Homoerotic poetry

The male-male erotic tradition encompasses poems by major poets such as Pindar, Theognis of Megara, Anacreon, Catullus, Virgil, Martial, Abu Nuwas, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, W. H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg.

The only other Renaissance artist writing in English to do this was the poet Richard Barnfield, who, in The Affectionate Shepherd and Cynthia, wrote homoerotic poetry.

[1] The Uranian poets and prose writers, who sang the praises of the love between men and boys and in doing so often appealed to Ancient Greece, formed a rather cohesive group with a well-expressed philosophy.

During the 19th century the British gay poet Digby Mackworth Dolben was little known; however, in the last decade Lord Alfred Douglas produced a major volume of Dolben's homoerotic poems (1896) published in Paris, written in both English and French translations after the trial of Oscar Wilde for homosexual offences brought about largely by Wilde's love for Douglas.

In Great Britain the pederast Ralph Chubb lived in poverty and produced his own books in limited editions made from illustrated engravings (similar to methods employed by William Blake), which he then erased.

The Canadian gay poet Ian Young produced the first major bibliography with his works The Male Homosexual in Literature (2 editions, the second being expanded).

The Canadian gay poet Edward A. Lacey was run over in the street while drunk in Bangkok; repatriated to Canada, he remained bedridden until his death.

The British poet Thom Gunn lived in the United States and wrote a notable volume inspired by AIDS (which has produced several anthologies).

[citation needed] Italian has Michelangelo, the Renaissance painter and sculptor, who wrote homosexual love sonnets while Sandro Penna and Dario Bellezza are twentieth century poets.

Hebrew gay poetry has been discussed by Norman Roth, Jefim Schirmann and Dan Pagis and dates from the Middle Ages in Spain.

C. M. Naim surveyed gay poetry in an article in Studies in the Urdu ghazal and Prose Fiction (1979) and Ralph Russell has dealt with the subject in various books.