du temps perdu | Marcel Proust | France | [In Search of Lost Time] Some critics surmise that the narrator is presented as a closeted homosexual. The first chapter of the fourth volume includes a detailed account of a sexual encounter between two men. Proust himself was gay, but not publicly. |
| 1913 | Marcos, amador de la belleza$^{:103–106}$ | Alberto Nin Frías | Spain | [Marcos, Lover of Beauty] The homoerotism of this novel is diffuse, and spiritual, but can be clearly decoded by those aware of the code. |
| 1913* | Maurice | Edward Morgan Forster | UK | Written between 1913 and 1914, but not published until 1971, after Forster's death (Forster's homosexuality was not publicly known during his lifetime), Maurice follows the story of an Edwardian young man and his self discovery of love and life as a homosexual in a repressed society. It is one of the first gay novels with a happy ending. It was adapted as a movie in 1987, and was nominated for several awards. |
| 1913 | Ein Jünger Platos: Aus dem Leben eines Entgleisten | "Konradin" | Germany | [A Disciple of Plato: From the Life of a Derailed] Tells the story of Theodor Reinhold, a student who arouses "reddening love" in the young count's son Lorenzo, which he does not know how to deal with. |
| 1913 | Fenny Skaller: Ein Leben der namenlosen Liebe | John Henry Mackay | Germany | [Fenny Skaller: A life of nameless love] Fenny Skaller, a man in his forties, looks back on his life. Through photos, he relives disappointments and happy moments, he recalls gradually realizing that he loves boys between the ages of 14 and 17. The novel has autobiographical traits. |
| 1914 | The Prussian Officer | David Herbert Lawrence | UK | The plot is very simple and describes the consequences that non-assumed homosexuality can cause when sexual desire appears in a violent character. A military captain feeling an acute sexual tension towards one subordinate does everything to prevent him from seriously engaging in the relationship. |
| 1914 | Kokoro | "Natsume Sōseki" (Natsume Kin'nosuke) | Japan | [Heart] The work deals with the transition from the Japanese Meiji society to the modern era; by exploring the subtle friendship between a young man and an older man he calls "Sensei". |
| 1914 | Aus dem Liebesleben zweier Freunde | "Theo von Tempesta" | Germany | [From the Love Life of Two Friends] Tells of the inner struggle of a man "noble Uranian who will not give in to his inclination" and flees to the country to be safe from any temptation. |
| 1914 | Jésus-la-Caille [fr] | "Francis Carco" (François Carcopino-Tusoli) | France | [Jesus the Quail] Paris, 1910s, Jesus-la-Caille, a young gigolo from the Montmartre district, has just lost his protector and lover, Bambou. Turned upside down by this misadventure, he falls in love with Fernande, a prostitute and "môme" from Dominique-le-Corse, pimp of her state. |
| 1914 | Seelenwanderung | Jules Siber [de] | Germany | [Soul Wandering; or, Transmigration of Souls] Tells the story of a brilliant violinist and his search for a young painter, obsessed with the unfinished painting of a Dutch painter burned alive for Sodomy in 1654. |
| 1914 | A Confissão de Lúcio | Mário de Sá-Carneiro | Portugal | [Lucio's Confession] Tells the story of the complex love/sexual/mental relationship of the ménage à trois between Lucius, Martha, Richard. The narrator, Lúcio Vaz, seeks to claim his innocence after having served ten years in prison for the alleged murder of the poet Ricardo de Loureiro. |
| 1914 | O menino do Gouveia | "Capadocio Maluco" | Brazil | [Gouveia's boy] Cappadocio is a man who visits a prostitute named Bembem, who tells him the story of his life and his tireless sexual desire. It is considered the first Brazilian homosexual pornographic story, it has been claimed in recent years for its pioneering nature, for dealing with homosexuality, transsexuality and pedophilia. |
| 1914 | Desert Dreamers: a Romance of Friendship | "Patrick Weston" (Gerald Hamilton) | UK | It tells of a beautiful and passionate romance between an Arab teenager, Tayeb ben Mahmud, a guide for wealthy tourists in the Algerian city of Biskra, and a rich 22-year-old Englishman, Julian Thelluson, who will see his rigid moral code shaken by the onslaught of the feelings that the boy awakens in him, to which he will succumb without the possibility of opposition. Possibly inspired by the true story experienced in 1895 by Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover, with a young and beautiful Algerian boy named Ali. |
| 1915 | El martirio de San Sebastián | Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent [es] | Spain | [The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian] Narrates life in a sordid brothel in the Chinatown of Barcelona at the beginning of the 20th century, where a young boy, Silverio -nicknamed El Bonito- works as a servant, an effeminate and narcissistic ephebe, in contrast to the harlots, such a classic and perfect beauty. |
| 1915 | La sombra inquieta | "Alone" (Hernán Díaz Arrieta) | Chile | [The restless shadow] Novel that includes the first effeminate character in Chilean national literature. |
| 1916 | The Romance of a Choir-Boy | John Gambril Nicholson | UK | Written sometime between 1896 and 1905, and privately printed in 1916. |
| 1916 | David Blaize | Edward Frederic Benson | UK | The novel follows David’s career as a schoolboy from Prep school to public school and ends just before he leaves for university. Thematically it has a lot of burgeoning homoerotic sentiments. David and his friend Frank have a full-fledged bromance, but without sex, seen as "beastly". Another friend of David's is expelled for carnality, but by the end of the novel he has reformed and he has made it into a military academy. |
| 1917 | The Loom of Youth | Alec Waugh | UK | Thought to be the first English-language work depicting homosexuality between students in boarding school. A best seller, in part because its subject matter provoked a scandal. |
| 1918 | Efebos | Karol Szymanowski | Poland | [Ephebes] Two-volume novel that has unfortunately been lost, the plot was the homosexual love affairs of Prince Ali Lowicki, in Italy. It contained a series of autobiographical motifs and was dedicated to his lover, Boris Kochno. He did not attempt to publish the novel during her mother's lifetime and, before his death, he gave the manuscript to his friend Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who in turn refrained from publishing the text for the same reason. The manuscript was burned in September 1939, during the invasion of Poland. Only one of the chapters -given to Kochno- has survived. |
| 1918 | Den alten Göttern zu. Ein Platen-Roman | Hans von Hülsen [de] | Germany | [To the Old Gods. A Platen's novel] The novel recounts the formative years of the poet August von Platen-Hallermünde as a student in Würzburg and Erlangen come to life. |
| 1918 | Despised and Rejected | "A.T. Fitzroy" (Rose Laure Allatini) | UK | The sexuality of many of the characters in the book is represented as unstable, in a way unusual for the period. Antoinette at first has a passionate crush on an older woman, and then falls for Dennis Blackwood, a homosexual who had previously courted her, partly as a disguise for his actual sexuality, and partly in the hope that she might 'cure' him. |
| 1919 | Bertram Cope's Year | Henry Blake Fuller | US | Bertram Cope, an attractive but socially unaware and lacking confidence young English instructor becomes the elusive object of desire, either social or sexual or some combination of the two, for an older woman, two older men, and three young women. |
| 1919 | Las «locas» de postín$^{:167–169}$ | Álvaro Retana [es] | Spain | [The Posh "Crazies"] Rafael Hinojosa de Cebreros, the vicious son of some marquises feels fascinated by a mysterious Argentine with whom his friends have set him up on a date just to get his money. Set in the posh, decadent, gay circles of Madrid, the novel parades all types of characters: blue-blooded fairies, famous circus and cabaret performers, bohemian writers, etc. |
| 1919 | Los extravíos de Tony: Confesiones amorales de un colegial ingenuo | Álvaro Retana [es] | Spain | [The Misplacements of Tony: Amoral Confessions of a Naive Schoolboy] Antonio "Tony" Fontanar is a sixteen-year-old boy from an aristocratic school in Madrid who keeps a diary and tells how he ends up in jail along with his classmates whom he calls them "the Duchesses". |
| 1919 | Valmouth | Ronald Firbank | UK | Tells the effects of a black woman and her niece moving into a spa resort inhabited by wealthy centenarians. The novel is noted for its florid and baroque style and parody-like humour, and its sexual innuendos both heterosexual and homosexual. There is also a fanciful brand of Catholicism, a blend of mortification of the flesh, high-flown mysticism, and proselytism. |
| 1920 | Women in Love | David Herbert Lawrence | UK | The sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen meet two men who live nearby, school inspector Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, heir to a coal mine, and start a relationship. But, they have a strong emotional relationship, which is deepened and developed by their physical and psychological attraction to each other. |
| 1920 | Wo hast du dich denn herumgetrieben? | “Pfarrer Silesius” (Hans Siemsen) | Germany | [Where did you hang around?] In the novel he combines personal experiences of the First World War with travel accounts and autobiographical material. The book's cover, showing a young man in a suit and tie wearing stiletto heels, seems devoid of context compared to its content. The book conveys a depressed mood, contains two descriptions of a repressive environment and a non-existent homosexuality. |
| 1920 | The Dark Mother | Waldo Frank | US | Thomas Rennard, a lawyer from New York meets David Markand while vacationing. Markand's mother has recently died and he plans to move to New York. After arriving in New York, an intense love triangle of sorts plays out among Markand, Thomas Rennard and his sister Cornelia. Although the homosexual nature of the relationship is never mentioned, the reader can feel its strong presence. |
| 1920 | Das erotische Komödiengärtlein | "Granand" (Erwin von Busse) | Germany | [Erotic Comedy Garden] Its five stories depict a variety of sexually charged encounters between men, with characters that range from military school cadets and dance-hall regulars to a foreign businessman and a burglar. Promptly banned for "indecency", it was not republished until 1993 and only appeared in an English translation as Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights in 2022. |
| 1920* | Ver-Vert | Filippo de Pisis | Italy | Fragments for an unwritten novel, diary pages from De Pisis' Roman period (1919-1926). Notes, annotations, illuminations on boys, on love, and on male beauty, indulged with inexhaustible lust. The story follows Felipe (an alter ego of the author), dealing with Rome in the twenties, at age 25. The text was published until 1984 by his niece Bona de Pisis and by the editor Sandro Zanotto. It is considered an "artist novel". |
| 1920 | Sodom | Egmont Colerus [de] | Austria | The novel is a fantastic pseudo-historical story taking place in the last days of the doomed city itself, and featuring seduction, betrayal, murder, and cannibalism, among other such topics. |
| 1920 | Dernières Kermesses | Georges Eekhoud | Belgium | [Last Fairs] Third novel of the Fairs trilogy, this one has hints of admiration for the masculine. |
| 1920 | El hombre que parecía un caballo | Rafael Arévalo Martínez | Guatemala | [The Man Who Resembled a Horse] The short story purports to be the satirical portrait of Colombian poet Porfirio Barba-Jacob, who is given the character of a blaspheming, egotistical, and amoral man. The story's power lies in the delirious and oblique account of homoerotic desire. The protagonist's resemblance to a horse embraces his graceful, yet brutal sexuality and his total disregard for morality. |
| 1921 | El infierno de hielo | Álvaro Retana [es] | Spain | [Ice Hell] A young writer meets three beautiful siblings: a blonde girl, a little brunette woman and a beautiful young man with blue eyes. The three will suggest you delve into the most perverse sexual pleasures. |
| 1922 | Los ambiguos | Álvaro Retana [es] | Spain | [The Ambiguous]. |
| 1922 | Sodome et Gomorrhe | Marcel Proust | France | [Sodom and Gomorrah] In the fourth volume of Proust's monumental work, the homosexual inclination of Baron de Charlus, the narrator's uncle, in love first with Jupien, and later with the violinist named Morel, is addressed. |
| 1923 | Kyra Kyralina | Panait Istrati | Romania | [Chira Chiralina; or Kyra My Sister] Stavro -whose real name is Dragomir- who is the younger brother of Kyra Kyralina, shows sexual desire towards a young man named Adrian Zografi, and after being rejected, tells his story to the young man and that of his sister. Istrati was the first Romanian author to write a novel in which a character is homosexual. |
| 1923 | Mi novia y mi novio | Álvaro Retana [es] | Spain | [My Girlfriend and my Boyfriend] A young man meets a pair of siblings with whom he begins a relationship at the same time. |
| 1923 | The Blind Bow-Boy | Carl Van Vechten | US | The sheltered young man Harold Prewett, is given unlimited funds by his father to learn about life and himself. His father also finds him a mentor in Paul Moody who was employed by him specifically because he was “of good character but no model sense” and have been involved in a public scandal. In other words, a Bohemian and, thus, he will find himself involved with a motley crew of oddballs. |
| 1923 | L'Ersatz d'amour | "Willy" (Henry Gauthier-Villars) and "Ménalkas" (Suzanne de Callias) | France | [The Substitute for Love] During the First World War, a soldier comes to leave the Parisian painter Simon-Pierre with a manuscript, saying that he will come back later. This manuscript was intended for him by his friend Marc Revenal, in it he tells the story of Marc with the German officer Carl von Rudorff. The soldier returns two hours later an announces to him that Marc died in the war during a perilous mission. |
| 1923 | La corrección de menores | Francisco Herrera Velado | El Salvador | [The Correction of Minors] One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Mentiras y verdades. Tells the story of Luis/Luisa, a man who is raised as a girl and who over the years lives in constant transition between both genders. Later, Luis becomes a poet and decides to write the story of his "old life as a transvestite". |
| 1923 | Das Tigerschiff | “Pfarrer Silesius” (Hans Siemsen) | Germany | [The Tiger Ship] His erotically tender “boy stories” published by Querschnitt-Verlag, were illustrated by Renee Sintenis. Her tender and restrained drawings on the cover and inside vividly convey the homoerotic mood of the texts in the field of tension between friendship and eroticism. Siemsen's language in this work is impressive due to its succinct, very precise depiction of events; no word is too much. |
| 1924 | Pasión y muerte del Cura Deusto [es]$^{:122–128}$ | Augusto d'Halmar | Spain | [Passion and Death of the Priest Deusto] The priest Deusto has to decide between his vows to the Church and his love to the gypsy Miguelillo, who corresponds his feelings. |
| 1924 | La débauche | André Birabeau | France | [Debauchery] The first novel about a homosexual man from the mother's point of view. Translated into English as Revelation in 1930. |
