As an academic whose
recent work has been LGBTQ+ history, it has been amazing and humbling to
recognize that we haven’t a complete account of one of the most famous events of
all—the trials of Oscar Wilde.
This absence hasn’t stopped us from speculating
and theorizing about them and their significance, but that work will be easier
in the future because of Bristow’s masterful book. Utilizing hard-to-find
materials in archives and the digitization of newspapers, Bristow gives us the
closest we’re likely to get to an accurate understanding of what happened in
1895.
It is a powerful case for how to understand the trials today, what we can
conclude Wilde was guilty of, and how he was victimized by an unjust legal
process.
The most authoritative account of a pivotal event in legal and cultural history: the trials of Oscar Wilde on charges of "gross indecency"
Among the most infamous prosecutions of a literary figure in history, the two trials of Oscar Wilde for committing acts of "gross indecency" occurred at the height of his fame. After being found guilty, Wilde spent two years in prison, emerged bankrupt, and died in a cheap hotel room in Paris a few years after his release. The trials prompted a new intolerance toward homosexuality: habits of male bonding that were previously seen as innocent were now…
My
current research tries to understand the remarkable changes in attitudes
towards sexual and gender nonconformity in Ireland over the past century,
especially in the past few decades when it has transformed from a regressive and
repressive Catholic nation to one in the vanguard of European liberalism.
O’Toole’s journalism and writing about the relationship between Ireland and
Britain (especially the follies of Brexit) have been a sure guide, and this
book encapsulates his analysis of an emerging Ireland with personal and family
stories illustrating its hairpin shifts and contradictions.
It is a tricky
strategy for writing history because it risks placing the emphasis in the wrong
places, but the combination of personal and political frames of reference works
beautifully here.
Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government-in despair, because all the young people were leaving-opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.
I’m a bit obsessed with the Velvet Underground, glam rock, Bowie, and the Warhol Factory – fixations that converge on Lou Reed’s music, especially the Transformer album. Transformer recounts a similar fanboy obsession, but it also puns on its title (putting one syllable in black, the other in white) to accentuate the striking queerness of the album.
Crucially, Noonan centers the lives and works of the Warhol drag queens at the heart of “Walk on the Wild Side” (Holly “from Miami, FLA” Woodlawn or Jackie “speeding away” Curtis) who’ve been relegated to footnotes. Reed was an inconsistent source and a difficult interviewee, so we’re still piecing together his biography years after his death. Transformer is a great way to start your own obsession.
In this funny and poignant memoir and cultural history, the television personality, columnist, and author of Drag pays homage to Lou Reed's groundbreaking album Transformer on its fiftieth anniversary and recalls its influence on his coming of age and coming out through glam rock.
In November 1972, Lou Reed released his album, Transformer because he thought it was "dreary for gay people to have to listen to straight people's love songs." That groundbreaking idea echoed with the times. That same year, Sweden was the first country to legalize gender-affirming surgery, and San Francisco struck down employment discrimination based on sexual…
When Margaret Thatcher called in 1979 for a
return to Victorian values such as hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and
national pride, the Labour opposition responded that “Victorian values” also
included “cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor, and ignorance.”
The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror looks
at how the twentieth century reacted to and reimagined its predecessor, with
conservative and liberal-modernist responses combining to fix an understanding
of the Victorians in the popular imagination.
By examining heritage culture,
contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian,” it also offers a more
affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, highlighting a model of social
interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s
politics and culture. As its title suggests, the Victorian age and its
inheritances are always closer than they appear.
