Gregory Woods traces the informal networks through which gay men (and some women) supported each other and enriched the arts from Oscar Wilde's trials through the gay liberation movement. The term 'Homintern,' originally a hostile coinage suggesting a homosexual conspiracy analogous to the Communist International, Woods reclaims to describe real networks of solidarity, introduction, and protection that operated in cultures where homosexuality was criminal. He follows these networks through modernist Paris, the Bloomsbury Group, the Harlem Renaissance, Hollywood's coded productions, and postwar New York and San Francisco. Woods shows how gay artists and writers drew on shared references, provided each other with work and shelter, and created codes that allowed communication while evading persecution. The book examines how these networks shaped cultural production: the camp sensibility, the aesthetic of surfaces, the cultivation of wit and style as survival strategies. Woods, a poet and scholar of gay literature, writes with insider knowledge of the cultural traditions he traces. He addresses tensions within gay communities--between effeminate and masculine self-presentation, between discretion and visibility, between assimilation and radicalism. The book provides essential history for understanding how LGBTQ culture developed before liberation made public identity possible.