How gay is opera? According to popular folklore, very. The culture indicated by the phrase “opera queen” became visible in pioneering openly gay communities of the late nineteenth century, and undoubtedly existed long before that. Xavier Mayne’s “The Intersexes,” a 1908 defense of homosexuality, included a self-diagnostic questionnaire—titled “Am I at All an Uranian?”—with such leading questions as “Do you prefer operatic or more abstract music . . .?” and “Are you peculiarly fond of Wagner?” Twentieth-century novels and plays show pale men and women who haunt the standing-room section at the opera and fixate upon the divas of the day. The scholar Terry Castle calls opera-queen culture “a tradition of awe, delight, and comic self-abasement as old as the opera itself.” By the nineteen-seventies and eighties, though, the venerable stereotype had receded. As Wayne Koestenbaum argues in his elegiac 1993 book, “The Queen’s Throat,” the opera queen became a signifier of a pre-Stonewall mentality—a time of “displaced eroticism,” when gay men and lesbians had to express themselves in florid codes. “After sexual liberation,” Koestenbaum asks, “who needs opera?” These days, younger gay people are far likelier to use pop music as a lingua franca. Beyoncé displaces Caballé.

Even so, operas on gay themes have proliferated. Since 2010, the crop of gay-oriented works has included—flute trill, please—Jorge Martín’s “Before Night Falls” and Charles Wuorinen’s “Brokeback Mountain,” stories familiar from film; Theodore Morrison’s “Oscar,” on the life of Wilde; Terence Blanchard’s “Champion,” about the gay African-American boxer Emile Griffith; two period operas by Gregory Spears, “Paul’s Case” and “Fellow Travelers”; Mark Simpson’s “Pleasure,” set at a gay night club; Kevin March’s “Les Feluettes,” based on Michel Marc Bouchard’s play “Lilies”; Andrea Scartazzini’s “Edward II,” about the scandalous British monarch; Ricky Ian Gordon’s “27,” portraying the partnership of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; and Laura Kaminsky’s “As One,” a tale of transgender life. Last month, Peter Eötvös’s 2004 adaptation of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” was staged at New York City Opera, and Lou Harrison’s pioneering 1971 opera, “Young Caesar,” a portrait of Julius Caesar as a young bisexual, resurfaced at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Whether these offerings can reignite opera-queen culture remains to be seen. They certainly compensate for the long decades when gay people projected themselves onto an art form that failed to reflect them in return. (One notable development: not all of the above operas are by gay composers.) Troublingly, though, male stories far outnumber female ones, with attendant marketing campaigns featuring buff male bodies. In the nineteen-nineties, American Opera Projects commissioned Paula Kimper to compose “Patience & Sarah,” a lesbian romance that had its première at the Lincoln Center Festival in 1998. It has had very few successors at mainstream opera houses. American music hardly lacks lesbian composers of distinction—Meredith Monk, Jennifer Higdon, Annea Lockwood, and Kristin Norderval, among others, come to mind—and they should be part of the gay-opera wave, if they are so inclined.

The first gay character in opera is usually said to be the Countess Geschwitz, who appears in Alban Berg’s all-eclipsing masterpiece “Lulu,” unfinished at the time of the composer’s death, in 1935. Geschwitz not only declares her love for the title character but is given the final words: “Lulu! My angel! . . . I will stay near you! Into eternity!” But there were murmurs of homosexuality before that. Richard Strauss’s “Salome,” based on the Wilde play, features a male page smitten with the captain of Herod’s guard. That was 1905; four years earlier, Xavier Leroux’s now forgotten opera “Astarté” raised eyebrows in Paris. The libretto, devised by the decadent dramatist Louis de Gramont, is a fantasia on the story of Heracles’ enslavement to Queen Omphale: here, Omphale is the priestess of the Sapphic cult of Astarté, and Heracles is shown in drag, observing what appears to be a ceremonial lesbian orgy. Heracles intends to put an end to the debauchery but falls in love with Omphale instead. His only escape from this predicament is to don the fatal Shirt of Nessus, which has been dipped in centaur blood. He catches fire, and amid the ensuing conflagration Omphale escapes. The opera ends with the priestess reconstituting her Sapphic circle on the isle of Lesbos, as a chorus sings, “Glory to pleasure.” The Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen,the journal founded by the German gay activist Magnus Hirschfeld, took note: “ ‘Astarté’ is probably the first opera to be performed, and generally the first theatre piece, in which lesbian love is represented.”

