While "the male condition" is increasingly the focus of critical inquiry, the first images to come to most minds are those associated, ironically enough, with the resoundingly heterosexual men's movement - sweat lodges, primal screams, etc. As these images quickly become cliched, a more progressive and less primitivist movement continues to gather strength, namely one that examines the experiences and writings of homosexual men. In this groundbreaking...

Sinfield tracks stage representations of lesbians and gay men from Oscar Wilde to the present day, examining scores of British and American plays produced and viewed in alternative as well as West End and Broadway theaters. Theater, he argues, was and is an important place for the circulation of images of homosexuality and for the exploration of concepts of gender and sexuality.--From publisher description

Unlike much of the scholarship that has reexamined issues of gender and sexuality in the Restoration and eighteenth century, this book is not concerned with tracing the emergence of a proto-modern "homosexual" identity. In The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, the central question is: Why did so many eighteenth-century writers represent the sodomite at all? What purposes did these representations serve? Charting the emergence of the sodomite as a social...

Oscar Wilde -- Willa Cather -- E. M. Forster -- Gore Vidal -- Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams -- Mary Renault -- James Baldwin -- Christopher Isherwood