Henry Blake Fuller

Henry Blake Fuller (1857–1929) was an American novelist, dramatist, short story writer, critic, composer, and editor. Best known for his 1893 novel The Cliff-Dwellers, Fuller wrote one of the first published plays with queer themes in the United States, At Saint Judas’s (1896), and one of the first American gay novels, Bertram Cope’s Year (1919). Though Fuller never openly revealed his own sexual identity, his writing displayed a sympathetic and unapologetic attitude toward homosexuality. He was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 2000 and into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2017.