Male homosexual and gay poetry

Male homosexual poetry is poetry about male homosexuality and poetry by known male homosexuals and bisexuals. Such poetry goes back as far a human recorded poetry: to the ancient Semitic and Indo-European epic poem Gilgamesh (see Gilgamesh's dream and Gilgamesh's lament for Enkidu in the Akkadian version which is the largest surviving version with 80% of the text now known; the Akkadian version dates from about 620 BC but there are earlier shorter versions in other languages of the Middle East). See the text edited and commentary edited by A. R. George of SOAS at the University of London.

European Authors

In English Shakespeare wrote gay love sonnets as did Byron and Tennyson while in the twentieth century W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg are well known. No English language gay poet has had as great influence than the US nineteenth century poet Walt Whitman.The British savant Anthony Reid created the largest male homosexual anthology of poems: The Eternal Flame (2 volumes, 1992–2002; publication of the second volume was help up by the publisher going bankrupt) while the excellent 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 Australian gay poet Paul Knobel's CD-ROM "An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and its Reception History" (2002) is the largest survey of the subject and comes to 1 million words with overviews covering over 250 languages and language groups. He has also published "A World Overview of Male Homosexual Poetry" (2005).

Italian has Michelangelo, the painter and sculptor, who wrote gay love sonnets while Leopardi and Montale are later poets.

In French there is Rimbaud and Verlaine and Jean Cocteau in the twentieth century.

In German Goethe wrote gay poems while Stefan George is the best known poet.

Spanish produced Garcia Lorca and many others.

Ancient World

Poets writing such poetry include Homer, author of The Iliad and the poets 12th book of the Palatine Antholog, the so called Mouse paidike (Muse of boy love).

In Latin, Virgil (see his second Ecologue), Catullus and others wrote gay poetry which continued in the middle ages in Latin (see the anthology in Johhn Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality); in fact Latin gay poems were written up to the 1920s by those involved in the circle of the bisexual Aleister Crowley, who was a practitioner of magic.

Asiatics

In Chinese there is a huge tradition as also in Korean (where songs of gay song boys survive: see the film The King and the Clown).

In Japanese Basho who wrote haikus admitted to homosexuality and Mutsuo Takahasi is a recent poet.

Baltic & Middle Eastern

Russian has Kuzmin and Gennady Trifonov (who was imprisoned for writing homosexual poems which were not then published).

Turkish has a huge gay poetry heritage as does medieval Hebrew and Arabic. The gay poems of these languages as well as Urdu and Persian are strongly pederastic mainly.

In Persian the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the best known gay work. Oral poems in many of the world's up to 33,000 known languages are only now being explored e.g. in Papua New Guinea in association with rituals involving oral and anal sex which all boys had to undergo (Papua New Guinea has some 1,500 languages).