Homintern

by Gregory Woods
Homintern
Author: Gregory Woods
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300219563
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In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called “the Homintern” (an echo of Lenin’s “Comintern”) by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some defense against dominant heterosexual exclusion, the grouping brought solidarity, celebrated talent, and, in doing so, invigorated the majority culture. Woods introduces an enormous cast of gifted and extraordinary characters, most of them operating with surprising openness; but also explores such issues as artistic influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Traveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this sharply observed, warm-spirited book presents a surpassing portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture

by Michael S. Sherry
Gay Artists in Modern American Culture
Author: Michael S. Sherry
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2007-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807885894
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Today it is widely recognized that gay men played a prominent role in defining the culture of mid-twentieth-century America, with such icons as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson defining much of what seemed distinctly "American" on the stage and screen. Even though few gay artists were "out," their sexuality caused significant anxiety during a time of rampant antihomosexual attitudes. Michael Sherry offers a sophisticated analysis of the tension between the nation's simultaneous dependence on and fear of the cultural influence of gay artists. Sherry places conspiracy theories about the "homintern" (homosexual international) taking control and debasing American culture within the paranoia of the time that included anticommunism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Gay artists, he argues, helped shape a lyrical, often nationalist version of American modernism that served the nation's ambitions to create a cultural empire and win the Cold War. Their success made them valuable to the country's cultural empire but also exposed them to rising antigay sentiment voiced even at the highest levels of power (for example, by President Richard Nixon). Only late in the twentieth century, Sherry concludes, did suspicion slowly give way to an uneasy accommodation of gay artists' place in American life.

A History of Gay Literature

by Gregory Woods
A History of Gay Literature
Author: Gregory Woods
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780300080889
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Account of male gay literature across cultures and languages and from ancient times to the present. It traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion. It includes writers of wide-ranging literary status (from high cultural icons like Virgil, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Proust to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett) and of various locations (from Mishima s Tokyo and Abu Nuwas s Baghdad to David Leavitt s New York). It also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men.

Between You and Me

by Gavin Butt
Between You and Me
Author: Gavin Butt
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2005-09-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0822387050
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In the decades preceding the Stonewall riots—in the wake of the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s controversial report on male sexuality and in the midst of a cold war culture of suspicion and paranoia—discussions of homosexuality within the New York art world necessarily circulated via gossip and rumor. Between You and Me explores this informal, everyday talk and how it shaped artists’ lives, their work, and its reception. Revealing the “trivial” and “unserious” aspects of the postwar art scene as key to understanding queer subjectivity, Gavin Butt argues for a richer, more expansive concept of historical evidence, one that supplements the verifiable facts of traditional historical narrative with the gossipy fictions of sexual curiosity. Focusing on the period from 1948 to 1963, Butt draws on the accusations and denials of homosexuality that appeared in the popular press, on early homophile publications such as One and the Mattachine Review, and on biographies, autobiographies, and interviews. In a stunning exposition of Larry Rivers’s work, he shows how Rivers incorporated gossip into his paintings, just as his friend and lover Frank O’Hara worked it into his poetry. He describes how the stories about Andy Warhol being too “swish” to be taken seriously as an artist changed following his breakthrough success, reconstructing him as an asexual dandy. Butt also speculates on the meanings surrounding a MoMA curator’s refusal in 1958 to buy Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts on the grounds that it was too scandalous for the museum to acquire. Between You and Me sheds new light on a pivotal moment in American cultural production as it signals new directions for art history.

Capital Is Dead

by McKenzie Wark
Capital Is Dead
Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1788735331
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It's not capitalism, it's not neoliberalism - what if it's something worse? In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.

A History of Homosexuality in Europe, Vol. I & II

by Florence Tamagne
A History of Homosexuality in Europe, Vol. I & II
Author: Florence Tamagne
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 0875863566
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Outstanding Academic Title 2005 - Choice Magazine The period between the two world wars was crucial in the history of homosexuality in Europe. It was then that homosexuality first came out into the light of day. Just crawling out from under the Victorian blanket, Europe was devastated by a gruesome war that consumed the flower of its youth. Tamagne examines the currents of nostalgia and yearning, euphoria, rebellion, and exploration in the postwar era, and the bonds forged at school and on the battlefront, in a scholarly treatise charting the early days of the homosexual and lesbian scene. Berlin became the capital of the new culture, and the center of a political movement seeking rights and protections for what we now call gays and lesbians. In England, the struggle was brisk to undermine the structures and strictures of Victorianism; whereas in France (which was more tolerant, over all), homosexuality remained more subtle and nonmilitant. However, the social and political backlash soon became apparent, first of all in Germany. More conservative attitudes arrested the evolution of the new mores, and it was not until the 1960s that the new wave of the sexual revolution once again swept the continent. Tamagne's work outlines the long and arduous journey from the shadows toward acceptability as the homosexual and lesbian community sets out to find a new legitimacy at various levels of society. She weaves together cultural references from literature, songs and theater, news stories and private correspondence, police reports and government documents to give a rounded picture of the evolving scene. * "The first volume argues that homosexuality, a 'high culture' sort, enjoyed a golden ageconsequent upon the Great War's liberalization of morals. In volume 2, reaction and repression march through the 1930s. [...] A lively read. Highly recommended." - CHOICE Magazine * Florence Tamagne holds a PhD from the prestigious Institute of Political Studies in Paris, France. This is her second book tracing the evolution of homosexuality in Europe.

Females

by Andrea Long Chu
Females
Author: Andrea Long Chu
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788737393
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One of today’s most original thinkers on gender offers a provocative take on the current feminist movement, exploring “desire as the force shaping our identifies, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition” (Bookforum). “[Females] is always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart.” —Vice Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race—men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she’s just projecting. A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the “second wave” of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.

The Lavender Scare

by David K. Johnson
The Lavender Scare
Author: David K. Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2023-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226825736
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A new edition of a classic work of history, revealing the anti-homosexual purges of midcentury Washington. In The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson tells the frightening story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a “Lavender Scare” more vehement and long-lasting than Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. Drawing on declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in midcentury Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where anti-homosexual purges ruined the lives and careers of thousands of Americans. This enlarged edition of Johnson’s classic work of history—the winner of numerous awards and the basis for an acclaimed documentary broadcast on PBS—features a new epilogue, bringing the still-relevant story into the twenty-first century.