From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the poems of Allen Ginsberg and gay literature of the 1980s and '90s, The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature draws together hundreds of texts from Western literary history that describe experiences of love, friendship, intimacy, desire, and sex among men. Spanning more than two millennia, from ancient Mesopotamia to the late twentieth century, this anthology brings together the best-known texts of gay male writing such as the poetry of Martial and Walt Whitman, and excerpts from E.M. Forster's Maurice, as well as from lesser known works such as nineteenth-century English homoerotic poetry and selections from two early American novels of homosexual love - Joseph and His Friend and Imre. In The Columbia Anthology readers become acquainted with the early bonds of male companionship found in Homer's writings on Zeus and Ganymede, and with the homoerotic poetry of Catullus and Juvenal. From Shakespeare's Sonnets to the philosophy of de Sade, to the political writings of Edmund White, this anthology traces a multifaceted tradition.