This week's episode of LGBookT remembers three gay writers who defied the odds to become iconic literary and civil rights figures around the world.
Harvey Milk, one of America's first openly gay elected officials, died November 27, 1978, murdered in his San Francisco office by a colleague on the Board of Supervisors. He was 48 years old.
Since his death, his speeches and writings have inspired activists and authors. To the immense annoyance of the LGBT community's foes, he has also been memorialized by a US postage stamp, a US Navy vessel, and May 22 in the State of California.
Oscar Wilde, Anglo-Irish poet, author, and playwright, died in Paris November 30, 1900, at the age of 46. He was worn down by having been made an international pariah after a sex scandal and two trials for libel and gross indecency five years earlier, and his health had been broken by the privations of a term at hard labor in prison.
The next century saw his reputation not only restored by burnished. His plays remain in constant production. Of the making of books about his life and work, there is no end. His grave remains a pilgrimage site for LGBT citizens of the world.
In 2015 his homeland, Ireland, adopted marriage equality in an overwhelming popular vote, and in 2017 he was granted a posthumous pardon by act of the British Parliament.
James Baldwin, the African-American novelist, essayist, civil rights activist, died December 1, 1987 at the age of 63. Ever the iconoclast, Baldwin professed he criticized his homeland so sharply because he loved it so much; to live openly as a gay man in the 1960s, he moved to France, where he died, amember of the Legion of Honor, a quarter-century later. LGBT characters are out in nearly all his fiction; his second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) caused a scandal upon a scandal: American conservatives were affronted by a novel about a homosexual love affair, even more so that its protagonist was a white man created on the page by a black author.
In the age of segregation, they argued, white queers were the province of white haters. Negroes could go get their own. Baldwin was also an influential civil rights activist even as others tried to marginalize him within that movement as they did another of its organizers, Bayard Rustin.
LGBookT is a weekly, weekend video looking at the literary world of the LGBT community on the LGBookT Facebook page. We welcome comments, suggestions, and guests!
Harvey Milk, one of America's first openly gay elected officials, died November 27, 1978, murdered in his San Francisco office by a colleague on the Board of Supervisors. He was 48 years old.
Since his death, his speeches and writings have inspired activists and authors. To the immense annoyance of the LGBT community's foes, he has also been memorialized by a US postage stamp, a US Navy vessel, and May 22 in the State of California.
Oscar Wilde, Anglo-Irish poet, author, and playwright, died in Paris November 30, 1900, at the age of 46. He was worn down by having been made an international pariah after a sex scandal and two trials for libel and gross indecency five years earlier, and his health had been broken by the privations of a term at hard labor in prison.
The next century saw his reputation not only restored by burnished. His plays remain in constant production. Of the making of books about his life and work, there is no end. His grave remains a pilgrimage site for LGBT citizens of the world.
In 2015 his homeland, Ireland, adopted marriage equality in an overwhelming popular vote, and in 2017 he was granted a posthumous pardon by act of the British Parliament.
James Baldwin, the African-American novelist, essayist, civil rights activist, died December 1, 1987 at the age of 63. Ever the iconoclast, Baldwin professed he criticized his homeland so sharply because he loved it so much; to live openly as a gay man in the 1960s, he moved to France, where he died, amember of the Legion of Honor, a quarter-century later. LGBT characters are out in nearly all his fiction; his second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956) caused a scandal upon a scandal: American conservatives were affronted by a novel about a homosexual love affair, even more so that its protagonist was a white man created on the page by a black author.
In the age of segregation, they argued, white queers were the province of white haters. Negroes could go get their own. Baldwin was also an influential civil rights activist even as others tried to marginalize him within that movement as they did another of its organizers, Bayard Rustin.
LGBookT is a weekly, weekend video looking at the literary world of the LGBT community on the LGBookT Facebook page. We welcome comments, suggestions, and guests!
Comments
Post a Comment
We welcome comments, corrections, ideas, and thoughts. We expect discussions to be carried on in a civil manner, and will intervene if they are not.