Azis

Vasil Trayanov Boyanov, who goes by the stage name Azis, is a gay Bulgarian Roma pop-folk singer who performs in a drag-ish hodgepodge of outfits. Azis boasts an impressive discography including dozens of singles, and his concerts sell out quickly. His atypically-gendered modeling and open homosexuality have been sources of controversy, as when billboards featuring him kissing his then-husband while shirtless were censored for being too graphic. Outside of music and scandal Azis was narrowly defeated in a run for parliament as a member of the Eurorama party. For his accomplishments Azis was declared the 21st most important Bulgarian of all time in 2006 by the television program Velikite Balgari.

 

Clive Barker

Prolific artist, filmmaker, and author Clive Barker has been leaving his mark on he horror genre since the 1980s when he debuted his short story collections Books of Blood. He directed his most notable work, Hellraiser, out of a fear that his original story would be treated poorly in the wrong hands, as he had seen happen to another adaptation. Since his early forays into fiction he has branched out into other genres, including – of all things – young adult literature. For the positive portrayal of homosexuality in his novel Sacrament he was honored with a GLAAD Media Award in 2003.

Barker’s website is available here; his Twitter feed, here; and his Facebook page, here.

Rock Hudson

Roy Harold Scherer, Jr., dubbed “Rock Hudson” by his image-crafting manager, was an American leading man and sex symbol of the mid-20th century, starring in both melodramas and fluffy comedies, along with a smattering of other genres, television, and live theater. Before moving to Hollywood Scherer had been an aircraft mechanic. Although he had no acting training he was able to break into the business on the strength of his good looks and persistence; later tutoring from Universal Pictures solved his inexperience problem, and he went on to be nominated for an Oscar. Scherer publicly announced that he was gay and HIV positive before passing away from AIDS-related complications in 1985, which became a pivotal event in drawing attention to the disease and humanizing homosexuality.

John Waters

A multitalented gay cult film creator, John Waters was the creative mind behind notorious Dreamlander productions like Pink Flamingos and the tamer Hairspray, which was later adapted as a Broadway musical. To all of his productions he has brought his trademark sense of offbeat, taboo humor, the kind that involves feces more often than not. Outside of his shock films, Waters is also a fine artist and writer. His humorous concept art installations have been featured in prominent galleries, including a photograph of flowers that squirts passers by with water. His adventures hitchhiking across the United States are documented in a memoir called Carsick, which contains comical fictional accounts of his journey along with the real one.

Onir

Openly gay Bollywood director and producer Onir is a small minority in a suppressive industry. His feature length film debut, My Brother…Nikhil, was based on the life of Dominic d’Souza, who was quarantined in a tuberculosis ward after being diagnosed with AIDS; due to careful avoidance of same-sex physical affection (among other deviations from d’Souza’s life), it received a warm welcome with India’s mainstream audiences. Onir has since directed several more films, including I Am, an award-winning collection of four short films, each of which explores a controversial theme through a single human subject. He has started a production company aimed at elevating new acting talent.

 

Hänschen Rilow and Ernst Röbel

Hänschen Rilow and Ernst Röbel, two characters in Frühlings Erwachen, an 1891 German play by Frank Wedekind translated in English as Spring Awakening (or variations, such as The Awakening of Spring), are a same-sex teenage couple who – in a reversal of later conventions – have the most optimistic storyline in the production. Röbel is a mediocre student on the verge of failing his classes; Rilow, the more apt and sexually forward pupil who seduces him. (Rilow may also be read as bisexual given a scene in which he masturbates to an image of a woman.) The final scene in which they appear takes place in a vineyard and concludes with a declaration of love; remarkable, given that two of the other children end up dead and one on the run after breaking out of a reformatory.

For its frank discussion of sexuality Frühlings Erwachen has been repeatedly censored, including an incident in New York where an injunction had to be sought in order to put on a single matinee performance. (Ironically, Frühlings Erwachen was adapted as a Broadway musical in 2006.)

Anthony Perkins

Anthony Perkins’ role of “Norman Bates” in Psycho (and its sequels) was among the most iconic to come out of thriller director Alfred Hitchcock’s canon and an overwhelming presence in the actor’s life. Perkins had already been a theater actor and won awards for both stage and screen, like the part of a young Quaker man in Friendly Persuasion, a movie President Reagan later offered to Mikhail Gorbachev as a model of conflict resolution. Perkins also had a respectable singing voice, acting in several musicals and releasing three pop albums, though he never managed a career from it.

Perkins’ sexual orientation is subject to some interpretation. Although he allegedly had affairs with a number of male celebrities, he did marry and had at least one encounter with a different woman earlier in his life. He is popularly referred to as both homosexual and bisexual though he never openly called himself either; in fact, he suggested in one interview that psychotherapy had enabled him to have relationships with women.

 

Paul Cadmus

Through his paintings and figure drawings Paul Cadmus depicted satirical scenes of debauchery and homoeroticism, drawing attention to same-sex relationships in ordinary daily life.Cadmus’s style, which blended Renaissance and neoclassical aesthetics with exaggeration, was referred to as magical realism, though he himself did not use the term. His government-commissioned image of two sailors flirting with each other, even while surrounded by heterosexual couples, was removed from its display after complaints were submitted, making it the first in a series of attention-drawing censorship disputes; sarcastic takes on class relations and Coney Island beach goers followed to similar controversy. On occasion he did paint serious pieces such as What I Believe, which depicted the positive role art Cadmus saw it playing in the future; later in life he dropped painting altogether and concentrated on charcoal figure studies of naked men.

 

Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim penned the lyrics and music for some of the 20th century’s most iconic musical theater productions over a career spanning more than five decades, from Company to Sweeney Todd. His mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, was a theatrical master himself, and his early tutelage involved writing entire musicals for critique. West Side Story, Sondheim’s Broadway debut, earned numerous awards and spawned a film adaptation. In later years Sondheim took on darker projects that have been criticized as “inappropriate” for musical theater but won him accolades and an enduring impact on the genre (and enough uses in film and television to fill an IMDB page).

 

Chin

Very little is known about Chin, a Mayan god of death and the originator of homosexual intercourse, since the only surviving writings detailing his (or, per one source, possibly her) role come from conquistador writers scandalized by sodomy. Chin was said to have demonstrated male-male sex with another ‘demon’, and thereby inspired the practice of fathers gifting younger men to their sons for sexual relationships. These unions were recognized as marriages in the sense that if someone else slept with the younger man it was considered adultery. While the art above does not depict Chin, it does show a male being of some kind in an awkwardly erotic embrace with a Mayan nobleman.