FFFriday: though more generally on LGBTQ+ literary traditions
[A] mature literary culture is diverse, inclusive, and deep. It’s a culture that includes works of writerly brilliance and works that speak to the circumstances of their readers’ lives or that exist simply to entertain and provide pleasurable escapism. What difference does it make, one might ask, whether a mystery features a gay protagonist or a straight one if the main purpose of the book is to provide a few hours of relief from “real life”? If you live in a world where the cultural products continue to mostly exclude you, it makes an enormous difference. Queer readers have always sought not just diversion from their literature, but validation, and even now, in this era of greater acceptance of LGBTQ lives, that’s still true. We, as readers, identify with those works that have at least a passing relationship to our own specific human experience, which includes our conceptions of gender and sexual orientation.
A series of three articles by Michael Nava, Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing:
Out from the Shadows: Beginning, 1940-1980: While there was but a trickle of gay novels in the 1950s and ’60s, there was a flood of fiction about lesbians and lesbian life, much of it available on paperback book racks in your local drugstore.... But the popularity of these books could hardly be ascribed to their positive depictions of lesbian life - nor were lesbians their intended audience. From the very outset, the authors of these books were told they had to conform to the popular view of lesbianism as a pathology, which eliminated the possibility of happy endings.... Nonetheless, like the handful of gay male novels published after World War II, these books reached lesbian readers for whom they were - despite the required unhappy endings - an important and unique lifeline.
The Golden Age (1980-1995): The lesbian presses, which began to emerge out of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, were rooted in a community that had constructed its own cultural infrastructure, one that included newspapers, magazines, bookstores, music festivals, and women’s studies programs. Powerfully supported by the lesbian community, these presses were, from the start, mission-driven and operated largely outside the mainstream literary world. These characteristics helped secure an autonomy that allowed them to publish without regard to the cultural and economic vagaries that swayed New York publishing. Lesbian small presses launched and nurtured the careers of major lesbian writers.
Picking Up the Pieces: Queer Publishing Now: the notion that, with marriage equality, we now live in a “post-homophobic” culture has also had a detrimental impact on LGBTQ writers. This is especially true of trans writers and queer writers of color who understand all too well that the claim of victory over bigotry is premature. If polite society, gay and straight, has now concluded that homosexuals are just like everyone else - having babies, shopping at Ikea, getting mortgages, and sizing up their portfolios from startup IPOs - it’s unlikely that Big Publishing will publish queer writers whose work challenges and upsets this charming applecart by reminding the reading public that the suffering of the queer community is real and ongoing, that reminds them that we haven’t yet reached the horizons glimpsed in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
And if you are interested in high modernism and the role of lesbians therein, I point you at this work: No Modernism Without Lesbians, by Diana Souhami: The extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place - Paris, Between the Wars - fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own - forming a community around them in Paris.
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A series of three articles by Michael Nava, Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing:
Out from the Shadows: Beginning, 1940-1980: While there was but a trickle of gay novels in the 1950s and ’60s, there was a flood of fiction about lesbians and lesbian life, much of it available on paperback book racks in your local drugstore.... But the popularity of these books could hardly be ascribed to their positive depictions of lesbian life - nor were lesbians their intended audience. From the very outset, the authors of these books were told they had to conform to the popular view of lesbianism as a pathology, which eliminated the possibility of happy endings.... Nonetheless, like the handful of gay male novels published after World War II, these books reached lesbian readers for whom they were - despite the required unhappy endings - an important and unique lifeline.
The Golden Age (1980-1995): The lesbian presses, which began to emerge out of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, were rooted in a community that had constructed its own cultural infrastructure, one that included newspapers, magazines, bookstores, music festivals, and women’s studies programs. Powerfully supported by the lesbian community, these presses were, from the start, mission-driven and operated largely outside the mainstream literary world. These characteristics helped secure an autonomy that allowed them to publish without regard to the cultural and economic vagaries that swayed New York publishing. Lesbian small presses launched and nurtured the careers of major lesbian writers.
Picking Up the Pieces: Queer Publishing Now: the notion that, with marriage equality, we now live in a “post-homophobic” culture has also had a detrimental impact on LGBTQ writers. This is especially true of trans writers and queer writers of color who understand all too well that the claim of victory over bigotry is premature. If polite society, gay and straight, has now concluded that homosexuals are just like everyone else - having babies, shopping at Ikea, getting mortgages, and sizing up their portfolios from startup IPOs - it’s unlikely that Big Publishing will publish queer writers whose work challenges and upsets this charming applecart by reminding the reading public that the suffering of the queer community is real and ongoing, that reminds them that we haven’t yet reached the horizons glimpsed in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
And if you are interested in high modernism and the role of lesbians therein, I point you at this work: No Modernism Without Lesbians, by Diana Souhami: The extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place - Paris, Between the Wars - fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own - forming a community around them in Paris.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3249730.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.