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20 - The Queer Short Story
- from Part V - Identity and the Short Story
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- By Brett Josef Grubisic, lectures on Canada's west coast, specialising in queer, Canadian and contemporary literature
- Edited by Paul Delaney, Adrian Hunter
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 December 2019
- Print publication:
- 31 October 2018, pp 328-345
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Summary
I was by myself, and I wanted to meet others like me. I couldn't go down the street saying: ‘I'm looking for lesbian friends’. So this was the only way I could think of to do it. That's why I started Vice Versa.
(Edith Eyde)IN THE DEBUT ISSUE OF Sodomite Invasion Review (1990), founding editor Don Larventz recalled the ‘heady days of gay liberation in the 1970s’, a decade marked by a ‘torrent of poetry, stories, novels, plays, essays and varied mixed forms’ that stood in marked contrast to the ‘previously silent’ eras. While acknowledging a great shift in Western attitudes – ‘celebrations where there was hostility and book fairs where there were locked libraries’ – Larventz also sensed imminent reversals: ‘growing government sentiment in favour of the censorship, remarginalization and exclusion of gay writing and images’ and, another ‘threat to the liberating effect of gay literature’, the corporate capitalist recuperation and assimilation of formerly gay communal imagery. Offering readers ‘pleasure and knowledge’, the stories, photography, essays and poetry of his ‘Magazine of New Writing’ – by predominantly Canadian and American male authors such as Alan Alvare, Tony Correia, Dennis Denisoff, Stan Persky, Felice Picano, Scott Watson and Wayne Yung – were positioned as resistance to everyday antagonists. In particular, ‘Sodomite Invasion Planned for 1990’, a 1988 headline from a Canadian fundamentalist Christian publication alerting British Columbians to an impending international gay and lesbian sporting event, galvanised the editorial board.
Vancouver-based Invasion (1990–4) is typical in many respects. Self-consciously political, volunteer-staffed, short-lived, and limited in reach and print run, its ancestors include Vice Versa (1947–8), nine issues edited pseudonymously in Los Angeles by ‘Lisa Ben’ (an anagram of ‘lesbian’), and Arena Three (1963–72), spearheaded by Londoners Esme Ross-Langley and Diana Chapman. Ordinarily featuring reportage and essays as well as stories and poems, the periodicals take as a given literature's role in liberation activism. There are notable generational differences among the publications, however, reflecting transforming mores. For instance, in 1947 ‘Lisa Ben’, a secretary in Hollywood, necessarily edited in secret; in the 1980s Edith Eyde revealed herself as the magazine's sole producer. Freely distributed in Vancouver, Invasion was readily purchased elsewhere in Canada.
18 - Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
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- By Brett Josef Grubisic, University of British Columbia, Carellin Brooks, University of British Columbia
- Edited by Dominic Head, University of Nottingham
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story
- Published online:
- 17 November 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2016, pp 304-322
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Summary
In 2013 LGBT History Month Scotland, a website project administered by LGBT Youth Scotland and partially funded by the Scottish government, posted a submissions call for Out There, an anthology in which Scottish authors who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex would explore the nation's social and sexual landscape. The call stated that in addition to posting select pieces online, the anthology would be published by Glasgow's Freight Books, whose sister publication, Gutter, devoted a 2012 issue to LGBT stories.
From the vantage point of 2015, a special issue and an anthology focused on LGBT writing does not represent groundbreaking news. That status quo, however, is in itself noteworthy. When Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons remark that ‘changes in gay life over the past half-century have been astonishing’, they refer to widespread societal developments (in the European Union and North America especially) related to the heightened agency and social status of sexual minorities that began in the late 1960s. These changes are all the more striking in light of earlier periods. Ellis's 1897 summation – ‘I realized that in England, more than in any other country, the law and public opinion combine to place a heavy burden and a severe social stigma on the manifestations of an instinct which to these persons who possess it frequently appeared natural and normal’ (p. 59) – stands in marked contrast to Tom Warner's 2002 description of the ‘historically unprecedented’ accomplishments of Anglo-American activists during the twentieth century's final decades: they rejected ‘the quasi-human role in which gays, lesbians and bisexuals had been cast throughout history, a role that forced them to hide their sexual orientation, to disguise themselves, and to lead double lives filled with fear, isolation, and self-loathing’.
Burdensome conditions took various forms. Faderman illustrates one effect of categorization: ‘As an undergraduate in college I was an English major, but the only time I learned about a lesbian book was in an Abnormal Psych class, where [Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel] The Well of Loneliness was mentioned.’ Similarly, Terry Castle remarks on Jeanette Howard Foster, whose Sex Variant Women in Literature was ‘issued privately and at her own expense in 1956, at a time when no reputable publisher would touch the subject of female homosexuality’; as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, Castle located Foster's book ‘hidden away in a special, non-circulating, “Triple X-rated” stack behind the front desk’.