anglais, english, Queer, LGBT, anthology, Poetry, history, Short Stories, Essays, Lesbian, classics 

LGBTQ writing from ancient times to yesterday, selected by award-winning translator Frank Wynne.

Since the dawn of literature, queer people have turned to writing to document their existence: to share great triumphs and deep despairs; to praise the virtues of their lover, extol their loneliness and proclaim their lust; to tell of their peculiarities and mundanities. For almost as long, they have been censored and bowdlerised, persecuted and relegated to the margins. No longer.

Alive in these pages, readers will hear Homer's Achilles beat his chest in grief for the loss of his Patroclus and Paul Verlaine exalt the arsehole of his lover. They will see Alison Bechdel tiptoe then leap out of the closet and Juno Dawson come out again, but differently. They will bite and lick and groan in sweet surprise with Roz Kaveney, and fall in and out of love alongside Qiu Miaojin in Paris and Taiwan. They will recognise queer saints and icons - Audre Lorde, Larry Kramer, Virginia Woolf - and meet young queer, trans and non-binary writers - Keith Jarrett, Zhang Yueran and Niviaq Korneliussen, among others.

Frank Wynne allows their voices to ring out, unashamed and unabashed, in eighty pieces that straddle the spectrum of queer existence: short stories, poems, essays, extracts and scenes from countries the world over, from ancient times to yesterday. 

Homer … from The Iliad: Achilles’ Lament
Sappho … Three poems: Prayer to our Lady of Paphos /I have not had one word from her / Afraid of Losing You
The Book of Samuel … David and Jonathan
Catullus … Three poems: Sonnets 15, 80 and 99
William Shakespeare … Three poems: Sonnet 29, Sonnet 87, Sonnet 126
Aphra Behn … To the fair Clarinda
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz … Inés, dear, with your love I am enraptured
Anne Lister … from the Diaries of Anne Lister
Walt Whitman … We Two Boys Together Clinging
Emily Dickinson … Her Breast is Fit for Pearls
Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud … Sonnet to the Arsehole
Arthur Rimbaud … Our Arses Are Not Theirs
Oscar Wilde … from “De Profundis”
A.E. Houseman … from A Shropshire Lad: Look Not In My Eyes
Constantine Cavafy … One Night
Magnus Hirschfeld … from Berlin’s Third Sex
Amy Lowell … Three poems: Aubade / Carrefour! / Absense
Renée Vivien … Three poems: The Latent Night / She Passes / Words to my Love
Radclyffe Hall … Miss Oglivy Finds Herself
Virginia Woolf … from Orlando
Katherine Mansfield … Friendship
Marina Tsvetaeva … Girlfriend (Podruga)
Wilfred Owen … Two poems: Music / To Eros
Sylvia Townsend Warner … Two poems: Since the first toss of gale that blew / Drawing you, heavy with sleep, to lie closer
Federico Garcia Lorca … The Poet Speaks to his Love on the Telephone
Karin Boye … Everything Contains You
Langston Hughes … Blessed Assurance
Valentine Ackland … The Eyes of the Body
Bruce Nugent … Smoke, Lilies and Jade
William Burroughs … Lee and the Boys
Ismat Chughtai … The Quilt
Jane Bowles … Everything Is Nice
Carson McCullers … Like That
Patricia Highsmith … from Carol / The Price of Salt
Pier Paolo Pasolini … The Cry of the Excavator
Allen Ginsberg … Please Master
Thom Gunn … The Man with Night Sweats
Audre Lorde … Three poems: Never to Dream of Spiders / Love Poem / Afterlove
Larry Kramer … from Faggots
Takahashi Mutsuo … The Chair
Reinaldo Arenas … The Wedding
Rita Mae Brown … from Rubyfruit Jungle
Armistead Maupin … from Michael Tolliver Lives: Confederacy of Survivors
Patrizia Cavalli … To Simulate the Burning of the Heart
Roz Kaveney … Three poems (For my Trans Dyke Sisters / Cunt / Me Too)
Hezy Leskly … Three poems: Isaac / YAKANTALISA / Reuben and I
Alan Hollinghurst … Highlights
Hervé Guibert … A Man’s Secrets
Murathan Mungan … Love's Tears, or, Rapunzel and the Drifter
Colm Téibin … Three Friends
Neil Bartlett … Words
Jeanette Winterson … The Poetics of Sex
Alison Bechdel … Coming Out Story
Rosie Garland … You'll Do
A.M. Homes … A Real Doll
Patrick Gale … Brown Manilla
Damon Galgut … Shadows
Philip Hensher … A Chartist
Tomoyuki Hoshino … Air
Yau Ching … Five Poems
A. Revathi … from The Truth About Me
Hida Viloria … from Born Both: Going Public
Qiu Miaojin … from Last Words from Montmartre: Letter Fourteen
Paul B. Preciado … Letter from a Trans Man to the Sexual Ancien Régime
Lawrence Schimel … Handle with Bear
Abdellah Taia … The Wounded Man
John Better Armella … The Brevity of Cigarettes
Nicholas Wong … Private Parts: Anti-Bodies
Jacek Dehnel … Fig. 370. Hunchback Due to Tuberculosis of the Spine
Juno Dawson … from The Gender Games: The Penny Drops
Cat Fitzpatrick … Six Women I’m Not
Sergio Loo … They Keep Killing Us
Zhang Yueran … Binary
Keith Jarrett … A Gay Poem / Emerging from Matter
Kirsty Logan … Underskirts
Alma Mathijsen … Forget the Girls
Max Lobe … The Avenging Whip
Andrew McMillan … Two poems: Screen / If it Wasn't for the Nights / A Gift
Imogen Binnie … I Met a Girl Named Bat Who Met Jeffrey Palmer
Niviaq Korneliussen … from Crimson