How LGBT+ Culture Liberated the Modern World

Professor Andrew Lear is a world-renowned expert on sexuality in art and the author of the best-known book on sexuality in Greek vase-painting.  He is the founder of Oscar Wilde Tours, the gay history tour company, and Shady Ladies Tours, the woman's history tour company.

Andrew Lear

Join  Professor Gregory Woods for this celebratory voyage through the cosmopolitanism of modern lesbian and gay culture!

<p><em><strong>Can&#x27;t make the live event?  No problem!  You can watch the video recording at your convenience for 2 weeks.</strong></em></p><p>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 Cyril 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.</p><p>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.</p><p></p>

<p>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 &amp; Lesbian Studies in the UK, at Nottingham Trent University, where he is now Professor Emeritus.</p>

<h2>FAQs</h2><h3>When will the Zoom invite come?</h3><p>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.</p><h3>If I can't make the live recording, can I watch the event at another time?</h3><p>The event will be recorded, and all ticket holders will receive a link to the recording by email the evening after the presentation, with a password to access it.  It will be available to view for 2 weeks 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.</p><h3>What time zone is the event scheduled in?</h3><p>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.</p><h3>Refund policy?</h3><p>Refunds are available up to the start time of the event. After the start time, refunds are only available if you have been unable to access the event.</p>

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How LGBT+ Culture Liberated the Modern World

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