| 1924 | Le Naufragé | "Willy" (Henry Gauthier-Villars) and "Ménalkas" (Suzanne de Callias) | France | [The Shipwreck] The novel is set during the German Revolution of 1918-1919 and the revival of the homosexual movement. Sequel to L'Ersatz d'amour, it follows the story of the aristocrat Carl von Rudorff who returns from self-exile and finds himself in post-war Europe. |
| 1924 | The Apple of the Eye | Glenway Wescott | US | The novel has autobiographical features. Wescott shows his reflections on the rural Wisconsin of his childhood, where he opposes a repressed puritanism in search of a more sensual appreciation of life. The homoeroticism is very subtle, but there are enough clues to make it obvious that Dan Strane is same-sex attracted, though the book ends with his having, apparently, no more than inklings about the nature of his desire. |
| 1924 | Cākleṭ | "Ugra" (Pandey Bechan Sharma) | India | [Chocolate] Published in the magazine Matvala ("Intoxicated"). The story describes an illicit sexual relationship between Babu Dinkar Prasad, an upper-class Hindu man, and “a beautiful lad of thirteen of fourteen”. Ugra claimed that his representations of homoeroticism were intended to reveal and hence eradicate Indian homosexuality. However, many readers were scandalised that Ugra had discussed homosexuality at all, believing that by doing so, he was promoting it. |
| 1925 | Les Faux-monnayeurs | André Gide | France | [The Counterfeiters] The novel features a considerable number of bisexual or gay male characters. An important part of the plot is its depiction of various possibilities of positive and negative homoerotic or homosexual relationships. |
| 1925 | The Western Shore | Clarkson Crane | US | A story set at UC Berkeley, featuring a gay professor as a major character (possibly modeled after Crane), and other characters of ambiguous sexual orientation. Not commercially or critically successful. |
| 1925 | Die Symphonie des Eros | Erich Ernst | Germany | [Symphony of the Eros] |
| 1925 | Hanymed | Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic | Czechoslovakia | [Ganymede] It is a variation of the Golem myth, in which a sculptor revives his sculpture of a handsome young man, as a form of compensation for his own physical ugliness. Tells the story of Radovan, who is very attracted to the charismatic Adrian Morris, who belongs to his mother's circle. Adrian, interested in the secrets of Rodolphinian Prague, meets the sculptor Jörn Moller, who has solved the mystery of how to revive the golem - of which Radovan is the model - with the help of the Kabbalah. Ganymedes is the last novel in the trilogy Romány tří magů (Novels of Three Mages), preceded by the novels Román Mandreda McMillena (1907) and Scarabaeus (1908). |
| 1925 | Pijpelijntjes | Jacob Israël de Haan | Netherlands | [Lines from De Pijp] The novel was intended to be a thinly veiled version of his own gay life with Arnold Aletrino in the working-class “Pijp” district of Amsterdam. |
| 1925 | Firecrackers. A Realistic Novel | Carl Van Vechten | US | During 1924, a blasé coterie of pleasure-seeking sophisticates are inordinately excited by a handsome and athletic newcomer to their social circle, Gunnar O'Grady, “a youth with the appearance of a Greek Adonis”, becoming an object of sexual fascination to many within the circle. |
| 1926 | Der Puppenjunge | John Henry Mackay | Germany | [The Hustler] Günther is fifteen years old when, running away from home, he arrives in Berlin in the 1920s, where he discovers the many boys who prostitute themselves in the streets of the center, finding in this way of life a way of surviving that will not always be easy. |
| 1926 | Der fromme Tanz | Klaus Mann | Germany | [The Pious Dance] The eighteen-year-old poet Andreas travels to Berlin to discover big city life. There he immersed himself in bohemianism and tried to process the hopes and goals of his generation in literature. Is considered one of the first German-language homosexual novels. |
| 1926 | Un hombre muerto a puntapiés [es] | Pablo Palacio | Ecuador | [The Man Who Was Kicked to Death] The narrator of the story finds out through the local press about the murder of a man named Octavio Ramírez, who was classified as "vicious", he is interested in discovering the reasons for his death and becomes obsessed with discovering "what kind of vice" the deceased had, since the newspaper does not mention it. |
| 1926 | Smoke, Lilies, and Jade | Richard Bruce Nugent | US | The short story was written in a modernist stream-of-consciousness style. Its subject matter was bisexuality and more specifically interracial male desire. Was the first story by an African-American writer to openly declare his homosexuality. |
| 1926 | Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli | Ronald Firbank | UK | Firbank's last novel, published posthumously. It is set in Spain, and tells of the Cardinal's 'eccentricities' include the baptism of pet dogs in his cathedral and a passion for choir-boys. |
| 1927 | Verwirrung der Gefühle | Stefan Zweig | Germany | [Confusion of Feelings] A renowned professor is honored on his sixtieth birthday for his long career full of success and achievements. But inside him he keeps a youthful secret, an episode that occurred when he was in his teens. |
| 1927 | Vestal Fire | Compton Mackenzie | UK | The novel is a Roman à clef, is set on the island of Sirene (a barely disguised fictional version of Capri), accounts the arrival of a French count of dubious origin, Robert "Bob" Marsac Lagerström, who was invited by a lesbian couple, Miss Virginia and Maimie Pepworth-Norton, who lives in Villa Amabile. It was inspired by the time Mackenzie had spent living in Capri before the First World War. |
| 1927 | Verbotene Liebe | “Pfarrer Silesius” (Hans Siemsen) | Germany | [Forbidden Love] For the novel, Siemsen drew letters from a young Swiss painter residing in Germany, arrested in March 1921 and accused of violating article 175 of the Penal Code. He hanged himself in his cell and left behind a bundle of letters that ended up in Siemsen's possession in a roundabout way. |
| 1927 | Glück: Ein Roman d. Freundesliebe | Max Schneider | Germany | [Happiness: A Novel of Friends Love] |
| 1927 | Las noches en el palacio de la nunciatura | Rafael Arévalo Martínez | Guatemala | [The Nights in the Nunciature Palace] Manuel Aldano, a man immersed in the spiritualist and esoteric currents of his time, begins a romantic relationship and intellectual attraction with the almost divine figure of the Lord of Aretal. |
| 1927 | Mr. Fortune's Maggot | Sylvia Townsend Warner | US | Tells the story of the infatuation of a middle-aged missionary Reverend Timothy Fortune for a young Polynesian male, Lueli, in St. Fabien in a remote island of Fanua, on the Raritongan Archipelago in the Pacific. The boy -renamed Theodore- with the approval of his mother, moves with Mr. Fortune an introduces him to island life and customs. |
| 1927 | Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír | Halldór Laxness | Iceland | [The Great Weaver from Kashmir] Follows the story of Steinn Elliði, an unstable young man who travels around Europe in search of his place in the world and who, in several passages, recounts his sexual experiences. |
| 1927 | Chocolate: And Other Writings On Male Homoeroticism | "Ugra" (Pandey Bechan Sharma) | India | [Chocolate: And Other Writings On Male Homoeroticism] Choklat was a sensation, eliciting polarized responses upon publication. Encouraged by the scandal he provoked, Ugra proceeded to publish a further four stories on the same theme over the next few months, and gathered them together in October 1927 with three more stories: Hey Sukumar (O Beautiful Young Man!), Vyabhichari Pyar (Dissolute Love), and Jail Mein (In Prison). The collection appeared translated into English by Ruth Vanita in 2006, under the name Chocolate: And Other Writings on Male-male Desire. |
| 1928 | The White Paper | Anonymous (Jean Cocteau) | France | A gay narrator recalls the course of his life, including his sexual awakening and attempts to come to terms with his sexuality. Some scholars have read it as autobiographical (Cocteau was gay). Rictor Norton interprets it as a sociological treatise on the injustice of homophobia. |
| 1928 | El ángel de Sodoma$^{:195–198}$ | Alfonso Hernández-Catá [es] | Spain | [The Angel from Sodom] The first "official" gay novel published in Spain. It was prefaced by endocrinologist Dr. Gregorio Marañón. |
| 1928 | To Kiss the Crocodile: A Story | Ernest Milton | UK | In it one protagonist -of two- fled the languor of British “invert” society, escaping to exotic regions and sacrificial death. |
| 1928 | Krypteia | Naomi Mitchison | UK | One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Black Sparta: Greek Stories. The Spartan Geranor kills a rebellious goatherd and takes his son prisoner, whom he takes to the Spartan camp. His beloved Charilas asks Geranor in vain not to sacrifice the young man's life; His pleas are ignored and the prisoner is killed after being interrogated. Charilas, watering the Spartan land with tears, claims to be unable to continue loving a man who could have done such a thing. |
| 1928 | O Lucky Thessaly! | Naomi Mitchison | UK | One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Black Sparta: Greek Stories. The young poet Pindar arrives in Thessaly invited by the Grand Duke Thorax to compose an ode in honor of Hippokleas, who has won the race at Delphi. The poet and the boy fall in love, Hippokleas in such a way that he stops entertaining his friends. Once the poem is finished and already rehearsed by the choir, Pindar proposes to the young man, but his intellectual distance interferes with the pleasure of making love. After the poem has been triumphantly recited at a great party, Pindar decides to leave Thessaly, feeling that he must leave so that the muses may inspire him through another love. Once alone, Hippokleas, heartbroken and upset, returns to the company of his friends. |
| 1928 | Adonis-Bar | Maurice Duplay (écrivain) [fr] | France | Inspired by the Montmartre transvestite cabaret La Petite Chaumière, Duplay tells an unusual sentimental story set in a Montmartre gay bar that accurately reflects the decadence of the 1920s. Through the eyes of the owner of the Bar Adonis, Horace, we learn about his beginnings as the lover of the great actor Farnèse, then his career as an actor - mediocre and unsuccessful - his subsequent decision to open a bar with the help of some transvestite friends, his conversion into a meeting point thanks to his former lover Farnèse, the poet Jonquille and the Prince of the Canary Islands (based on Infante Luis Fernando of Spain); and his meeting Fred, a young tie salesman whom he makes his lover and companion. |
| 1929 | Au Poiss' D'Or, Hôtel Meublé | Alec Scouffi | France | [The Pension of the Golden Fish] In the Roaring Twenties, Pierre, a cute and innocent blond boy, runs away from home ready to discover the world. He arrives to Paris, where he easily integrates into a group of urchins and petty criminals, among whom he discovers his sexuality and the attraction that his body exerts on certain men, which he decides to exploit. |
| 1929 | Singermann | Myron Brinig | US | Tells the story of Moses Singermann, his wife Rebecca, and their six children. It is a story of what the new American freedom does to the family's traditional Jewish values. It is here we first meet Harry and Michael, the two gay Singermann brothers. |
| 1929 | American Colony | Charles Brackett | US | Novel of the high jinks and romances among the American expatriates living on the French Riviera. One of the characters, Sydney, is a gay man living among upper-crust straight friends. The book is dedicated to the American homosexual drama critic and commentator Alexander Woollcott. |
| 1929 | The Lives and Deaths of Roland Greer | Richard Lionel Pyke | US | Is the story of a boy who is dominated all his life by two outside forces, Male and Female, the conscious and un conscious influences at work in the lives of Roland Greer are uncompromisingly set forth. |
| 1929 | Alf | Bruno Vogel | Germany | Felix and Alf, high school students in Wilhelmine Germany, discover their sexuality and experience love; but Felix finally submits to the commandments of church, school and state. Disappointed, Alf volunteers for the war: a heroic death instead of love and happiness. |
| 1929 | Alexis ou le Traité du vain combat | "Marguerite Yourcenar" (Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour) | France | [Alexis; or, The Treatise of Vain Combat] Set in Austria, on the eve of the First World War. In a long letter, Alexis, a twenty-two-year-old musician, describes to his wife Monique the "vain fight" he has been waging for years against the nature of his deepest desires and which leads him to break up: the love of men, which is suggested between the lines of the narrative. |
| 1929* | The Temple | Stephen Spender | UK | Is a semi-autobiographical novel, sometimes labelled a bildungsroman because of its explorations of youth and first love. Due to its frank depictions of homosexuality, was published until 1988. |
| 1929 | Serenata del amor triunfante | Pedro Badanelli [es] | Spain | [Triumphant Love Serenade] It is about a triangular rivalry that ends badly between a brother, a sister and a man desired by both. The novel ends in a delirium of passion and death. Badanelli also makes an ethical and aesthetic defense of homosexuality, with arguments that evoke those used by André Gide, Alberto Nin Frías and E.M. Forster. As a result of its publication, its author, a priest, was exiled in Argentina. |
| 1929 | A Matter of No Importance | Naomi Mitchison | UK | One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Barbarian Stories. The tribune Marcus Trebius returns to Rome after having fought in Britain accompanied by Rudd, a young slave with whom he has come to fall in love. But Decima, Marcus's rich heiress and whom he wishes to marry due to his political ambitions, demands the slave as a gift. The tearful Rudd is handed over to Decima not without pain, later, during another absence of Marcus now sent to Gaul, his fiancée trades Rudd for a brooch. When the tribune returns to Rome, the slave has been sold to a foreigner and taken with him. The marriage is celebrated, but despite this, Marcus does not become consul. |
| 1929 | Alexander, Roman der Utopie | Klaus Mann | Germany | [Alexander, Novel of Utopia] Describes the life and death of Alexander III of Macedon has an obsessive man who, carried away by the exuberance of his ideas, already feels the defeats in his victories, becomes guilty of his friends and increasingly succumbs to loneliness. Klaus Mann's first novel was one of the first novels in Germany to deal with homosexuality openly (apparently the first novel to deal with Alexander's homosexuality), and "inspired" his father, Thomas Mann, to write an essay in which he condemned homoeroticism. |
| 1929 | Fredi a l'école. Le roman d'un inverti | "Max des Vignons" | France | [Freddy at School: the Story of a Homosexual] One of a series of homoerotic “Fredi” novels. This title about Fredi's schoolboy days and the emergence of his sexual inclinations, which manifest themselves as timidity. Complete with a preface that presents the subject matter as a guide to parents and educators who “too often, due to ignorance... fail to recognize, in childhood, the first symptoms of inversion...”. It was printed in Paris by the Librairie Artistique, with illustrations by Gaston Smit. |
| 1930 | Manji | Jun'ichirō Tanizaki | Japan | [Quicksand] In fact, Manji means Swastika. It was written in serial format between 1928 and 1930. It concerns a four-way bisexual love affair between upper-crust denizens of Osaka. |
