A Road to Stonewall: Male Homosexuality and Homophobia in English and American Literature, 1750-1969Since the June 1969 uprising at New York's Stonewall Inn, the very word "Stonewall" has become etched in the American psyche as a synonym for "liberation". Stonewall proved a cataclysmic marker in the lives of gay men and lesbians: it was the point after which gay people were no longer content to live in fearful silence as their most basic rights were trampled on or ignored. Stonewall happened because homosexuals of all races revolted against an act of official oppression. It was indeed a beginning, but it was also the culmination of a long struggle against the tyranny of socially regulated and defined speech about homosexuality. In this insightful and engaging analysis, Byrne R. S. Fone maps out one very significant road to Stonewall - the literary course of male homoerotic desire and the homophobia that has made so much of what homosexuals have written so passionate and moving. Most of the texts Fone analyzes presume that sexuality is the central aspect of identity. Whereas gay literature since 1969 has been a vocal and supporting partner to the activism that has characterized the movement for lesbian and gay rights, before 1969 there were few political initiatives and only a handful of organized groups: the text was dominant. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
American argues asserts Bayard Taylor beauty become boys Byron Calamus poems called Carpenter century cited in text construction culture defined described difference discourse Don Leon dreams E. M. Forster Edward Carpenter effeminacy effeminate England English erotic eroticized essay feeling fellatio feminine fiction Forster friendship gender Greek Grieux hereafter cited heterosexual homo homoerotic texts homoeroticism homophobia homophobic homosexual desire homosexual identity homosexual love homosexual texts insists Intersexes Jennie June John Addington Symonds Leaves of Grass lesbian Lind literary literature lovers male manly love Martin Duberman masculine Maurice Mayne modern molly molly houses moral nature nineteenth nineteenth-century novel passion perhaps perversion play poet poetry political published queer quoted in Katz quoted in Reade Scarlet Pansy seems sexual desire Sexual Inversion social society sodomites Stonewall story Strutwell suggests Symonds Symonds's Teleny theory tion transgressive Uranian Walt Whitman Whiffle woman women writers York young youth