WHEN I FIRST STUMBLED across Joe Gage’s film L.A. Tool & Die (1979), which was billed as a gay porn movie, I was astonished. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “this is a real film!” As the mix of cinematography, image, soundtrack, vignettes, and intermittent but increasingly compelling narrative unfolded, the sexual content became powerful to the point of being unsettling. That’s when I realized that L.A. Tool & Die—and Gage’s other early works, Kansas City Trucking Co., and El Paso Wrecking Corp.—were more than “real films.” They were art, of a kind I’d never encountered before.

[Author’s Note: About a decade ago, I started work on a book about Paul Monette. I’ve interviewed more than a hundred of his friends and associates, and I’ve been given access to his as yet unpublished diaries. Finally, all these years later, the project is beginning to come to life. This essay uses his diaries and a couple of the interviews to revisit one of Monette’s most important books.]

I DO NOT remember being surprised as a high school student in the turbulent 60’s when I earned that W. H. Auden was gay. …

AT A SMALL but select Walt Whitman exhibition mounted by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2006, a tender photograph of Whitman with his partner Peter Doyle was matter-of-factly labeled as such; and my jaw dropped. It was the first time I’d ever seen an American museum correctly name this relationship, announcing in effect that Whitman, arguably our greatest poet, was emotionally involved with another man.

“WHAT The Well of Loneliness did for the man-woman, this most unusual tale does for the woman-man.” This is how an early gay classic was blurbed in advertisements and on the dust jacket flap by Samuel Roth, its first publisher, in 1933. A Scarlet Pansy, by Robert Scully (possibly a pseudonym), is a skillful and mature American novel about forbidden sex, complete with sensational packaging. That a book like A Scarlet Pansy could be displayed and sold openly in 1933 is itself remarkable.

THE YEAR 1969 was when the straight brother of my high school girlfriend introduced me to the two gay men who would change my life forever. Savannah, like New York, had its own gay counter-culture that gathered in a Stonewall-like club known as the Basement, which was located in the basement of the neglected Armory Building that later became the home of the Savannah College of Art and Design.

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, on June 23, 1992, sculptor George Segal (1924-2000) witnessed the installation of his first outdoor public sculpture in Manhattan, the city center that had inspired much of his work and had made him internationally famous. Titled Gay Liberation, the piece had taken twelve years to find its intended home within the triangle of Christopher Park in Greenwich Village, just across Christopher Street from what had been the Stonewall Inn.