| 1930 | Asakusa Kurenaidan | Yasunari Kawabata | Japan | [The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa] The novel describes the decadent allure of this entertainment district, where beggars and teenage prostitutes mingle with revue dancers and famous authors. |
| 1930 | Kotō no Oni | "Edogawa Ranpo" (Tarō Hirai) | Japan | [The Demon of the Lonely Isle] Moroto and Minoura have known each other since they were students, Minoura admired Moroto -who is six years older than him- as a respectable student. Moroto is homosexual and is in love with Minoura, who is not homosexual, but his self-esteem increased a bit by having such feelings directed at the object of his respect. |
| 1930 | Anthony in the Nude | Myron Brinig | US | Tells the story of a successful love affair between narcissists. |
| 1930 | Other Man's Saucer | John Keith Winter | UK | The novel follows Shaw Latimer, a schoolteacher in Oxford who writes his first novel. |
| 1930 | Fredi s'amuse | "Max des Vignons" | France | [Freddy has fun] Fredi is out of school; he is a student, he lives free. Women seek him, but he comes out of their hands absolutely disenchanted and returns to his real satisfaction. Each volume is illustrated by “master” Smit. The novels are a masculine mirror of Colette/Willy’s successful Claudine series. |
| 1930 | Fredi en ménage | "Max des Vignons" | France | [Freddy in housekeeping] The third and last in the series of transvestite novels starring Fredi. In this last volume, the full flowering of the investment takes place. Fredi dreams of creating a home for himself, of having a home, but -of course- outside of natural law. He plays the housekeeper to an older man, but he seems to spend most of his time in a silk kimono and high-heeled shoes. |
| 1931 | Strange Brother | Blair Niles | US | The story is about a platonic relationship between a heterosexual woman and a gay man and takes place in New York City in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The novel provides an early and objective documentation of homosexual issues during the Harlem Renaissance. |
| 1931 | The Opening of a Door | George Davis | US | The story is of a large family in downtown Chicago in the 1920s and what happens to them when the Grandfather dies. Homosexuality is never mentioned or depicted outright, but there are so many subtle hints; from Uncle Daniel who lives in San Francisco and collects the first editions of Gide, through Uncle Lincoln who seems to have a dark secret that his wife knows about and often get his drunken rages about their marriage, to young Edward who needs to break away from his current drab life and become the gay writer. |
| 1931 | Hommes du Crépuscule | André Tellier | France | [Twilight Men: The Story of a Homosexual] The novel follows Armand (the illegitimate son of the Comte Edmond de Rasbon) through the twilight world of Paris and New York, through the pain of his first awareness of his own sexual longings, his gay tendencies who infuriates his father, who attempts to set him upon the "path of normality" by hiring a mistress to seduce him, his unavailing romance with Marianne, and into his own, queer world of jealousies and courtship, gaiety and sadness. |
| 1932 | The Memorial | Christopher Isherwood | UK | |
| 1932 | Por los caminos de Sodoma: confesiones íntimas de un homosexual | "Sir. Edgar Dixon" ( Bernardo Arias Trujillo [es]) | Colombia | [On the Roads of Sodom: Intimate Confessions of a Homosexual] It tells the story of David, a teenager from a provincial city, who, faced with the oppressive environment of his home, decides to flee. Looking for the love of another boy with whom to share his life, after several failed experiences, he falls madly in love with a beautiful circus trapeze artist. But his past will end up leading him to perdition. |
| 1932 | This Man Is My Brother | Myron Brinig | US | The sequel to Singermann (1929) in which Brinig continues the story of the two gay brothers, Harry and Michael Singermann. |
| 1932 | Männer zu verkaufen | Friedrich Radszuweit | Germany | [Men for Sale] Berlin 1930: Baron von Rotberg is being blackmailed and faces ruin. Erich Lammers, the tutor, wants to help and has to realize that the blackmailer is his own brother. |
| 1932* | Hindoo Holiday | Joe Randolph Ackerley | UK | Comic memory of the author, it is a gay satire on autocracy, it is set in the city of Chhokrapur ("City of Boys"). Is written in the form of (and based on) a journal which Ackerley kept during his five-month engagement as secretary to Vishwanath Singh, Maharajah of Chhatarpur between December 1923 and May 1924. The book was published until the death of the Maharaja. |
| 1933 | Better Angel | "Richard Meeker" (Forman Brown) | US | The novel describes the love affair between Kurt and another man Derry, and their relationship with a third man, Tony. Reprinted as a pulp paperback in 1951 under the title Torment. |
| 1933 | The Young and Evil | Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler | France | Set in the underground homosexual community in New York City and using stream of consciousness narration. Ford, an American, was unable to find a publisher in the US or UK, and the book was barred from being shipped there. |
| 1933 | Am Rande der Nacht | Friedo Lampe | Germany | [At the Edge of Night] The book was seized by the Nazis, withdrawn from sale, and included on their ‘list of damaging and undesirable writings’. This was due to the homoerotic content of the novel, and its depiction of an interracial relationship between a German woman and a black man. |
| 1933 | A Sodoma en tren de botijo$^{:169–174}$ | Álvaro Retana [es] | Spain | [To Sodome in the Tourist Train] A camp novel, where handsome, and naive Nemesio Fuentepino from Almería is taken advantage by a group of big city queens, where he will discover the depraved world of the fiestas of the perverse Marquis de Pijo Infante, attended by aristocrats fond of cross-dressing, cocottes and the most carefree illustrious fagots of the city. |
| 1933 | Forest Fire | Rex Stout | US | The novel is laid in the wild forest reserves of Montana; it is peopled by robust he-men; it is laid waste by a conflagration of major dimensions. Stan Durham is a senior fire ranger who protects his territory from forest fires along with his blond, blue-eyed nineteen-year-old summer recruit, Henry Fallon. |
| 1933 | Gentlemen, I Address You Privately | Kay Boyle | US | An English priest, Munday, defrocked for playing Poeme de l'Exstase by Scriabin during collection, who exiles himself to Normandy's wild countryside. Here he befriends the Cockney sailor, Ayton, a vagabond as shifty as the winds who was wanted for theft, deserted his ship, and went into hiding. Munday and Ayton become involved in an erotic relationship, causing Munday to question his whole identity. |
| 1933 | Serafim Ponte Grande | José Oswald de Souza Andrade | Brazil | [Seraph Ponte Grande] The protagonist is a womanizer who at times experiences homoerotic desires, which the novel treats in a comical way and which he sees as an illness. The work also shows a lesbian couple, one of whom Seraph seduces, with the idea that not even a lesbian woman could resist her charms. |
| 1933 | Ces Messieurs du Sens Interdit | "Marilli de Saint-Yves" (Marie-Louise Fouquet) | France | [These Gentleman of Forbidden Meaning] In this Roman à clef, the author tells us about, among other places, La Select, a place frequented by androgynous people with the appearance of artists, and the Cosy-Bar, a place of “Corydones” and young men who seek each other out, love each other and hate each other. With her sharp eye, she caricatures this universe but also gives a warm and endearing view of love above prejudices and chains. |
| 1934 | Bachelor's Hall | "Reginald Underwood" | UK | The novel tells the story of Adrian, a humble boy who dreams of a pure and immaculate relationship with another boy who is willing to be his life partner, his alter ego, and with whom he can put an end to his loneliness. |
| 1934 | Duque (novel) [es] | José Diez Canseco Pereyra [es] | Peru | [Duke] Teddy Crownchield Soto Menor is a young dandy heir to a great fortune who, after having lived for more than ten years in Europe, seeks to fit into a Lima society that he no longer recognizes. Everything seemed to be going well until he becomes the lover of an older man. |
| 1934 | The Murder of My Aunt | "Richard Hull" (Richard Henry Sampson) | UK | Edward Powell lives with his Aunt Mildred in the Welsh town of Llwll. His aunt thinks Llwll an idyllic place to live, but Edward loathes the countryside—and thinks the company even worse. In fact, Edward has decided to murder his aunt. The novel is considered a masterpiece of the inverted detective story, in which it is known "whodunit". |
| 1934 | Butterfly Man: A Strange Love Story | Lew Levenson | US | In Texas, Ken Gracey was a normal young man until his transformation into the flaming Butterfly Man, darling of the Third Sex, who rockets through riotous revels from Coast to Coast, is a tragic tale of the youth who never knew himself until too late. |
| 1934 | Aleko | Kenneth Albert Matthews | UK | Set in an elitist Greek male boarding school, located on an island off the coast of the Peloponnese, it tells the story of the relationship between a young English teacher, Martin Grahame, and one of his pupils, a 16-year-old troublemaker named Aleko, after what which his marriage and his reputation suffer the consequences. |
| 1934 | L’Amour défendu | Jacques de Gailleul | France | [Forbidden Love] The text introduces Paul de Baramont, who works as secretary to the actor Silvio Borelli, who later becomes his lover. The novel has characters based on real people whose names the author changed. |
| 1934 | Undue Fulfillment | Kathleen Coyle | US | Agatha, an overprotective mother with strong religious morals, discovers that her son Lawrence's relationship with Lena has ended. She travels to Paris in the hope of reuniting them and discovers his relationship with Cesar Brak, a poet of her generation. While the relationship is not labeled as gay or homosexual, it is clear from what is said (and what is not said) that the relationship is sexual. |
| 1935 | Los alucinados | Augusto d'Halmar | Chile | [The Hazardous] Four stories make up this book and address homoerotic love in a very direct way. The work of this author is always more accurately described as pederastic because it focuses on the relationship between mature men and adolescent boys. |
| 1935 | Mr Norris Changes Trains | Christopher Isherwood | UK | During a train trip, the protagonist befriends Mr. Norris, a masochistic communist. |
| 1935 | Dwell in the Wilderness | Alvah Bessie | US | Its a multi-generational saga centering around a Michigan family, a mismatched husband and wife (he a gentle but ineffectual sort, she a religious zealot) and their four children, three boys and a girl. One boy becomes an alcoholic and another a money-worshipping status-seeker, but the more interesting pair are the sister (an aspiring actress) and the youngest brother (who's gay), who migrate to New York along with brother's lover, where they all cohabit and attempt to form a theatrical troupe. |
| 1935 | Pied Piper of Lovers | Lawrence Durrell | UK | The novel is in large part autobiographical and focuses on the Walsh Clifton -an Anglo-Indian born of an interracial couple- childhood in India and maturation in London. The protagonist has homosexual experiences, significant dream sequences, and comments on his wide readings. |
| 1936 | Shadows Flying | John Evans | US | Jacob, a sensitive and naive man in his twenties, develops a loving but non-sexual relationship with Runyon, a moody and self-centered fellow of his own age. After living together in San Francisco for three years, they visit Runyon's mother and sister at their ranch near Big Sur. Jacob becomes disturbed when Runyon's mother appears to display an unseemly interest in her son. The paperback edition (1955) retitled the book Love in the Shadows. |
| 1936 | The Last Enemy: A Study of Youth | Leonard Strong | UK | Tells the story of Denis Boyle, a young master in a public school who, because of unfitness during the war, finds himself a teacher, instead of completing his course at Oxford. Soon Denis is called up for re-examination for military service. |
| 1936* | Cronache di poveri amanti | Vasco Pratolini | Italy | [Chronicle of Poor Lovers] Set in Florence, the choral novel describes on the one hand the life, loves and vicissitudes of a small community closely linked by living in the same street. The private stories of the characters, which intertwine with the dramatic events that marked the years 1925-1927 of the history of Italy. The novel was to be published in 1936 but, due to the political conditions that had changed in the interim, was published until 1947. |
| 1936 | Impassioned Pygmies | John Keith Winter | UK | E. L. Marius, a literary figure of his age, just taken up residence on the Mediterranean island of Miramar (based on Majorca), but the arrival of Saul, his arrogant eldest son, accompanied by Simon and Lily, an English squire and his American wife, and by Andrew Jordan, a young dramatist, breaks violently into the life of the island. Winter and playwright Noël Coward were briefly lovers, and the model responsible for Andrew Jordan's character. For his part, E. L. Marius is based on D. H. Lawrence. |
| 1936 | Los niños en el bosque | Juan Carlos Onetti | Uruguay | [Children in the Forest] A teenager named Raucho defends another named Coco in a fight, and then warns him about a character known as Rubio whom he describes as a "faggot" and "a piece of trash." Despite the hostility with which Raucho refers to the homosexual character, he is clear with Coco when establishing that those who had relations with Rubio were not homosexuals, but only him. The text presents a traditional vision of sexual orientation based on Latin conceptions, in which only the passive man is considered homosexual. |
| 1936 | Adam Grywałd | Tadeusz Breza | Poland | The work describes the environment of the wealthy interwar bourgeoisie in Warsaw. The axis of the action is the beginning of a homoerotic romance between the title character and Edmund Mosse. This romance is a kind of compensation for the hero for his unrequited love for Iza, Edmund's sister. The action of the novel and the psyche of the title character are presented from the perspective of a first-person narrator, reconstructing events from gossip, confessions and assumptions. The work was seen as an anti-bourgeois satire, a novel about love, or an image of a lost generation. |
| 1937 | Kuilu | "Martti Larni" (Martti Laine) | Finland | [The Gap] Tells the story of journalist and writer Unto Kamara, who is in a homosexual relationship with a literary scholar named Dr. H. When the Finnish Civil War begins, they fight each other. |
| 1937 | He Swung and He Missed | Eugene O'Brien | US | The story follows Toby Brent, through his four years in the navy, after he enlisted with the hopes of continuing his studies at the Naval Academy. Brent is assaulted by a character who up until that moment, has been seen as a friend. It is in his desperation to get away from this once “friend” that Brent finds himself on an ever-increasing path towards a destruction of self. |
| 1937 | Dečki: roman iz dijaškega internata | France Novšak | Slovenia | [Boys: A Novel from a Boarding School] Zdenko Castelli from Serbia and Nani Papali from Slovenia, meet at St. Mary's Institute, a Catholic boarding school in Zagreb, Croatia, where Zdenko is the subject of great admiration, with students as well as educators generally regarding him as the most beautiful boy. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, the boys’ relationship becomes very intimate very quickly. It was the first gay-themed novel in Slovene. |
