The Bad Old Days? LGBTQ Writing Before Stonewall

What was it like to be queer in small-town Georgia in the 1930s? In upper-class London in 1890? In New York City during the great artistic and cultural movement that was the Harlem Renaissance? This Freshman Seminar takes a deep dive into the fascinating archive of literature produced by LGBTQ people before the Stonewall Riots of 1969. We will read a range of American and British writers including Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Radclyffe Hall, and Truman Capote in order to learn more about queer life on both sides of the Atlantic in the early to mid-twentieth century.