In the twentieth century, the field of gay opera was dominated by Benjamin Britten. From “Peter Grimes” to “Billy Budd” and on to “Death in Venice,” Britten chose subjects with an oblique or obvious gay slant. Yet his obsessive scrutiny of the figure of the innocent boy has given him an uneasy place in the pantheon of gay composers. Michael Tippett, Britten’s compatriot and contemporary, ventured further in his 1970 opera, “The Knot Garden,” whose ensemble cast includes Dov, a gay white musician, and Mel, a bisexual black writer. What was audacious at the time can now seem problematic: characters in the opera are doubled with those of “The Tempest,” and Mel is cast as Caliban. But Tippett’s modern-minded sketch of same-sex love was a crucial step.

Dozens of twentieth-century American composers, from Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson on down, were gay. Lou Harrison, whose centennial arrived in the spring, lived more openly than almost all of his contemporaries. In 1942, he told a draft board that he was homosexual, and, in a 1946 review of an edition of Tchaikovsky’s diaries, he gave a sympathetic cast to the composer’s customarily pathologized love life. With “Young Caesar,” Harrison became the first major composer to place a same-sex relationship at the heart of an opera. This was Caesar’s alleged affair with Nicomedes, King of Bithynia. Rome being Rome, the problem for Caesar’s contemporaries was not that he had bedded another man but that he had reportedly neglected to stay on top. One joke went, “Gallias Caesar subegit, Nicomedes Caesarem” (“Caesar conquered Gaul, Nicomedes conquered Caesar”). Caesar denied the rumors, but they stuck.

Harrison was drawn to the material not simply because of its gay content—there are more obvious stories he could have told—but also because it involved an encounter between East and West. He had long loved Indonesian gamelan music, and, in the opera, he made use of gamelan-like instruments that he and his partner, William Colvig, had constructed. Harrison was also a pacifist, and wished to show a moment in Caesar’s life when he was tempted to abandon a career of conquest. Robert Gordon, the librettist for the project, created a text with an arch, fable-like tone. Handel, one of Harrison’s favorite composers, was the model for the opera’s stately, unhurried arias.

“Young Caesar” has received few performances over the years, its progress hampered by dramatic weaknesses. Harrison revised it extensively but never solved its problems. In the L.A. Phil production, which was directed by Yuval Sharon, Harrison’s labor of love has finally achieved persuasive form. What it needed was a frame that enhanced its fairy-tale quality. Intermingling ritual and play—a cinematic ballet of animated phalluses figured in one scene—Sharon created an entertainment of trancelike grace. Caesar and Nicomedes, played affectingly by Adam Fisher and Hadleigh Adams, share tender embraces, but sexuality is almost incidental: instead, we watch a timeless scenario of a young man torn between love and ambition. There is no mention of Caesar’s bloody end, but we have the sense that he made the wrong choice.

A second wave of gay operas began in the nineteen-nineties, in the wake of the outspoken activism of ACT UP and Queer Nation. In 1995, Houston Grand Opera, which had introduced John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” staged Stewart Wallace’s “Harvey Milk,” an uneven but at times potent dramatization of Milk’s exuberant life and shocking death. In a tribute to opera-queen culture, the opera includes a scene in the standing room at the Metropolitan Opera, with a male chorus of “Tessitura. / Bel Canto. / Passaggio.”