| 1937 | The Young Desire It | "Seaforth Mackenzie" (Kenneth Ivo Brownley Langwell Mackenzie) | Australia | Mr. Penworth, a teacher recently arrived from Oxford, falls madly in love with young Charles and tries to seduce him. It is a significant novel for the way it reveals the differences between sex and gender. |
| 1938 | Serenade | James Mallahan Cain | US | Loosely based on Bizet's Carmen, the story explores the sources of artistic development, in particular the role played by sexual orientation in the development of artistic talent. |
| 1938 | Hombres sin mujer | Carlos Montenegro | Cuba | [Men without Women] The novel recounts the sentimental and sexual drama of some prisoners. The black Pascasio Speek describes how his world begins to fall apart when he meets a recently arrived prisoner, a teenager named Andrés. The young man ignites a flame in him that until then he was unaware of and makes him forget the miserable reality in which he lives. |
| 1938 | Concert Pitch | Elliot Paul | US | Set in Paris, some years after the War, the novel presents a critic, Ernest Hallowell; a handsome young pianist, Robert Maura; his beautiful mother Elizabeth Maura; a gay impresario, Lucien Piot; and his protegé, the poet Raoul Evrard. |
| 1938 | Spacer | "Sydor Rey" (Izydor Reiss) | Poland | [A Walk] This story illustrated the extent of Polish anti-Semitism in a homoerotic context. Two men with a homosexual sexual orientation, one of whom is Jewish and the other Polish, are taking a walk in a public park. The gentlemen openly display affection for each other, but this is not the reason for the outrage of those around them. Passersby are shocked by the fact that they are men of two different nationalities, the Poles outraged that one of the men is Jewish and the Jews outraged that one of them is hanging out with a Pole. |
| 1939 | Goodbye to Berlin | Christopher Isherwood | UK | The narrator, having moved to the Weimar Republic for work, meets a group of people who will be most at risk of intimidation, assault, and persecution by followers of Adolf Hitler: artists, free women, Jews, and homosexuals. |
| 1939 | Purposes of Love | "Mary Renault" (Eileen Mary Challans) | UK | Vivian Lingard, a 27-year-old nurse in a suffocating and soul sucking position at a hospital falls in love with Mic, a handsome, 25-year-old pathologist who she meets through her brother, Jan, and who also happens to be his ex-lover. At the same time, a nurse named Colonna Kimball is in love with Vivian. |
| 1939 | The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler | US | Is a hardboiled crime novel, the first to feature the detective Philip Marlowe. The story is noted for its complexity, with characters double-crossing one another and secrets being exposed throughout the narrative. |
| 1939 | Le Coup de grâce | "Marguerite Yourcenar" (Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour) | France | [Coup de Grace] Erick von Lhomond, recently wounded during the Spanish Civil War, returning to Germany via Italy. Among other mercenaries, he begins to tell his war story, which dates back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He joins to German forces fighting the Bolsheviks in Kurland There he meets his childhood friend, Conrad, who will fight alongside him and Conrad's sister, Sophie, helps take care of all the soldiers. Erick easily reconnects with Conrad but he did not expect Sophie's more mature attentions, rejecting her advances because of his feelings for Conrad. |
| 1940 | Die Geschichte des Hitlerjungen Adolf Goers | “Pfarrer Silesius” (Hans Siemsen) | UK | [The Story of the Hitler Youth Adolf Goers] Written in exile, the novel is an "anti-fascist pamphlet". Siemsen's novel is pervaded by the assumption that the Hitlerjugend was a hotbed of homosexuality, in fact, it became subliminal denounced National Socialism was a homosexual movement. That's why Siemsen, who was homosexual himself, was sometimes accused of 'gay self-hatred'. Printed in London in 1940, it was printed in Germany until 1947. |
| 1941 | Reflections in a Golden Eye | Carson McCullers | US | Capt. Penderton is a closeted homosexual who realizes that he is physically attracted to Pvt. Williams, but remains unaware of the private's attraction to his wife Leonora. |
| 1941* | The Mysteries of Joy Rio | "Tennessee Williams" (Thomas Lanier Williams III) | US | One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Hard Candy: A Book of Stories. Pablo González inherits the watch shop of his mentor and lover Emiel Kroger, and goes to the old theatre where he met him and where other men went to meet each other. Written in 1941, it was not published until 1954. |
| 1942 | Zwei Welten: Eine Jugend im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland | "Frank Clare" (Frederick William Clayton) | Germany | [Two Worlds: A Youth in Nazi Germany] The novel describes the political and social situation in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s from the perspective of the Englishman David Beaton, who worked as an English teacher at a German school for a while. A friendly relationship develops between Beaton and the 16-year-old student Götz, which also includes intellectual disputes. |
| 1942 | The Sailor-Boy’s Tale | "Isak Dinesen" (Karen Blixen) | Denmark | One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Winter’s Tales. Is a coming-of-age story, told in the style of a fairy tale, in which a young man, Simon, must go through a rite of passage to make the transition from boyhood to manhood. As Simon is a sailor, he comes from a strongly homosocial environment, as there are no women in the ships’ crews. Even when they go ashore for recreation, the sailors in the story seem to be primarily interested in interacting with one another rather than seeking out the company of women. |
| 1942 | Lihaaf | Ismat Chughtai | India | [The Quilt] Short story published in the Urdu literary journal Adab-i-Latif. After discovering her husband's homosexuality, a woman explores her own sexuality. |
| 1943 | Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs | Jean Genet | France | [Our Lady of the Flowers] The novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld. The characters are drawn after their real-life counterparts, who are mostly homosexuals living on the fringes of society. |
| 1943 | Agostino | Alberto Moravia | Italy | [Augustine] The story centers on the painful discovery of sex by a thirteen-year-old boy, between his mother (a beautiful young widow, whom he reveres), a group of local youth from a Tuscan seaside resort, and Saro, a man who owns a boat who maintains a homosexual relationship with Homs, a young black man who belongs to the group. |
| 1943 | Maiden Voyage | Denton Welch | UK | Although autobiographical, it tells the author's adventures in a fantastic way, probably embellished or imagined. At 16, Denton runs away rather than return to Repton's school. He embarks on a journey to Shanghai to meet his father. |
| 1943 | Il quartiere | Vasco Pratolini | Italy | [The District] Published in the United States as The Naked Streets and in the United Kingdom as A Tale of Santa Croce. Set in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Florence around 1935, the novel captures a group of boys and girls in the transition from adolescence to early youth. Everything is told through the eyes of Valerio, fifteen years old, a projection of the author himself. |
| 1944 | Les amitiés particulières | Roger Peyrefitte | France | [Special Friendships] Largely autobiographical, it deals with an intimate relationship between two boys at a Roman Catholic boarding school and how it is destroyed by a priest's will to protect them from homosexuality. |
| 1944 | The Lost Weekend | Charles Reginald Jackson | US | This story of a talented but alcoholic writer was praised for its powerful realism, closely reflecting the author's own experience of alcoholism, from which he was temporarily cured. |
| 1945 | Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh | UK | One of Waugh's most nostalgic and iconic novels, adapted for TV in 1981 and remade for cinema in 2008, Brideshead Revisited follows the story of captain Charles Ryder who, after returning to Brideshead, starts recalling his life since 1920s Oxford, full of drama and tragedies (his romantic friendship with a young aristocrat being the center of it all), until the start of the war. |
| 1945 | The Brick Foxhole | Richard Brooks | US | Set in the U.S. during the final months of WWII, this story of murder reflects the racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia of the times. The main characters are a group of soldiers coping with the frustration, boredom, and disgrace of serving stateside while other men are over in Europe and the Pacific, killing the enemy. |
| 1945 | The Folded Leaf | William Keepers Maxwell Jr. | US | In the suburbs of Chicago in the 1920s, two boys initiate an unusual friendship: Lymie Peters, a skinny and somewhat clumsy boy who always gets good grades, and newcomer Spud Latham, a star athlete and mediocre student. Spud accepts Lymie's devotion without questioning it, but once high school ends and the boys enter college, tensions begin to arise between them. |
| 1945* | And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks | Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs | US | The book consists of alternating chapters by each author writing as a different character. The novel is a Roman à clef based upon the killing of David Kammerer who was obsessed with Lucien Carr. The text remained unpublished in complete form until 2008. |
| 1946 | The Fall of Valor | Charles Reginald Jackson | US | Tells the story of John Grandin, a middle-aged man meeting his wife, Ethel, for a summer vacation on Nantucket. There, they meet a young Marine captain on medical leave with his newlywed wife. John finds himself drawn to the Marine for reasons he can't quite articulate. |
| 1946 | The Dazzling Crystal | Janet Schane | US | The commercial artist Judith Forrester marries the novelist Nicky Hoffmann, after this she try to understand why her husband's dislike him. Later she meets Nicky first publisher, Mark Sauter, and she realizes that the two men had once been lovers. |
| 1946 | Miracle de la rose | Jean Genet | France | [Miracle of the Rose] Is a non-linear structure semi-autobiographical novel that describes homosexual erotic desires for his fellow adolescent detainees in Mettray Penal Colony and Fontevrault prison. |
| 1946 | Eftir örstuttan leik | Elías Mar | Iceland | [After a Very Short Game] Tells the first-person story of Þórhall, a twenty student known as Bubba who lives in Reykjavík and who suffers an existential crisis for not being able to adapt to the social expectations of him. The work does not include direct references to homosexuality, but the internal conflicts of the protagonist and his chaotic relationships with women indicate a repressed homosexual desire. |
| 1947 | Querelle de Brest | Anonymous (Jean Genet) | France | [Querelle of Brest] The story of a bisexual thief, prostitute and serial killer in Brest. Only 460 copies initially printed. An English translation was published in 1974. It was adapted to film in 1982 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. |
| 1947 | The Strumpet Wind | Gordon Merrick | US | The somewhat autobiographical novel is about a gay American spy in France during World War II. Homosexual themes are minimized in the novel, which explores concepts of individual liberty and freedom. The spy's director is a dazzlingly handsome, but sadistic, bisexual. |
| 1947 | The Great Light | Larry Barretto | US | Dirck Ericson, after kill an innocent man, he with his friend Archer Paine -who later becomes a novelist- enlists as an ambulance corpsman at America's entry into World War I, there meets a gay man called Roswell Cleminshaw. |
| 1947 | The End of My Life | Vance Bourjaily | US | Inspired story by Vance Bourjaily's experiences as an ambulance driver in the American Field Service during the World War II. |
| 1947 | The Gallery | John Horne Burns | US | Set in occupied Naples in 1944, the novel takes its name from the Galleria Umberto I, a bombed-out arcade where everybody in town comes together in pursuit of food, drink, sex, money, and oblivion. A daring novel and one of the first to look directly at gay life in the military. |
| 1947 | The Sling and the Arrow Light | Stuart Engstrand | US | Tells the story about a married man named Herbert Dawes, a "latent homosexual" who throughout much of the book he attempts to: kill his wife Lonna, gets involved with a prostitute, turns into a "peeping Tom", has fantasies about being a woman and seems to be suffering with a serious mental illness. |
| 1947 | Finistère | Fritz Peters | US | [Finisterre] After his parents' divorce, Matthew Cameron moved to Paris with his mother, where he was enrolled at the St. Croix École des Garçons boarding school, where he began a series of relationships. His innocent and idealized first love can't insulate him from the cruelty of the world or of the adults in his life. |
| 1947 | Knock on Any Door | Willard Motley | US | A work of gritty naturalism, it concerns the life of Nick Romano, an Italian-American altar boy who turns to crime because of poverty and the difficulties of the immigrant experience. Motley researched his novel on the streets of his native Chicago, talking to immigrants about their experiences and visiting juveniles in Illinois's youth detention centers. |
| 1947 | End As a Man | Calder Willingham | US | The novel an indictment of the macho culture of military academies, introducing his first iconic character, sadistic Jocko de Paris. The story include graphic hazing, sex, and suggested homosexuality. |
| 1947 | Frederico Paciência | Mário de Andrade | Brazil | One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Contos novos. A man named Juca remembers his classmate Frederico, who during school was united by an intense friendship and affection that caused the rest of his classmates to begin to verbally attack them and accuse them of being homosexual. Although neither of them accepts that what they feel is more than friendship. Although the characters do not accept their sexual orientation, the text is remembered as one of the first in which a homoaffective relationship is not narrated in a negative way and that focuses on the affection between the characters. |
| 1947 | Jours sans dimanche | Guy de Hautefeuille | France | [Days without Sunday] The short novel recounts the sexual adventures of Jacques, a young man well endowed by nature, who leaves his rural home to work with his aunt in Paris. His aunt takes him firmly in hand, and during the course of the narrative he learns all the ways in which sex can be experienced. Jours sans dimanche stands alone by virtue of being the only quality narrative of the period to include both heterosexual and male and female same-sex scenes – something for all tastes. Was published Au Mont de Vénus and illustrated by Anatola Soungouroff. |
| 1948 | The City and the Pillar | Gore Vidal | US | The story is about a young man who is coming of age and discovers his own homosexuality. Is recognized as the first post-World War II novel whose gay protagonist is portrayed in a sympathetic manner and is not killed off at the end of the story for defying social norms. |
