Gay dramatists and playwrights

Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Coward attended a dance academy in London as a child, making his professional stage début at the age of eleven. As a teenager he was introduced into the high society in which most of his plays would be set. Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works, as well as those of others.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Coward volunteered for war work, running the British propaganda office in Paris. He also worked with the Secret Service, seeking to use his influence to persuade the American public and government to help Britain. Coward won an Academy Honorary Award in 1943 for his naval film drama In Which We Serve and was knighted in 1970. In the 1950s he achieved fresh success as a cabaret performer, performing his own songs, such as "Mad Dogs and Englishmen", "London Pride", and "I Went to a Marvellous Party".
Coward's plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture. He did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, but it was discussed candidly after his death by biographers including Graham Payn, his long-time partner, and in Coward's diaries and letters, published posthumously. The former Albery Theatre (originally the New Theatre) in London was renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in his honour in 2006.

Emilio Carballido (Córdoba, Veracruz, 22 May 1925 – Xalapa, Veracruz, 11 February 2008) was a Mexican writer who earned particular renown as a playwright.
Carballido belonged to the group of writers known as the Generación de los 50, alongside such figures as Sergio Magaña, Luisa Josefina Hernández, Rosario Castellanos, Jaime Sabines, and Sergio Galindo. He studied English literature and earned a master's degree in literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
As a playwright his first work was Rosalba y los Llaveros, which premiered at Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1950, directed by well-known poet and stage director Salvador Novo. This was followed by a huge number of plays, including Un pequeño día de ira (1961), which earned him the Casa de las Américas Prize, ¡Silencio Pollos pelones, ya les van a echar su maíz! (1963), Te juro Juana que tengo ganas (1965), Yo también hablo de la rosa (1965), Acapulco los lunes (1969), Las cartas de Mozart (1974), and the box office hit Rosa de dos aromas (1986).
Some of his works as a playwright were filmed for the screen, such as Rosalba y los llaveros (1954), Felicidad (1956), La danza que sueña la tortuga (1975), El censo (1977), Orinoco (1984), and Rosa de dos aromas (1989). In addition to more than a hundred plays and scripts, he also wrote two volumes of short stories and nine novels, and worked randomly as a stage director.
His career in the Mexican film industry began with the script for La torre de marfil, written in collaboration with Luisa Josefina Hernández in 1957. In 1972 he received two Ariels for the storyline and script of Alfonso Arau's El Águila Descalza. On 27 May 2002 he was given the Ariel de Oro for his lifetime achievements which include more than 50 films, remarkably his collaboration in Luis Buñuel's Nazarín (1959).
On 16 March 2007, Carballido and his partner of 20 years, Héctor Herrera, were among the first couples to apply for a civil union following the enactment of the Federal District's 2006 Ley de Sociedad de Convivencia.
Carballido died of a heart attack on 11 February 2008 in Xalapa. Two days later, Governor of Veracruz Fidel Herrera Beltrán ordered a day of mourning in the state and announced that the Theatre of the State and one of the state literary prizes would be renamed after him.

Peter Wildeblood (19 May 1923 – 14 November 1999) was an Anglo-Canadian journalist, novelist, playwright and gay rights campaigner. He was one of the first men in the UK publicly to declare his homosexuality.

Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne (December 28, 1932 – July 22, 1990), commonly called Manuel Puig, was an Argentine author. Among his best-known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1968), Boquitas pintadas (Heartbreak Tango, 1969), and El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976) which was adapted into the film released in 1985, directed by the Argentine-Brazilian director Héctor Babenco; and a Broadway musical in 1993.

Gerrit Jan Komrij (30 March 1944 – 5 July 2012) was a Dutch poet, novelist, translator, critic, polemic journalist and playwright. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s, writing poetry that sharply contrasted with the free-form poetry of his contemporaries. He acquired a reputation for his prose in the late 1970s, writing acerbic essays and columns often critical of writers, television programs, and politicians. As a literary critic and especially as an anthologist he had a formative influence on Dutch literature: his 1979 anthology of Dutch poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries, reformed the canon, and was followed by anthologies of Dutch poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries, of Afrikaans poetry, and of children's poetry. Those anthologies and a steady stream of prose and poetry publications solidified his reputation as one of the country's leading writers and critics; he was awarded the highest literary awards including the P. C. Hooft Award (1993), and from 2000 to 2004, he was the Dutch Dichter des Vaderlands (Poet Laureate). Komrij died in 2012 at age 68.

François-Marie Banier (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa maʁi banje]) (born 27 June 1947) is a French novelist, playwright, artist, con man, actor and photographer. He is particularly known for his photographs of celebrities and other public figures and for his friendships with members of high society. In a prominent legal case, in 2016 he was convicted of 'abuse of weakness' of the elderly billionaire Liliane Bettencourt.