9 American Writers who were Homosexuals

Gay writers are unusual people. But after the Second World War, many only went out into the world for the first time with their works. Novelists, screenwriters and other masters of the word, such as Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal wrote literary portraits of American gay life, which challenged established norms and demanded recognition of personalities who had previously been persecuted by society.

His novel "The City and the Column" became a passionate masterpiece, but critics blasted the work to smithereens for its sexual frankness. Vidal dedicated the novel to Jimmy Trimble, his lover and classmate who died in the battle for Iwo Jima, but which the writer could not forget. Once in his youth, Gore Vidal paid for sex, and then he himself was "sold" more than once as a writer. He wrote a lot and fruitfully, while not only prose, but also plays and scripts. He even participated in the work on the script of the famous film of the 60s "Ben Hur". (Corbis)

Truman Capote was known both for his literary masterpieces, as well as for his drunkenness and talent as a storyteller. During his life, he loved many men and even several women. "Other Voices, Other Rooms" is a distinctly autobiographical novel set in Capote's homeland, the south of the United States. This novel, published in 1948, blew up the literary world. Over time, in order to pay the bills, Capote had to go into journalism. And he has never been so open with readers about his sexual orientation again. (Jerry Cooke / Corbis)

Another iconic American writer is Tennessee Williams, whose meteoric career was accompanied by drunkenness and paranoia, as a result of which he went off the rails. Although he won the Pulitzer Prize for his works "Tram "Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Roof", it was the novel "Something vague, something Clear" that told the story of his first love, which came to him at the age of 29 and lasted his whole life. (Bettmann-Corbis)

"The Scream" is a bold poem by Ginsberg, which he first read in San Francisco in 1955, in the same city where two years later this literary work will be considered in court for obscenity. Ginsberg was born into a Jewish family that resided in Newark, New Jersey. Growing up, he became a poet and a school teacher. His mother suffered from mental disorders, but they could not give her a correct diagnosis. After college, Ginsberg communicated with other authors of "free orientation", for example, with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, and met his soulmate Peter Orlowski. The poem "The Scream" was his real masterpiece, and 50 years later many say that the level of its homosexuality is downplayed. (Bettmann-Corbis)

This black gay writer broke all the rules of Harlem. In his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, which he wrote for nine years, Baldwin describes one day in the life of a religious family where sex was considered a terrible sin. Baldwin wrote his second novel, Giovanni's Room, in collaboration with his friend Lucien Happersberger. According to the soulfulness of the performance, this novel is compared to the movie "Brokeback Mountain". The writer hid the homosexual subtext of the novel from publishers until the last day. (AP)

Albee claimed to have known about his homosexuality as a teenager, and his first lover, composer William Flanagan, also became his mentor. In gay bars in New York, they were nicknamed the Grimm Sisters, and among other things, they became famous for fighting. When Albee's homosexuality became known, his novel "Exorcism: or Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" became even more popular. (David Montgomery / Getty Images)

Another writer who was first a journalist, and only later became a novelist. Maupin was brought up in North Carolina and moved to San Francisco to work with the Associated Press. His series of short stories "Urban Stories" was filmed as a series. He was one of the most famous writers who was not afraid to touch on the sensitive topic of AIDS in his novel. (Ed Kashi / Corbis)

White is often compared to Baldwin — both of them are prolific, educated and loved to push forward. "The joy of same-sex sex" burst into the literary world like an arrow. The writer's love for actor Keith McDermott was not mutual, although they lived together, and McDermott inspired the writer to create some works. In the mid-1970s, in New York, he and his contemporaries created a cultural salon - and a society of gay writers, which he had always dreamed of.

Born into a family of Jewish classical musicians, Kushner grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He loved poetry, studied medieval literature, and in his works, he described a variety of heroes and themes — Hitler, AIDS and the Berlin Wall. "Angels in America" is a two—part play that premiered in 1991 and won the Pulitzer Prize for wild ideas, the suggestion of religions and the theme of people's duty to each other. (Craig Lassig / AP)