| 1948 | Other Voices, Other Rooms | "Truman Capote" (Truman Streckfus Persons) | US | After his mother's death, 13-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, a lonely, effeminate boy, is sent from New Orleans to live with his father, who abandoned him at birth. There he meets his sullen stepmother Amy; her cousin Randolph, a gay man and dandy; the defiant tomboy Idabel; and Jesus and Zoo, the two black caretakers of the home. |
| 1948 | Pompes funèbres | Jean Genet | France | [Funeral Rites] The story tells a story of love and betrayal outside and above any political division; the protagonist tells in memory and in honor of his homosexual lover, Jean Decarnin, assassinated by the Germans during World War II. |
| 1948 | The Welcome | Hubert Creekmore | US | After moving to New York following Jim's wedding, Don returns home in Mississippi, routed by the Depression of the 1930s. He finds Jim stuck in an unhappy marriage, and Don's arrival intensifies Jim's misery. As Jim sinks into alcoholism, Don connects with a new love interest, and their mutual friends persistently try to unlock the secrets between Don and Jim. |
| 1948* | Atti impuri | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Italy | [Impure Acts] It is the first of two of Pasolini's first unpublished stories. Largely autobiographical, the text tells of the author's difficulties with his own homosexuality. Originally written in 1948, were published until 1982. |
| 1948* | Amado mio | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Italy | [My Beloved] It is the second of two of Pasolini's first unpublished stories. Largely autobiographical, the text tells of the author's difficulties with his own homosexuality. Originally written in 1948, were published until 1982. |
| 1948 | Desire and the Black Masseur | "Tennessee Williams" (Thomas Lanier Williams III) | US | One of the short stories included in the collection entitled One Arm and Other Stories. It narrates from a third-person omniscient point-of-view the sadomasochistic relationship that Anthony Burns, a 30-year-old white wholesale clerk, and an anonymous black masseur establish in a Turkish bath house. |
| 1948 | The Angel in the Alcove | "Tennessee Williams" (Thomas Lanier Williams III) | US | One of the short stories included in the collection entitled One Arm and Other Stories. An anonymous writer lives in a boarding house with a nosy, ill-tempered landlady and a dying neighbor who wants to perform fellatio on him before he dies. |
| 1949 | Kamen no Kokuhaku | Yukio Mishima | Japan | [Confessions of a Mask] The work, with important autobiographical elements, has as its main themes false appearances, the discovery of one's own homosexuality, and the Japanese national identity crisis after its defeat in World War II. |
| 1949 | Journal du voleur | Jean Genet | France | [The Thief's Journal] The novel is structured around a series of homosexual love affairs and male prostitution between the author/anti-hero and various criminals, con artists, pimps, and a detective. |
| 1949 | Stranger in the Land | "Ward Thomas" (Edward Thomas McNamara) | US | It narrates what happened to Raymond Manton, a young high school teacher, who jealously guards the secret of his homosexuality in the closed environment of a small and conservative American city during World War II. |
| 1949 | All Things Human | "Stuart Benton" (George Sylvester Viereck) | US | John Stuart Kent is a millionaire banker and aesthete, living out the Indian Summer of his life as the shape of his future is altered by five extraordinary women. |
| 1949 | The Christmas Tree | "Isabel Bolton" (Mary Britton Miller) | US | Bolton presents the members of a family who are scattered across the country. Each person's inner dialogue is unique but all conclude that this Christmas will be challenging, particularly if everyone shows up. The elderly Mrs. Danforth is celebrating the holidays with her grandson Henry, the boy's mother Anne, and new step-father Captain George Fletcher, when her homosexual son Larry, the boy's father, appears on the scene with his lover Jerry, and the story draws to its tragic conclusion. The novel suggest that families have always been difficult and tensions run high at that time of the year. |
| 1949 | The World Next Door | Fritz Peters | US | The novel is a fictionalized version of the author's own experiences and shows the horrors of psychiatric treatment during the 1940s and 1950s, including the use of wet sheet packs, insulin shock and electro-shock therapies. |
| 1949 | The Gay Year | Michael Jean De Forrest | US | The novel traces the journey, over one year, of Joe Harris as he moves from questioning his sexuality to becoming a gay kept boy with a promiscuous secret life to deciding he is heterosexual. Apparently the first time that 'gay' appeared in a title with a homosexual meaning. |
| 1949 | The Dark Peninsula | Ernest Frost | US | Is a novel in which homosexuality is not once mentioned by name, but one in which it is all-pervasive, both dangerous and desirous. |
| 1949 | The Divided Path | Nial Kent | US | The story follows Michael from his childhood, with his mother trying to make him a girl, his meeting with Paul and his torment for being unrequited, until his life in New York, and the participation in a coterie of young men who are also "gay". |
| 1949 | Man eg þig löngum | Elías Mar | Iceland | [I Remember You for a Long Time] Halldór, a young book lover who comes from a fishing village, travels to Reykjavík to study grammar, there he must face the internal shame he feels when he perceives himself differently and does not meet the expectations of his family and society. The novel displays many autobiographical features. |
| 1950 | Quatrefoil: A Modern Novel | "James Barr" (James Fugaté) | US | Among the first novels to favourably portray homosexuality. Tells the story of a naval officer and banker named Phillip Froelich who is engaged to be married to a woman named Sybel Jo. While under investigation by court-martial by the Navy in 1946, he meets and is assisted by Tim Danelaw, a superior officer. An affair with Tim causes Phillip to confront his closeted homosexuality. |
| 1950 | The Dog Star | Donald Windham | US | Set in 1930s post-Depression Atlanta, tells the story of a young Southern man who is haunted by the suicide of his best friend from reform school. |
| 1950 | The Bitterweed Path | Thomas Hal Phillips | US | Depicts the struggles of two gay men in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century, and how an unconventional love triangle involving these two men, and one of their fathers, impacts their three marriages in small-town, Deep South. |
| 1950 | Footsteps on the Stairs | Myron Brinig | US | Jimmy Joyce, scion of a wealthy Butte Irish family who goes to San Francisco, where in a beautifully rendered scene of drunken desire has a one-night stand with a man he meets in a bar. |
| 1950 | The Night Air | Harrison Dowd | US | The novel described the difficulties its central character encounters in trying to come to terms with his sexuality. For years Andy Moore has resisted his tendency towards inversion and its, attendant evil, heavy drinking. But slowly, little by little, he succumbs to both. |
| 1950 | The Invisible Glass | "Loren Wahl" (Lawrence J. Madalena) | UK | Set against the backdrop of the Italian front at the end of World War II, in five intense days, the passions and prejudices that boil inside an African-American company of soldiers commanded by the racist Captain Randall and visited by an Italian-American lieutenant who falls in love with one of the soldiers. A doomed love story which breaks three taboos: love between men, love across the racial divide, and love between an officer and an enlisted man (Sergeant Washington and Corporal Carney). |
| 1950 | The Spanish Gardener | Archibald Joseph Cronin | UK | Tells the story of an American consul, Harrington Brande, who is posted to San Jorge on the Costa Brava, Spain with his young son Nicholas. The novel relates how Nicholas's innocent love for his father is destroyed by the latter's jealousy and vindictiveness when Nicholas forms a friendship with the young Spanish gardener, José Santero. |
| 1950 | The Image of a Drawn Sword | Jocelyn Brooke | UK | Reynard Langrish is an indecisive, submissive, bank teller who is charmed one evening by the appearance of a Captain Roy Archer, leader of an unnamed battalion. With Archer, Langrish is recruited into a secret cavalcade of men all of whom, curiously, sport the same tattoo. With vague pronouncements about “enlistment” and “the crisis,” Reynard fights against his desire to be closer to the men -in particular Roy- and his utter confusion as to what has been happening in and around him. Brooke develops themes such as paranoia and isolation. |
| 1950 | Elles se rend pas compte | "Vernon Sullivan" (Boris Vian) | France | [They Do Not Realize] Francis Deacon attends a fancy dress ball given by his childhood friend -and occasional lover- Gaya. He is shocked to learn that she is getting married, and even more shocked to meet her future husband, Richard Walcott, a homosexual drug dealer and member of the Walcott Gang. The novel addresses issues such as transvestism, lesbianism, homosexuality, corrective rape and asphyxiophilia. |
| 1951 | Look Down in Mercy | Walter Baxter | UK | A British officer in the Burma campaign in World War II falls in love with his batman. |
| 1951 | Mémoires d'Hadrien | "Marguerite Yourcenar" (Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour) | France | [Memoirs of Hadrian] The book takes the form of a letter to Hadrian's adoptive grandson and eventual successor “Mark". The emperor meditates on military triumphs, love of poetry and music, philosophy, and his passion for his lover Antinous. |
| 1951 | Parents' Day | Paul Goodman | US | The book's narrator, an unnamed teacher, grapples with his homosexuality and explores a series of sexual attractions and relationships that culminates in his being fired by the school. Written as autobiographical fiction based on the author's experiences teaching. |
| 1951 | Il conformist | Alberto Moravia | Italy | [The Conformist] A tragedy, details the life and desire for normality of Marcello Clerici, a government official during Italy's fascist period. |
| 1951 | Leopard in the Grass | Desmond Stirling Stewart | UK | John Stirling, a young British archaeologist, arrives in Cyropolis with the intention of working for the local government on archaeological excavations. There he falls into a sexual relationship with Sophie Abbas, a Jewish divorcee, often thinking of the relationships he had with other boys during his school days. One day he befriends Q, a British gay artist, and Nimr, a Bedouin whom Q took in as a child. |
| 1952 | Hemlock and After | Angus Wilson | UK | The novel offers a candid portrayal of gay life in post-World War II England. |
| 1952 | Fabrizio Lupo | Carlo Coccioli [es] | Italy | The Italian painter Fabrizio is going to exhibit in Paris and meets Laurent, a French sculptor, they both fall in love, but stumble upon the rejection of society, Fabrizio's deep Catholicism, and the personalities of the two. |
| 1952 | Pena de muerte | Enrique Lafourcade | Chile | [Death Penalty] |
| 1953 | Kinjiki | Yukio Mishima | Japan | [Forbidden Colors] The name kinjiki is a euphemism for same-sex love. It describes a marriage of a Gay man to a young woman. |
| 1953 | The Charioteer | "Mary Renault" (Eileen Mary Challans) | UK | Due to its positive portrayal of homosexuality, it was not able to be published in the US until 1959. Renault would continue to explore homosexual themes in her later novels - beginning with the 1956 The Last of the Wine - but using an Ancient Greek setting to evade censorship. |
| 1953 | A szív a száműzetésben | "Rodney Garland" (Adam de Hegedus) | Hungary | [The Heart in Exile] A psychiatrist, Tony Page, investigates the mysterious suicide of another man, Julian Lecrec, who years before had been his lover. |
| 1953* | Ernesto | Umberto Saba | Italy | [Ernest] Details the moments when Ernesto -a 16-year-old apprentice clerk- discover of his homosexuality when he meets a stable boy -a 28-year-old laborer identified as “the man”- and his intense sexual relationship. And a year later, his attraction to Emilio -15 years-old and nicknamed "Ilio"- a talented violin student. Written in 1953, was published posthumously in 1975. |
| 1953* | Queer | William Seward Burroughs II | US | A short novel written between 1951 and 1953, published in 1985. It is partially a sequel to his earlier novel, Junkie. It was doubtful whether much of the content could be published in the US at that time since the heavy homosexual content and theme could be held as obscene. Despite his frequent and uncompromising writings on homosexuality, Burroughs has not been viewed as a gay author by many readers. |
| 1953 | Cara e' santo | Rafael Díaz Ycaza | Ecuador | [Saint Face] In this short story, a man appears dead floating in a river, it is Julio Barbosa, Samborondón's political lieutenant, who unsuccessfully tried to seduce the protagonist. |
| 1953 | La hojarasca | Gabriel García Márquez | Colombia | [Leaf Storm] Debut novel by García Márquez. In the play, the boy's character shows a homoerotic desire towards his friend Abraham, with whom he spends much of his free time. |
| 1953 | The World Well Lost | "Theodore Sturgeon" (Edward Hamilton Waldo) | US | Its sensitive treatment of homosexuality was unusual for science fiction published at that time, and it is now regarded as a milestone in science fiction's portrayal of homosexuality. |
| 1953 | Trans-Atlantyk | Witold Gombrowicz | France | [Transatlantic] The semi-autobiographical plot of the novel closely tracks Gombrowicz's own experience in the years during and just after the outbreak of World War II. It was published in Paris in 1953, and four years later in Poland. The novel is set in late August and early September 1939. Witold, a Polish writer, embarks on an ocean voyage only for war to break out while he visits Argentina. Finding himself penniless and stranded after the Nazis take over his country, he is taken in by the local community of Polish emigrants. The narrator contrasts the patriotic cult of the "Homeland" (represented by old Tomasz) with the fascination with the "Filiation" (synczyzna) (represented by the young upper-class soldier, Ignacy, Tomasz's son) in opposition to the dedication to the own desires and passions (represented by the eccentric millionaire Gonzalo Andes, an Argentine homosexual to whom the beautiful Ignacy becomes the object of his passion). |
| 1954 | Der Tod in Rom | Wolfgang Koeppen | Germany | [Death in Rome] A parody of Death in Venice where the protagonist does not die. |
| 1954 | A zaklatott éjfél | "Rodney Garland" (Adam de Hegedus) | Hungary | [The Troubled Midnight]. |
| 1954* | Tirésias | “Théophile” (Marcel Jouhandeau) | France | [Tiresias] Tells the myth of Tiresias: Man and woman, blind and soothsayer; this is the ambiguous and complex figure that the writer uses as a reference to recount his secret dates with four men: Richard, Philippe, Pierre and a young man he calls the Dwarf, who offer him their bodies for money. This narrative, with a high autobiographical content, conveys the experience of homosexuality as lived by its author: mortifying, obscene, liberating and, above all, deeply aesthetic. This short novel was written in 1954, but was not published until 1977 under a pseudonym, and for the first time under the author's name in 1988. |
| 1955 | Erebo | Pablo Gumiel | Bolivia | [Erebus] The novel begins with a reunion between Jacob and his lover in a lonely station, and in a hotel room, Jacob reads a letter with his lover in which he recounts his life and how much he has suffered due to social rejection of his sexual orientation, from the discrimination he was subjected to as a child to the tragic death of his first love. |
