Eventually We're All Queer: Isherwood's Identities and Legacies
Follow Christopher Isherwood's from Berlin to Hollywood, as he made queer history with A Single Man, Cabaret, & Christopher and His Kind.
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2 TYPES OF TICKETS:
Can't make the live event? Buy a ticket for the recording and watch the event in your own time! Details in FAQs below.
Join us for this “Zooming Through Queer Culture” event.
Join us for a fascinating talk about gay writer/pioneer Christopher Isherwood. From England to Berlin to Hollywood, Isherwood broke ground every step of the way, culminating with "A Single Man," "Cabaret," and his coming out memoir, "Christopher and His Kind."
Isherwood: Christopher Isherwood was everywhere in the twentieth century: he was at Cambridge in the 20s; in Berlin in the early 30s; in Hollywood in the 40s and 50s; and in love, with young Don Bachardy from the mid 1950s until Isherwood's death in 1986. His life is often inseparable from his work. His main character was almost always a version of himself, sometimes hiding in plain sight, sometimes gay but discreet, sometimes defiant, and finally open, in his groundbreaking memoir, "Christopher and His Kind."
Identities: In his "Berlin Stories," Herr Issyvoo is wily; it's never quite clear what's going on. By the time we got to "Cabaret," he was bisexual, but Isherwood wasn't satisfied. He got the last work in his memoir, "Christopher and His Kind," where he says that his character's homosexuality was depicted as "an indecent but comic weakness to be snickered at, like bed-wetting." So, in 1976, he set the record straight, so to speak, on the Berlin years and the 30s. In 2018, I went to Berlin, searching for traces of Isherwood's life there. It was haunting and moving, as you will hear. And it included young love.
Legacies: With the publication of Isherwood's voluminous diaries as well Tom Ford's adaptation of Isherwood's masterpiece "A Single Man" and the award-winning documentary "Chris & Don: A Love Story," Isherwood's twenty-first century reputation is looking solid. But what does a bourgeois, charmed gay life from the 20th century mean to us today? To start with: without people like him paving the way, where would we be now? And because he lived into the mid-1980s, he even saw and comments on the early years of the AIDS crisis. Isherwood's life story is a queer story, and it keeps giving, to anyone who pays attention.
FYI—If you buy a ticket for the live event, the Zoom invite will be in your confirmation email (scroll to the bottom of the email, it's there!). If you do not receive the confirmation email, check your spam folder first, but please message us IMMEDIATELY if you don't find it and we shall send it to you directly, DO NOT WAIT until the event starts!
Speaker Bio
Chris Freeman teaches English at the University of Southern California. He took his first journey to Los Angeles when he was a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University in the early 90s. On that fateful trip, he met Dan Luckenbill, a librarian at UCLA, who had been Isherwood's student in 1965. That conversation led to twenty years' worth of work and a cross-country relocation. After meeting Don Bachardy in 1997, he began working with James Berg on "The Isherwood Century," the first ever essay collection on the life and work of Isherwood. That book won a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Studies, and since then, Freeman and Berg have published "Conversations with Christopher Isherwood," "The American Isherwood," and, last year, "Isherwood in Transit." At USC, he teaches courses on fiction, nonfiction, and poetry as well as a course on Los Angeles literature and culture. He lives in West Hollywood and Palm Springs.
When will the Zoom invite come?
The Zoom invite will be in the CONFIRMATION EMAIL from your order—IF YOU DO NOT RECEIVE IT IN YOUR CONFIRMATION EMAIL PLEASE MESSAGE US IMMEDIATELY. Subsequent to this, the Zoom invite will be sent to your email address at 48hrs, 2hrs, and 10mins before the event. PLEASE CHECK YOUR SPAM AND SOCIAL FOLDERS IF YOU DO NOT SEE THE ZOOM INVITE IN YOUR INBOX.
How do tickets for the recording work?
The event will be recorded and you can buy a ticket for the recording above. If you buy a ticket for the recording you will be emailed automatically a couple of hours after the live event with a link to the recording and a password to access it. It will be available to view for 1 week after the live event. If you do not receive the link to the recording a couple of hours after the live event please email us—sometimes Eventbrite emails can get lost in spam/social folders. If you bought a ticket for the live event but couldn't make it please email us and we will send you the link to the recording.
What time zone is the event scheduled in?
The event is scheduled for 2pm EST (i.e. New York time). You can watch it in any time zone but please adjust to the time zone you are in.