LGBTQ Breaking News Service

(Berlin) – Hungary’s parliament should reject a bill that would prohibit discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation, and violates Hungary’s international legal obligations, Human Rights Watch said today. The law targets content “promoting” or “portraying” sexual and gender diversity and could have sweeping consequences for health providers, educators, and artists, among others.

The draft “Laws enabling stricter action against pedophile offenders and the protection of children” bans the “portrayal and the promotion of gender identity different from sex at birth, the change of sex and homosexuality” aimed at people under 18. The bill, sponsored by Fidesz, the ruling party, is due for a vote in parliament on June 15, 2021.

“Hungary’s ruling party is cynically deploying a ‘protection of children’ narrative to trample on rights and try to render LGBT people invisible,” said Neela Ghoshal, associate LGBT rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Children do not need to be protected from exposure to diversity. On the contrary, LGBT children and families need protection from discrimination and violence.”

The draft law is the latest in a series of attacks on LGBT equality under Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government. In May 2020 the government rushed through an omnibus bill that included provisions preventing transgender and intersex people from changing their gender marker on official documents, in defiance of their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In December, parliament adopted an amendment to the constitution effectively banning same-sex couples from adopting children.

Orban’s government has sought to scapegoat LGBT people as part of a wider strategy to sidestep human rights obligations and cement Orban’s brand of authoritarianism.

In the case of the current bill, Fidesz members of the legislative committee added language on “portrayal and promotion” of diverse gender identities and sexual orientations at the last minute to an existing draft bill on pedophilia. The bill already contained provisions hostile to LGBT people, including one that the state should protect “family relations based on parent-child relations where the mother is a woman, the father is a man,” and another aimed at “ensuring the right of children to an identity in line with their sex at birth.”

The new provisions take aim at any discussion of diversity, and seem to stem in part from efforts by artists and advertisers to promote inclusion and acceptance of sexual and gender minorities. In 2019, Fidesz threatened a boycott in response to Coca-Cola advertisements featuring same-sex couples sharing a soft drink. In 2020, when Labrisz, a lesbian, bisexual and transgender women’s organization published a fairy tale anthology entitled “Wonderland is for Everyone” featuring some LGBT protagonists, the government forced it to attach stickers to the books with the disclaimer that they contained “behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles.”

Hungary’s draft pedophilia law introduces provisions into the Child Protection Act, the Act on Business Advertising Activity, the Media Act, the Family Protection Act, and the Public Education Act that would establish administrative sanctions for licensed professionals or institutions that violate it, threatening the right to education and the right to health, including the explicit right to health information under international law. In addition, the law is likely to contribute to violence and other forms of harassment against LGBT youth, in violation of the rights to security of person and freedom from violence.

Fidesz efforts to silence speech acknowledging the existence and human rights of LGBT people echo the so-called “gay propaganda” law passed in Russia in 2013. Human Rights Watch has extensively documented how that law exacerbated hostility toward LGBT people and stifled access to LGBT-inclusive education and support services, with harmful consequences for children.

Russia’s propaganda law has been used to shut down online information and mental health referral services for children and to discourage support groups and mental health professionals from working with children. It stigmatizes LGBT children and their families and has had a chilling effect on mental health professionals who work with LGBT youth. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2017 that the law was discriminatory and harmful to children. It held that authorities adopting such laws are seeking to reinforce stigma and prejudice and encourage homophobia, which is incompatible with the values of a democratic society.

The proposed bill in Hungary similarly violates the rights to freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination guaranteed in the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Watch said. As the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee for Human Rights has observed, “authorities have a positive obligation to take effective measures to protect and ensure the respect of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons who wish to … express themselves, even if their views are unpopular or not shared by the majority of the population.”

The right to freedom of expression includes the right to seek and receive information and ideas of all kinds. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe has noted the right to seek and receive information includes “information on subjects dealing with sexual orientation and gender identity.” In recognition of children’s particular need for information, the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires states to ensure children’s “access to information and materials from a diversity of national and international sources.”

In June 2020 the European Court of Human Rights found that Hungary violated its obligation under the European Convention on Human Rights to respect transgender people’s private lives, and has to provide a procedure to allow them to have their gender identity legally recognized on documents.

The EU Commission adopted in November 2020 its first-ever five-year LGBTIQ Equality Strategy and in March, the European Parliament declared the EU an “LGBTIQ Freedom zone.” This latest anti-LGBT attack in Hungary triggers a responsibility for the European Commission and other EU member states to take action and hold Hungary’s government to account. EU’s Equality Commissioner, Helena Dalli, should strongly denounce Hungary’s latest attack against non-discrimination, a core right under the EU treaties, and call on the Hungarian parliament to reject the draft bill.

“Equating sexual and gender diversity with pedophilia is in itself a frontal attack on the basic dignity and humanity of LGBT people, and poses real risks to their safety and well-being,” Ghoshal said. “Hungarian members of parliament should reject this effort to silence marginalized people and should instead redouble their efforts to protect the basic human rights of everyone in Hungary, including people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”
 

June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month, and so timed to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Greenwich Village. WBGO stands in support of the LGBTQ community — and celebrates the vital work of musicians in its ranks, who have often had to fight to carve out a space. “Make Them Hear You” is how jazz singer Aaron Myers articulates it on the first track of The Pride Album, which he’ll discuss with Keanna Faircloth on The Pulse later this month.