| 1955 | Ragazzi di vita | Pier Paolo Pasolini | Italy | [Boys of Life; or, The Hustlers] The novel tells the story of Riccetto, a street urchin to whom over the next few years, goes from robbery to scam to prostituting himself and back again while drifting around. During this time, many of his companions are killed or die off and there is constant immorality at hand. |
| 1955 | La confessione | Mario Soldati | Italy | [The Confession] Coming of age story of a young man, Clemente, a sensitive teenager, feeling the first signs of manhood, a little murky, a little too "aware of himself" compared to his companions. The Jesuits educate him -and Clement himself wants to think that one day he will become a Jesuit. The novel captures the confusion and urges of youth and the hypocritical taboos which society places on the behavior of young people. |
| 1955 | Ragazzo di Trastevere | Giuseppe Patroni Griffi | Italy | [The Boy of Trastevere] Tell about a young subproletarian who is as handsome as he, Othello, who prostitutes himself in all "innocence", despite being married, also starting real relationships with rich homosexuals. |
| 1955 | Tagebuch einer männlichen Braut | Walter Homann | Germany | [Diary of a Male Bride] From the teased schoolboy ("Puppe") to the celebrated female impersonator, from the "Baroness F." to "Countess H." leads the path of "blonde Dori", who finally puts an end to his life for fear of being discovered. The diary reflects the personal experiences of the author, but also deals with the fate of the Comtesse Dina Alma de Paradeda. |
| 1955 | The Talented Mr. Ripley | Patricia Highsmith | US | Tom Ripley, a con artist, is paid by a shipbuilding magnate to go to Italy to convince his son Dickie Greenleaf to return to New York and join the family business. Ripley befriends the younger Greenleaf and falls in love with the rich young man's indulgent, carefree lifestyle; he also becomes obsessed with Dickie himself. |
| 1955 | Ambassador of Loss | "Michael Scarrott" (Arthur Stanley Theodore Fisher) | UK | The novel describes the life in a Dorset public school in the early part of the 20th century, and the relationship between two young students. |
| 1955 | Behind the Mirror | Robin Maugham | UK | David Brent is a screenwriter for a London-based film company who travels to Tanganyika in search of former diplomat Norman Hartleigh. Upon arriving in the small village of Aruna, he discovers that Hartleigh is ostracized by the other residents for what they perceive as an inappropriate relationship with the young man, Bill Wayne, who lives with him. |
| 1956 | Giovanni's Room | James Baldwin | US | Though controversial, Giovanni's Room was acclaimed by the critics of its time and listed, in the late 90s, as the second best queer novel of all times by The Publishing Triangle. It follows the story of an American expat in 1950s Paris and his love affair with Giovanni, an Italian immigrant. Tragic, realistic and lyrical, one of Baldwin's most acclaimed novels. |
| 1956 | The Last of the Wine | "Mary Renault" (Eileen Mary Challans) | South Africa | Set in Athens at the close of the Golden Age and the end of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, and includes Socrates as a character. The first of several historical novels that Renault would write which dealt with homosexuality in an Ancient Greek setting. |
| 1956 | Thin Ice | Compton Mackenzie | UK | It tells the career of a homosexual politician seen through the eyes of his lifelong, heterosexual friend. |
| 1956 | Chocolates for Breakfast | Pamela Moore | US | The novel gained notoriety from readers and critics for its frank depiction of teenage sexuality, and its discussion of the taboo topics of homosexuality and gender roles. |
| 1956 | Grande Sertão: Veredas | João Guimarães Rosa | Brazil | [The Devil to Pay in the Backlands] It narrates in first person the life of adventures of jagunço Riobaldo. He is joined by Diadorim, a boy for whom he begins to feel a strong attraction to the point that "I coveted to eat and drink what he left, I coveted to put my hand where he put it”. |
| 1957 | Siranger | Renato Pellegrini [es] | Argentina | It tells the story of a 17-year-old boy who fails every time he has a naked woman on his hands, and who feels tempted to make friends with men who are visibly single and misogynistic. It is an autobiographical story about the persecutions and discriminations that the author suffered in his adolescence, as a homosexual and an internal migrant. |
| 1957* | El cuerpo de Giulia-No | Jorge Eduardo Eielson | Peru | [Giulia-No's Body] Written between 1955 and 1957, published in 1971, it has autobiographical elements of life, and the particular one that he maintains with two characters: Giulia, his idyllic lover, and Giuliano, a young man who initiates Eduardo sexually. Years later, the protagonist will become a vulgar and obese businessman obsessed with his business. |
| 1957 | Aubade | Kenneth Martin | US | Paul Anderson has taken a job at a tobacconist's shop for the summer before beginning university. One day, the young man named Gary/John Knight enters and thought about what it might be like to be friends with him. Those overwhelming feelings of wanting to spend time with him initially go unclassified, but when they do start spending time together it begins to be clear there is mutual feeling and what those feelings mean. |
| 1957 | L'isola di Arturo | Elsa Morante | Italy | [Arturo's Island] Arturo Gerace was born on the island of Procida and spent his entire childhood and adolescence there, the island encloses its entire world. Many of the homosexual interpretations attributed to this novel, characterized by its notes on youth sexuality, have a great connection with the friendship that the author maintained with the filmmaker Luchino Visconti. |
| 1957* | El ahogado | "Tristán Solarte" (Guillermo Sánchez Borbón) | Panama | [The Drowned] The narration of this novel is carried out in the third person through one of its protagonists, Doctor Martínez, a doctor from Bocas del Toro where this story takes place. In this novel, each of his characters is progressively introduced as Doctor Martínez describes the interviews he conducts to clarify the death of Rafael, a 17-year-old poet. Written between 1953 and 1954, it was published until 1957. |
| 1957 | Behind These Walls | "Christopher Teale" (Frank Earl Fleck) | US | It tells the story of the friendship between "Tex", a multi-offender and adult prisoner, and "Red", a handsome and innocent young man sentenced to life imprisonment for killing his girlfriend. From the day of his arrival, the boy attracts the interest of all the wolves that populate the prison, whose sexual attacks he will only be able to avoid thanks to the protection and teachings of the adult, who feels disturbingly and silently attracted to him. The sole novel by Frank Earl Fleck (1904-1970), who was born in Pittsburgh and spent most of his adult life in and out of prisons for counterfeiting, armed robbery, and other crimes. |
| 1957* | Ek Sadak Sattavan Galiyan | Kamleshwar Prasad Saxena | India | [The Street with Fifty-Seven Lanes] Originally titled Badnam Basti (Infamous Neighbourhood), was serialized in the Hindi journal Hans in 1956 and published as novel in 1957. Sarnam Singh, a truck driver and a dacoit, meets a Brahmin boy Shivraj and the two become physically and emotionally intimate. At the same time, he is also involved with the nautanki dancer Bansari, whom he saved from being raped by another bandit. The theme of homosexual interest between the two male characters caused Kamaleshwar's novel to attract controversy; and in the film adaptation in 1971, the director Prem Kapoor had to excise scenes from the novel and make their relationship only suggestive in order to receive clearance by the film censorship board. |
| 1958 | The Bell | Iris Murdoch | UK | |
| 1958 | The King Must Die | "Mary Renault" (Eileen Mary Challans) | South Africa | Is bildungsroman and historical novel that traces the early life and adventures of Theseus, a hero in Greek mythology. |
| 1958 | A Glass of Blessings | Barbara Pym | UK | It deals with the growing estrangement of a well-to-do married couple and the means by which harmony is restored. |
| 1958 | A Room in Chelsea Square | Anonymous (Michael Nelson) | UK | It is about a wealthy gentleman who lures an attractive younger man to London with the promise of an upper crust lifestyle. Is a "camp" novel about "bitchy queens in 1950s London", the text is semi-autobiographical. |
| 1958 | Gli occhiali d'oro | Giorgio Bassani | Italy | [The Golden Glasses] A young Jewish student of the faculty of literature tells the story of Fadigati, an established doctor in Ferrara, known both for his ability, his refinement and his culture, both for his presumed and latent homosexuality, which costs him marginalization from his high social class. |
| 1958 | The Gaudy Image | "William Talsman" (James M. Smith) | US | Describes the life among the community in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Thomas Schwartz (aka Titania, Queen of the Fairies) wanders about in search of the Gaudy Image -that most masculine man, a dream lover who knows what he wants. |
| 1958 | Tage mit Antonio | "Wolfgang Cordan [de]" (Heinrich Wolfgang Horn) | Germany | [Days with Antonio]. |
| 1958* | Costa Brava | "Victor Servatius" (Frits Bernard) | Netherlands | With a didactic vocation, aimed at making the general public understand the nature of pedophilia, the work narrates in the first person the friendly relationship between the director of a Venezuelan film company and a 12-year-old boy who took refuge in Spain during the Civil War. It was published until 1960. |
| 1958* | Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort | Roger Martin du Gard | France | The author presents his reflections in the form of memoirs written by Bertrand de Maumort, an aristocrat, soldier, and intellectual. Through his portrayal of Maumort and a fascinating array of secondary characters, dissects mankind in general, and calls into question whether true civilization, much less human progress, exists at all. From 1941 until his death, Du Gard worked on his unfinished novel, after acquiring the manuscript it was published in 1983 by André Daspre. |
| 1958 | The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot | Angus Wilson | UK | Depicts the fate of Meg Eliot, a happy and active woman, the wife of a lawyer, who finds herself a widow in reduced circumstances after the shocking murder of her husband Bill abroad. Her attempts to rebuild her life are contrasted with the self-isolation of her brother, David Parker, who lives with her dying partner Gordon Paget in a commercial nursery in Sussex. |
| 1959 | La narración de la historia | Carlos Correas [es] | Argentina | [The Telling of the Story] Correas was the first who dared to reflect the homosexual subculture in Argentina, a condition for which he paid dearly. He recounted a street fling and an explicit sexual relationship between two boys, belonging to different social classes: a petty-bourgeois student and a street boy. |
| 1959 | L'Anonimo lombardo | Alberto Arbasino | Italy | [The Anonymous Lombard] At a "première" of La Scala, a young neoclassical and romantic student meets love by surprise. And he immediately decides to live it and write it in the form of a novel. But behind the revered shadows of the engineer Gadda and the Abbot Parini lurk many narrative temptations. |
| 1959 | A Way of Love | James Courage | New Zealand | Set in the London gay community, its first-person narrative (an unusual device for Courage) describes the course of a homosexual relationship between middle-aged architect Bruce Quantock and young student Philip Dill. Is identified as New Zealand's first gay novel. |
| 1959 | L'Exilé de Capri | Roger Peyrefitte | France | [The Exile of Capri] The novel was based on the lives of Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen and Nino Cesarini, and their stay on the island of Capri, as well as in their circle of homosexual friends who received at Villa Lysis. |
| 1959 | Advise and Consent | Allen Drury | US | The novel reflects the era of McCarthyism, where political machinations were plotted to achieve favorable results for a party, using blackmail and incriminating for being communists or homosexuals. |
| 1959 | Para subir al cielo | Enrique Lafourcade | Chile | [To Go Up to Heaven] Lucanor is a sailor who is abandoned in Valparaíso, there he meets Angela, who is a member of the aristocratic Eguirreizaga family, made up of his mother Doña Isidora, and his brothers: Antinous and Pedro. Antinous is a non-conformist, a dilettante who has an ambiguous friendship with the priest Don Ezequiel. |
| 1959 | Crônica da casa assassinada | Lúcio Cardoso | Brazil | [Chronicle of the Murdered House] The story focuses on the decay of the Meneses family and depicts themes such as extramarital affairs, forbidden love, incestuous relationships, kinship, homosexuality, and violent acts. The story is told through letters, diary pages, and memories. |
| 1959 | The Feathers of Death | Simon Raven | UK | Scandal rocks a British army regiment in East Africa after Alastair Lynch, an officer, shoots drummer Malcolm Harley in the back for desertion. The resulting inquiry leads to a trial that reveals the true relationship between the two men and raises issues of class, motivation, and sexuality. |
| 1959 | At Fever Pitch | David Caute | UK | Set in a British colony on the edge of independence, the central character is Lieut. Michael Glyn, an English lad of good family and education who has no sense of vocation for his job and is emotional to the point of hysteria. |
| 1959* | Un amor fora ciutat | Manuel de Pedrolo Sanchez i Molina | Spain | [A Love Outside the Walls] A woman discovers, through the denunciation of a scorned ex-lover, that her husband is homosexual. She is hurt by his infidelity, but the fact that he is homosexual disgusts her. He tries to justify his condition and to do so he tells her about his life, from his childhood, from his first experiences. Written in 1959, no publisher dared to publish it until 1970. But even then it did not pass the censorship filter, as the book was seized and its author tried for public scandal, as it dealt with homosexuality without falling into the homophobia in force at the time. |
| 1960 | We Think the World of You | Joe Randolph Ackerley | UK | In post-war London an aimless young married bisexual man, Johnny, is sent to prison. He is forced to entrust his beloved Alsatian dog, Evie, to the reluctant care of his down-trodden parents and older, middle-class ex-lover and best friend, Frank. A set of tragi-comic relationships evolve with the dog coming to represent the hold they have over each other. |
| 1960 | ¡Justicia, Señor Gobernador! | Hugo Lindo | El Salvador | [Justice, Mr. Governor!] Written in the first person and structured in a double twisted plot line. The jurist Amenábar is declared incompetent of his position and taken to the asylum for a ruling in the opinion of his colleagues that was wrong. While a murderer with feminine features is brought to trial. It is one of the first novels that deals with the subject of transvestism in El Salvador. |
| 1960 | Il Gesuita Perfetto | Furio Monicelli | Italy | [The Perfect Jesuit] Seeking refuge from the world in the strict discipline and religious certainty of training for the priesthood, Andrea, a Jesuit novice, is a deeply troubled young man. He is wracked by both intellectual doubts and the urgings of his heart: the firstare personified by the anti-authoritarian Brother Zanna, a man full of difficult questions and rebellious thoughts; the second by the angelic Brother Lodovici -boyish, otherworldly and enviably holy. |
