How LGBT+ Culture Liberated the Modern World
Discover how modern lesbian and gay culture! has liberated the cosmopolitan world!
Cost: $12. Please note that this fee helps keep our small business going during the crisis so we can get up and running right away when it is safe to bring people together again in person.
2 TYPES OF TICKETS:
Can't make the live event? Buy a ticket for the recording and watch the event in your own time! See FAQs below for more info.
We begin with a joke from the 1920s-30s. Where Lenin had the Comintern (the Communist International), others had the Homintern. The international Communist conspiracy had its raffish mirror-equivalent in the international homosexual conspiracy. This may have seemed just a camp joke (often attributed to Cyrical Connolly, W.H. Auden, or others), but in certain circles it was taken with great seriousness. The Homintern was the international presence of lesbians and gay men in modern life. Imagined as a single network—depending on who did the imagining—it was either one of the major creative forces in the cultural development of the past century, or a sinister conspiracy against the moral and material interests of nation states.
Homosexual men and women were indeed on the move: they travelled to escape and to explore, in search of pleasure or security. They clustered in certain locations and moments of great cultural significance: 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York... For a while, it must have seemed hard not to cross paths with such figures as the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, the bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach, the poet and hostess Natalie Barney... Their innovative styles of life shocked and enthralled, attracted and appalled. Either way, so significant did they become, that, in the decades after the 1868 coining of the term ‘homosexual’—which quickly entered all the major European languages (except Greek)—the acceptance of homosexuality itself became an indicator of modernity.
Speaker Info
Gregory Woods was born in Egypt in 1953, and brought up in Ghana. He is the author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987), A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. His essay collection The Myth of the Last Taboo: Queer Subcultural Studies was published by Trent Editions (2016). His six main poetry collections, all with Carcanet Press, are We Have the Melon (1992), May I Say Nothing (1998), The District Commissioner’s Dreams (2002), Quidnunc (2007), An Ordinary Dog (2011), and Records of an Incitement to Silence (2021). Woods has two doctorates from the University of East Anglia (1983, 2006). He began his teaching career at the University of Salerno, Italy, in 1980. In 1998 he became the first Professor of Gay & Lesbian Studies in the UK, at Nottingham Trent University, where he is now Professor Emeritus
FAQ
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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.
Will the event be recorded and available to view later?
Yes 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 after the event with a link to the recording, available to view for 1 week after receiving the link. 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.