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In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the artist Basil Hallward becomes enthralled by the beauty of Dorian Gray, the young man who is the subject of a portrait he has recently painted.
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In one scene, Philip argues for the rights of people “who cannot shape themselves according to the commonplace pattern of society.” The novel also helped plant the seeds of the gay rights movement of the latter half of the 20th century. The novel, dedicated to those “who believe in the truth and tenderness of man’s love for man, as of man’s love for woman,” tells the story a young farmer named Joseph Aster who marries a wealthy woman before falling in love with his close friend. In 1870, Bayard Taylor published Joseph and His Friend: A Story in Pennsylvania, widely considered to be the first American gay novel. However, Duke Augustus was later criticized for writing characters who “stepped over the bounds of manly affection into unseemly eroticism.” It has been noted as “the earliest known novel that centers on an explicitly male-male love affair.” A Year in Arcadia’s classical setting, along with the Romantic movement’s encouragement of communicative and tender male friendships, prevented this novel from causing a stir among German aristocracy. The novel follows several different couples, including a gay male couple, as they fall in love and begin their lives together. The text, notorious for its sexual explicitness, has been considered by many to be the first gay novel.Ī Year in Arcadia: Kyllenion is a novel by Duke Augustus of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg set in ancient Greece. The teacher makes the convincing argument that it would be an insult to nature to use sexual organs for their intended purpose and refutes biblical denouncements of homosexuality. The work depicts a teacher in ancient Athens who uses philosophy, logic, and ancient texts to convince one of his students to have sex with him. The mythological relationship between Zeus and Ganymede, later depicted by Ovid, was the model for the ancient Greek practice of paiderastia, the socially acknowledged erotic relationship between an adult man and an adolescent boy.Īntonio Rocco’s Alcibiades the Schoolboy, initially published anonymously, is a defense of homosexual sodomy modeled after a traditional Platonic dialogue. Zeus then brings him to Olympus, where he serves as Zeus’s cup-bearer. In The Iliad, Homer describes Ganymede, a Trojan hero frequently referenced in Greek mythology, as “handsomest of mortals, whom the gods/caught up to pour out drink for Zeus and live/amid immortals for his beauty’s sake.” In one version of this myth, Zeus, smitten by Ganymede’s beauty, takes the form of an eagle and abducts the young boy. Behold: Literary Hub’s timeline of writing about the lives of queer men and women. In times when homosexuality was regarded as deviant-and even a crime-authors boldly published works about same-sex love.
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Writer Garth Greenwell called the book, which follows four men (three of them not straight) over three decades of friendship, “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.” While Yanagihara’s realistic and comprehensive depiction of gay lives is certainly a milestone in LGBT literature, it’s important to remember the great gay writing of the past. The Atlantic recently pronounced Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was released in March, the Great Gay Novel.