| 1960 | Saman lagt spott og speki | Elías Mar | Iceland | [A Combination of Mockery and Wisdom] Is considered the first Icelandic literary work with an openly homosexual theme. |
| 1960 | La tregua | Mario Benedetti | Uruguay | [The Truce] Jaime Santomé, the protagonist's most beloved son, reveals that he is homosexual and thus breaks the expectations that his family had of him. The representation of homosexuality is quite negative in the novel and is seen as a weakness on the part of the protagonist and as a cause of the decline of families. |
| 1960 | Bramy raju | Jerzy Andrzejewski | Poland | [The Gates of Paradise] Tells the story of the Children's Crusade of 1212 trying to reach the Holy Land. Through the children's confessions, true and false, the beginning of the path is described, the reasons that pushed the children and young people to travel a long path. Sad stories intertwine, branch and intertwine again. One of them, by Alexei Melissen, is about a love triangle between Jacques de Cloyes and Count Louis de Blois. |
| 1960 | The Hero Continues | Donald Windham | US | Written as a roman à clef, is about and dedicated to his dear friend Tennessee Williams, this book meanders through the seasons of a playwright's career as he climbs New York's social ladder and loses himself along the way. |
| 1960 | Pornografia | Witold Gombrowicz | Poland | [Pornography] Witold, the protagonist, who lives in wartime Poland, meets the mysterious Fryderyk during one of his gatherings with friends, whose eccentric behaviour combined with considerable refinement and familiarity with the art world seems so intriguing that he decides to curtail his relationship with the man. The extent of their relationship is not explicitly stated, and some critics admit the hypothesis of a homosexual relationship between them. |
| 1961 | Los inocentes (libro) [es] | Oswaldo Reynoso [es] | Peru | [The Innocents, or Lima on Rock] Series of urban realism stories focused on Lima and its adolescent and youthful characters grouped in gangs. The book caused a scandal for its stark description of youth on the street, who did not veil their sexuality, including homosexual characters. |
| 1961 | The Soft Machine | William Seward Burroughs II | US | |
| 1961 | El Sexto | José María Arguedas | Peru | The novel is based on the author's prison experience in the El Sexto prison under the dictatorship of Óscar R. Benavides. |
| 1961 | The Leather Boys | Eliot George (Gillian Freeman) | UK | Tells the story of a gay relationship between two young working-class men, Reggie and Pete, one married and the other a biker. The novel is an example of British kitchen sink realism. The author does not treat homosexuality as a personal or social problem but takes for granted that the love between these two inarticulate young men could exist between two human beings at any time at any place. |
| 1961 | The Primal Urge | Brian Wilson Aldiss | UK | A satire on sexual reserve, it explores the effects on society of a forehead-mounted "Emotion Register" that glows when the wearer experiences sexual attraction. |
| 1961 | The Pilgrimage | John Broderick | Ireland | Published in the United States as “The Chameleons”. Tells the story of Julia Glynn, the very model of a 'prim and well-conducted' bourgeois Catholic wife, and her crippled husband Michael, the richest man in town. In his illness he is dutifully tended to by the household manservant Stephen Lydon and by his handsome young nephew Doctor Jim. The suicide of local boy Tommy Baggot, a well-known figure within Dublin's secretive homosexual community, appears to be connected to Stephen and Michael. |
| 1961 | Conventional Weapons | Jocelyn Brooke | UK | The novel introduces a stratum of English middle-class society before and after World War II as the divergent paths of the two Tuffnell-Greene brothers unfold. Geoffrey joins the army, marries and sets up in business, but eventually ends up an exile in Malta; Nigel drifts into a seedy London life of drinking, parties and half-hearted gay liaisons, and finds some fame as an artist and novelist. As in most of his previous works, elements of his experiences and his love of military life appear, to the point that much of his fiction can be considered at least partly autobiographical. |
| 1962 | Another Country | James Baldwin | US | The novel is primarily set in Greenwich Village and Harlem, New York City, in the late 1950s. It portrayed many themes that were taboo at the time of its release, including bisexuality, interracial couples and extramarital affairs. |
| 1962 | Bericht über Bruno | Joseph Breitbach | Germany | [Report on Bruno] The story is told from the perspective of the Minister of the Interior of a small monarchy, who has just been overthrown by the machinations of his grandson Bruno Collignon. He is now giving an account of his life and his relationship with his grandson. |
| 1962 | The Wanting Seed | Anthony Burgess | UK | The dystopian novel addresses many societal issues, the main theme of which is overpopulation and its relation to culture. A significant portion of the book is a condemnation of war. There is also active discrimination against heterosexuals, homosexuality being encouraged as a measure against overpopulation, as well as self-sterilization is recommended. Religion, government, and history are also addressed. |
| 1962 | Los impuros | Eugenia Viteri | Ecuador | [The Uncleans] One of the short stories included in the collection entitled Doce cuentos. It narrates the wake of a homosexual man after his suicide. This is attended by his parents, who ask themselves ashamed about the mistakes they could have made to have such a child, and his lover, who turns out to be the only one who loved the deceased just as he was. |
| 1962 | Down There on a Visit | Christopher Isherwood | UK | In the novel Isherwood derives meaning and emotion from those around him. The novel's four sections describe four people who influenced him. Mr Lancaster introduces the young Christopher to the danger of asceticism. Ambrose (based on Francis Turville-Petre) inadvertently warns Christopher of isolationism. Waldemar embodies the surreality of heterosexual marriage. Finally, Isherwood encounters a famous male prostitute named Paul (based on Denham Fouts). The two men resolve to explore a regimented spiritual lifestyle centered on self-denial and meditation. Other characters are based on the botanist couple Rupert Barneby and Dwight Ripley, the actor Richard Kitchin, the painter Tony Bower, the academic Gerald Heard and the socialite Jean Connolly. |
| 1962 | The Dream | "Hal Porter" (Harold Edward Porter) | Australia | In this short story, the author fictionalizes a romance with a student, an indiscretion that went unpunished. |
| 1963 | City of Night | John Rechy | US | Follows a hustler in his travels across America. Includes discussion of the Cooper Do-nuts Riot, an early event in the gay liberation movement, seen as a precursor to the Stonewall riots. |
| 1963 | Making Do | Paul Goodman | US | |
| 1963 | Por qué Jesús no vuelve | Benjamín Carrión | Ecuador | [Why Doesn't Jesus Come Back?] The novel follows the story of Juan Antonio Molina, a boy from Loja's upper class who lives amid the religiosity of his hometown, which he leaves when he travels to Quito to do his university studies and there he meets Enrique Santa Cruz, considered the most cultured and elegant man in the city. |
| 1963 | Honey for the Bears | Anthony Burgess | UK | An English antique dealer, Paul Hussey, and his errant wife, Belinda – on a sea voyage to Leningrad in Soviet Russia, they become embroiled with black marketeers, secret policemen and political dissidents. When the protagonist discovers his wife's illicit affair with another woman, his own submerged sexual feelings come breaking through the surface. |
| 1964 | Last Exit to Brooklyn | Hubert Selby Jr. | US | The novel takes a harsh, uncompromising look at lower class Brooklyn in the 1950s written in a brusque, everyman style of prose. It is divided into six stories that connect to each other. |
| 1964 | A Single Man | Christopher Isherwood | US | Set in Southern California during 1962, it depicts one day in the life of George, a middle-aged Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles university, who is grieving the recent death of his longtime partner. time Jim. |
| 1964 | L'apprenti sorcier | François Augiéras | France | [The Sorcerer's Apprentice] |
| 1964 | 41 o el muchacho que soñaba en fantasmas | "Paolo Po" (Manuel Aguilar de la Torre [es]) | Mexico | [41 or The Boy Who Dreamed of Ghosts] It is the first Mexican literary work whose central theme is homosexual love. |
| 1964 | Las picardías de Goyo Momo | "Benjamín Amérika" (Alberto Quiroz Hernández) | Mexico | [Goyo Momo's Mischief] The novel humorously portrays the adventures of a homosexual, Goyo Momo, who is harassed by men and women, through a description of his life. |
| 1964 | El diario de José Toledo | Miguel Barbachano Ponce | Mexico | [The Diary of José Toledo] It tells the story of a boy –José Toledo, a twenty-year-old civil servant– who suffers from the absence and disinterest of his lover Wenceslao, another unemployed young man with a tendency to sadism, who sometimes cross-dresses or prostitutes himself. Unable to see reality, José deceives himself by weaving an unreal love story, on which he bets everything. |
| 1964 | Asfalto | Renato Pellegrini [es] | Argentina | [Asphalt] It tells the story of Eduardo Ales, a young man from Córdoba -in the interior of Argentina-, who, when he was released from the secondary school where he was in his last year, decides to leave his family and move to Buenos Aires. There he will come into contact with an underworld that he had hardly heard of until then and he will meet a series of characters that will challenge many of his beliefs, mainly those related to love and sexuality. |
| 1964 | Nova Express | William Seward Burroughs II | US | Describes the clashes between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police. The novel is a social commentary on human and machine control of life. The police are focused on “first-order addictions of junkies, homosexuals, dissidents, and criminals; if these criminals vanish, the police must create more in order to justify their own survival”. |
| 1964 | El Monstruo Sagrado | Edgardo de Habich y Palacio | Peru | [The Sacred Monster] The novel, based on true events, narrates the assassination of ambassador Jorge MacLean y Estenós by his secretary and lover Juan Antonio Perazo in 1951. |
| 1964 | The Dark Light Years | Brian Wilson Aldiss | UK | So after some years of space exploration and around 300 Earth-type planets, they land on the next planet and find the Utods, nicknamed "rhino men" due to their bulk and careless behavior, are a sophisticated and peaceful extraterrestrial race that has developed advanced technology and philosophy. These gentle aliens whose physical and mental health requires wallowing in mud and filth, and who – though they achieved interstellar space flight – are not even recognised as intelligent by the humans. The text is a sociopolitical satire about humankind's rationalization for violence through their inability to understand another culture and thus perceiving it as lesser. |
| 1964 | The Soft Spot: Four Short Stories | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | With these short stories, the writer explores his own life and the gay world in which he lives. The stories included are: Gaylord Merriewether III (In which the narrator likes to sleep with a very good-looking sailor), Smile! (A portrait about the life of a photographer), The Spanish Boys, and, The Rug Salesman. |
| 1965 | Midnight Cowboy | James Leo Herlihy | US | Chronicles the naïve Texan Joe Buck's odyssey from Texas to New York City, where he plans on realizing his dream of becoming a male prostitute servicing rich women. In 1969, the novel was made into the movie but only depicted the second half of the book, with events from the first half condensed or briefly seen as flashbacks. Directed by John Schlesinger and written by Waldo Salt, the film was commercially and critically successful. At the 42nd Academy Awards, the film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director and Adapted Screenplay. |
| 1965 | No End to the Way | "Neville Jackson" (Gerald Marcus Glaskin) | Australia | Set in Perth, Western Australia, presents the loving and tragic relationship between Ray, the narrator, and Cor, the young Dutchman he meets in a bar. At first the attraction between them is purely physical but as their knowledge of each other grows their relationship develops into a permanent and caring de facto 'marriage' - despite the efforts of Cor's ex-lover to destroy it. Was the first Australian gay novel. |
| 1965 | Das Waisenhaus | Hubert Fichte | Germany | [The Orphanage] A Jewish boy, Detlev, arrives at a Catholic orphanage in Scheyern and awaits the return of his mother, from whom he separated due to the relocation of children during the war. The work has autobiographical elements. |
| 1965 | Al vencedor | "Marta Lynch" (Marta Lía Frigerio) | Argentina | [To the Victor] Describes the adventures of two young conscripts, Benjamín (narrator) and Tulio, after completing their mandatory military service. Lynch displays a masculine universe where the paradigmatically homosocial space of the army encourages ties that can lead to (homo)sexual contact. |
| 1965 | Gioco d'infanzia | Giovanni Comisso | Italy | [Childhood Game] Is the story of Alberto, a world-weary young man, who decides to undertake an oriental journey in search of sensations, delights and events in Sri Lanka and China. A very different version was published, devoid of more blatantly homosexual accents than the one originally written, which was recovered and recently published by Nico Naldini. |
| 1965 | Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel | Marie-Claire Blais | Canada | [A Season in the Life of Emmanuel] The novel deals with themes of the life and death of Emmanuel's siblings, as well as themes such as that of homosexuality (of Jean le Maigre), incest, and the corrupt life of the monastery. Although conservative values are dominant in this novel, certain progressive ideas such as the individual quest for happiness and independence of spirit point through this Great Darkness. Was adapted for film by director Claude Weisz in 1972. |
| 1965 | The Final Programme | Michael Moorcock | UK | Jerry Cornelius is a scientist, a rock star, and an assassin. He is the hippest adventurer of them all: tripping through a pop art nightmare in which kidnappings, murder, sex and drugs are a daily occurrence. Along with his savvy and ruthless partner-in-chaos, Miss Brunner, Cornelius is on a mission to control a revolutionary code for creating the ultimate human being, a modern messiah— the final programme. |
| 1965 | The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea | Randolph Stow | Australia | The novel follows the story of a boy, Rob Coram, and his cousin Rick. |
| 1965 | Toda la luz del mediodía [es] | Mauricio Wacquez | Chile | [All the midday light] It relates the tension between the narrator and his relationships with his wife and her son, hinting at a homosexual relationship with the latter. |
| 1965 | A Sliver of Flesh: Four New Short Stories of the Homosexual Life | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | |
