Take Me Out, published as a book in 2003, is Richard Greenberg's Broadway play about a professional athlete who announces that he is gay, and the ripple effect this news has on his team and the people around him.

Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God beat out Bent for Best Play on Broadway in 1980. Later made into a movie that won an Oscar for Marlee Matlin, this story brought attention to the lives of the deaf.

The Elephant Man, a play published by Bernard Pomerance in 1979, depicts the life story of Joseph Merrick, a British man afflicted with a disfiguring disease and the problems he has in being accepted as an intelligent human.

Gad Beck's autobiographical story An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin is a nonfiction complement to Sherman's play.