| 1965 | Carnal Matters: Four Short Stories | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | The stories included are: Everybody Loves Charlie (This one concerns a small group of men living in San Francisco), The Battle Between the Poets and the Painters (A story of a poetry club that kind of goes nowhere), Irving (Set in Hawaii, the story concerns gay sailors on shore leave), and, Pictures You’d Be Proud to Show Your Mother (The story is about a man who works in computers. This self-centered man meets a physique photographer and agrees to a posing session for a magazine with another guy). |
| 1965 | Two People | Donald Windham | US | Published when the word "gay" in its sexual implications was little used or even recognized by heterosexuals. Tells about a love affair in Rome between a middle-aged stockbroker American, Forrest, whose wife has left him and a 17-year-old Italian boy, Marcello. The word "people" in the title is both singular and plural, dealing with two cultures as well as with two individuals. Two People can be considered the original Call Me By Your Name but better, because it was written by a gay man and so gives life to the internal struggles of the character in ways a book written by a straight man cannot. |
| 1966 | Paradiso | José Lezama Lima | Cuba | [Paradise] Set during the Cuban Revolution, the novel recounts José Cemí's struggles with a mysterious childhood illness, the death of his father, and the exploration of his homosexuality and literary sensibilities. |
| 1966 | El lugar sin límites | José Donoso | Chile | [The Place Without Limits] The story centers on “La Manuela”, a homosexual transvestite who owns half of the brothel in a small town known as Estación El Olivo, located near the city of Talca, and on her daughter, the other owner of the brothel, known as “La Japonesita”. |
| 1966 | O Físico Prodigioso | Jorge de Sena | Portugal | [The Prodigious Physician] A handsome young doctor from the Middle Ages possessed extraordinary powers granted by the devil, to whom he owes sexual favors, but which is his source of obtaining magical and sexual powers. |
| 1966 | Beautiful Losers | Leonard Cohen | Canada | Set in the Canadian province of Quebec, the story of 17th-century Mohawk saint Catherine Tekakwitha is interwoven with a love triangle between an unnamed anglophone Canadian folklorist; his Native wife, Edith, who has committed suicide; and his best friend, the mystical F, a Member of Parliament and a leader in the Quebec separatist movement. |
| 1966 | A Queer Kind of Death | George Baxt | US | The novel introduced the detective Pharaoh Love who was the first in the genre to be both black and openly gay. |
| 1966 | Child of the Sun | Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner | US | Tells the story of the youth Varius Avitus Bassianus, destined to become Emperor of the Roman empire. Varius spurned women. His erotic longings searched out a very different kind of love. |
| 1966 | The Man from C.A.M.P. | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | The first of a series of ten gay pulp fiction novels who offers the first positive portrayal of a gay secret agent in fiction, Jackie Holmes. Lou Upton pairs Jackie with the U.S. Treasury Department investigator Ted Summers to foil a Los Angeles gang of gays headed by the lesbian Big Daddy. |
| 1966 | Color Him Gay | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | Jackie fights B.U.T.C.H. in Los Angeles and San Francisco, when it seeks to blackmail the closeted British rock superstar Dingo Stark. |
| 1966 | The Watercress File | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | After Jackie and Treasury Agent Rex Winter's initial effort to uncover the international criminal organization Butterfly fails, Jackie is summoned by his Aunt Lily to Washington, D.C., where he teams up with CIA agent Craig Mathews, his aunts and a male cousin to stop an assassination plot. |
| 1966 | The Son Goes Down | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | Working with Irish agent Jerry Shannon to stop a ring kidnapping blond teenage American boys who are fans of the dead actor Dean James, Jackie heads to Tijuana and Lisbon, accompanied by the adopted son of an old friend, a male-to-female transsexual. |
| 1966 | Gothic Gaye | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | After Jackie falls in love with Baron Max von der Gout and leaves C.A.M.P. in order to live with him in the supposedly haunted Castle Gaye, B.U.T.C.H. makes various attempts on his life. |
| 1966 | Handsome is… | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | This is Goodman's only full-length book. The story concerns a young woman who sets out to find what her boyfriend Tony has been up to. She travels to New York and meets all sorts of shady characters from the gay underworld. As usual in Goodman's work there are elements of the men thinking they're straight, playing gay for a laugh. And the older men are all out for one thing and will stop at nothing to get it. |
| 1966 | Mercenary Affections: Stories of the Homosexual Life | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | The stories included are: A Murder Story (Some sailors on shore leave get up to some trouble. Concurrently a gay murder across town involving sailors is discovered. These gays don't trust the police and know the killer will likely get off using a gay panic defense), Just Old (A young man has a revealing talk with his grandfather about the older man's gay past), and, The Hoarder (This one involves a young man who gets paid to work around the house and then inside the house. When he later goes missing the police show up to question the man who hired him). |
| 1967 | Lord Dismiss Us | Michael Campbell | UK | The novel is set in a public school in England in the 1960s. It deals with the love affair between two boys, together with the internal politics of the school itself. |
| 1967 | Place d'Armes | Scott Symons | Canada | Contained both autobiographical and metafictional elements; the protagonist Hugh Anderson a wealthy but socially alienated man from Toronto abandoning his comfortable bourgeois life to hole up in a hotel in Montreal, rediscovering himself in sex with male prostitutes in Place d'Armes, and in turn writing his own novel within a novel about Andrew, a character who himself fit the same profile. |
| 1967 | The Power of the Dog | Thomas Savage | US | The story deals with bachelor brothers Phil and George, who live on a ranch in Montana, and the events following George's marriage. Phil looks with disdain at George's new wife, Rose, and her son Pete, after which dramatic events begin to unfold. |
| 1967 | Swing Low, Sweet Harriet | George Baxt | US | The campy detective Pharaoh Love investigates a thirty-three-year-old murder that still casts a pall over the life of a middle-aged television actress. |
| 1967 | Numbers | John Rechy | US | Johnny Rio, a handsome narcissist but no longer a pretty boy, travels to Los Angeles, the site of past sexual conquest and remembered youthful radiance, in a frenzied attempt to recreate his younger self. Johnny has ten precious days to draw the "numbers", the men who will confirm his desirability. |
| 1967 | El apuntamiento [es] | Luis Rivano [es] | Chile | [The Aiming] Vinizio Zaneti, a young orphaned grandson of Italian immigrants, faces poverty, loneliness and premature labor, first working in the fields and later as a prostitute. The novel questions poverty, and the difference between worked poverty and underworld poverty. |
| 1967 | The Einstein Intersection | Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. | US | Far in the extremely far future, village herder & musician Lo Lobey goes on an Orpheus-like quest for his slain lover along the way he meets the very complicated badass Spider, the sweet and nonchalant prince-in-exile Greeneye, the chameleonic object of everyone's desire Dove, and Lobey's terrible nemesis, architect of his quest: the vicious, scheming, mocking, murderous little red-haired psychic child, Kid Death. |
| 1967 | Aye, and Gomorrah | Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. | US | The short story involves a world where astronauts, known as Spacers, are neutered before puberty to avoid the effects of space radiation on gametes. Aside from making them sterile, the neutering also prevents puberty from occurring and results in androgynous adults whose birth-sex is unclear to others. Spacers are fetishized by a subculture of "frelks", those attracted by the Spacers' supposed unattainability and unarousability. |
| 1967 | Holiday Gay | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | During the Christmas season the Swallows, a gang of midgets under the direction of Birdie Wing, engages in a series of jewel heists before Jackie and an unexpected white-bearded gentleman dressed in a lavender suit stops them cold. |
| 1967 | Rally Round the Fag | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | Jackie is called upon to impersonate a female double agent who has become part of a plot to begin World War III. |
| 1967 | The Gay Dogs | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | A vicious gang under the leadership of the dominatrix Anna Lingus dognaps Lady Agatha's Yorkshire Terrier, causing Jackie chivalrously to go to the rescue. |
| 1967 | A Sweet Gentle Boy and Other Stories | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | The stories included are: A Sweet, Gentle Boy (A man and his prostitute), The Trip (A man has a plane ride where he imagines all the crew and passengers wanting to have sex with him), Absolutely Creamy (About a new play is being put on in New York City off-off Broadway), The Catch (A man throws an orgy to thank his friends for their support), The Storyteller (Talks about the mechanics of writing a story during the story), and, Dream Boy (Two old queens share gossip about their live-in beaus). |
| 1967 | The First Time: Five Short Stories | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | |
| 1967 | Blaze of Summer | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | The stories included are: Blaze of Summer (A small-town teacher with a history of being blackmailed and having to run from town to town for being gay starts a relationship with a local farmhand with devastating consequences), Three Immoral Fables, A Casual Affair (A theatre producer uses a boytoy to get investments for his latest play), and, Joe’s Other Husband (A couple argues in bed one night after one of them gets schooled in the world of S&M with a trick). |
| 1967 | Na plaży | "Sydor Rey" (Izydor Reiss) | Poland | [On the beach] |
| 1968 | Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone | James Baldwin | US | A retrospective examination of the life and relationships of a bisexual black man from Harlem. |
| 1968 | Die Palette | Hubert Fichte | Germany | [The Pallet] The novel tells the story of The Pallet, a pub that was located in the Neustadt district of Hamburg and existed until 1964, which was visited by thieves, con men, bohemians, dock workers, prostitutes, lesbians, and gays. |
| 1968 | Street of Stairs | Ronald Tavel | US | It is a pederastic and polyphonic novel that follows the life of Mark, an expatriate in Tangier, Morocco, who falls in love with Hamid, a thief. |
| 1968 | Topsy and Evil | George Baxt | US | Satan Stagg, a young Black detective a trainee of Pharaoh Love, investigates the baffling murder of Guru Raskalnikov, a wealthy tycoon. |
| 1968 | Los señores vencen | Pedro Jorge Vera | Ecuador | [The Lords Win] In this short story, a young homosexual who commits suicide leaves a letter to his father. |
| 1968 | Blow the Man Down | "Don Holliday" (Victor J. Banis) | US | When Atlantic ships start disappearing just before a Summit Cruise, Lou Upton calls on Jackie and U.S. Agent Andy Parks for help; they are sucked into the domed city of Atlantis. |
| 1968 | Happyland and Other Stories | "Alexander Goodman" (George Haimsohn) | US | The stories included are: Ink (A Twilight-Zone style story. Four young men appear naked in a white room with no doors and no walls), Two Immoral Fables (1. The Knight; and, 2. The Princess), and, Happyland (The owner of an amusement park called Happyland is being blackmailed for his homosexual sins). |
| 1968 | Sandel | Angus Stewart | UK | Set in the pseudonymous St Cecilia's College, Oxford, the book revolves around the unorthodox love between a 19-year-old undergraduate, David Rogers, and a 13-year-old chorister, Antony Sandel. The novel appears to have been based on real events, recounted by Stewart in an article under the pseudonym John Davis in the anthology Underdogs (1961), edited for Weidenfeld & Nicolson by Philip Toynbee. |
| 1969 | Printemps au parking | Christiane Rochefort | France | [Spring at the Parking Lot] The runaway anarchist teenager, Christophe, left to himself in Paris for a few days, the time to meet girls, hoodlums and above all an affection for a young journalist, Thomas, who introduces him to politics, to love and to a hitherto unknown pleasure. |
| 1969* | Les Garçons | Henry de Montherlant | France | [The Boys] Tells the story of 16-year-old philosophy student André Sevrais-Alban de Bricoule, who in his last year has a younger one under his control, he has 14-year-old Serge Souplier. A teenage love has been forged between them, but the Abbé de Pradts is also secretly in love with Souplier, and Alban is therefore a rival to be eliminated. The author is based on when he was expelled from the Institution Notre-Dame de Sainte-Croix in Neuilly for a relationship with a younger comrade, Philippe Jean Giquel. The novel was written between four and five decades before its publication. |
| 1969 | Después de todo | José Ceballos Maldonado | Mexico | [After All] Tells the story of Javier Lavalle, a homosexual man -young and brilliant university professor- who accepts himself as such without fear and who takes his choice of life to the last consequences. |
| 1969 | Fire from Heaven | "Mary Renault" (Eileen Mary Challans) | UK | Is about the childhood and youth of Alexander the Great. The novel deals with the relationship between Philip and Queen Olympias and Alexander's changing loyalties to them, his tuition under Aristotle, and his sexuality and relationship with his friend and future General Hephaistion, and Alexander's growing prowess as a soldier during his father's conquest of the Greek states. |
| 1969 | I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip | John Donovan | US | Tells the story of Davy Ross, a lonely boy who becomes close friends with a male classmate at his new school. The friendship later turns sexual, eventually causing Davy to struggle with feelings of guilt. It was one of the first mainstream teen novels to deal with homosexuality. |
| 1969 | Nuevas Lilianas | Eugenia Viteri | Ecuador | [New Lilianas] Tells the story of the marriage of a woman with a man who soon turns out to be an abusive sadist, who married her with the sole intention of hiding his homosexuality. |
| 1969 | Spartan Planet | Arthur Bertram Chandler | UK | A planet colonized by Earthlings long ago, it had become an all-male planet based partially on the militaristic, male-dominated city-state Sparta of ancient Greece. The book hits on an interesting undertone of homosexuality, these inhabitants are raised in a culture where sexuality is expressed by males toward males. |
| 1969 | The Season of the Witch | James Leo Herlihy | US | The story is written in the form of a journal that spans three months in the life of teenage runaway Gloria Glyczwycz, who decides to run away from home with her gay friend John McFadden. The novel explores casual drug use, draft evasion, homosexuality, and incest. Perhaps the last gay novel published before the Stonewall riots. |