WBGO has a longstanding commitment to celebrating LGBTQ artists, all year round. It extends to Jazz Night in America profiles of Gary Burton, Fred Hersch and Andy Bey, and video shorts like this one, featuring Allison Miller.

Miller has played several times in our studio, as a leader or a member of a band. With pianist Carmen Staaf, she performed the last WBGO Yamaha Salon before the pandemic lockdown last year; here is the full concert, emceed by Nate Chinen.

WBGO’s Pride Month programming is ongoing. Among the highlights:

• Billy Strayhorn spotlight on air
• June 7: Michael Mayo album spotlight in Take Five
• June 9: Patricia Barber track feature and album announcement
• June 23: Aaron Myers interview on The Pulse

See WBGO’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion statement for more information.

I came out as queer about a year and a half ago, at the age of 18. For the most part, I just started dropping allusions to it in conversations and allowed the people around me to work it out for themselves. Initially, I struggled with finding queer spaces that felt truly accessible to me, largely due to feeling hyperconscious of my skin. This was although they had come highly recommended to me by friends (who were often white themselves). It was only once I got to university that I found a community of queer people of colour. Being able to laugh and make plans with my friends for celebrations like Eid and Ramadan, treating them as my found family, is what makes me feel at home.

Coming out can be a difficult experience. While it can be freeing and is often upheld as ‘The Queer Milestone’, it’s perfectly fine to not come out if you don’t feel safe or ready to unveil your identity. Mainstream narratives often focus on coming out as a one-off event, followed by life continuing as normal and searching for a partner. In reality, it’s a process, and this is a truth that I wish would come through more often. We learn more about ourselves everyday, and that’s healthy. Although having the freedom to find a partner who fulfils you is important, coming out is about more than that. It’s also about forming lifelong memories and relationships with friends who have your back. It’s about forming a network of support for one another.

Zave Smith

Jason Park is a psychotherapist working in youth, LGBTQ+, sex and relationship therapies. “We’re led to create community spaces which form a safe basis for us to engage with our lives, should we be attacked,” he says. “How are you meant to find a positive affirmation for yourself when you don’t have that around you?” Unfortunately, this Stonewall study points out that LGB people are twice less likely to see biological family than their heterosexual peers, making found family and community even more important.

LGBT community: How to find your queer community

The LGBTQ+ community is often spoken about like it’s some kind of mysterious monolith, but there’s no one way of getting involved. The examples listed below aim to provide you with a starting point for your journey, but the beauty of coming out is how unique it is to you.

Note, when looking at these spaces and resources, it’s okay to feel that they aren’t for you. Recommendations aren’t the be all and end all. When it comes to finding your LGBTQ+ community, you need to centre yourself and choose the options which make you feel safe and the most authentic version of yourself.

Paula Daniëlse

Charities

For some, coming out is a time of acceptance. For others, it might lead to displacement. The work that charities do in supporting and creating LGBTQ+ community is vital.

While there are some great charities for the wider LGBTQ+ community, such as Stonewall, it’s also useful to find charities which cater specifically to your needs. For example, MindOut is an LGBTQ+ mental health charity. Coming out is hard, and you need to take care of yourself throughout the experience.

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There are also charities which cater to specific parts of the community. For example, Hidayah is an LGBTQ+ charity which caters to the Muslim community, and Keshet is one for Jewish LGBTQ+ groups. These organisations often run meetups and events in safe spaces, making them an ideal place to start finding your feet.

Clubs, bars and parades

Strobe lighting, sticky floors and rainbow flags: queer nightclubs are a great place for LGBTQ+ joy. As a newbie, it’s normal to feel intimidated, but there’s also something magical about the queer joy in these spaces once you’re more comfortable. They’re largely welcoming spaces, and you’re likely to end up being absorbed into a group of friends on a night out. Sometimes, you may find that they lean towards the cliquey side, but it’s all about finding the spaces that work for you.

In the UK, some names have become synonymous with queer nightlife. London’s G-A-Y and Pussy Palace, Bristol’s Eat Sleep Drag Repeat, Liverpool’s GBar and Birmingham’s Glitter Shit are all great places to start. Some of these spaces, however, such as G-A-Y, are fun byt do cater mainly to cis white gay men.

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There are also clubs which cater specifically to subsections of the LGBTQ+ community. For example, Club Kali started off in London, but has grown to nurture the biggest Asian LGBTQ+ community in the world. Similarly, the Cocoa Butter Club is a cabaret group for black and brown performers who seek to change the face of their industry.

Unfortunately, these clubs tend to be limited to cities. However, many have been running online events, which is still a great chance to get stuck in. They tend to announce such events on an ad hoc basis, so following their socials and checking their sites regularly is a good idea.

Media

The lack of representation of LGBTQ+ identities within the media isn’t a new development. Unfortunately, there remains a lot of work that needs to be done. Still, finding media which mirrors you and your experiences in some small way can be a great route to feeling less lonely. Queer Talk, a great podcast hosted by friends Spencer and Mufseen, explores various facets of queer identities through positive news stories and interviews. ‘Gender Stories’ explores how gender affects different aspects of our lives.

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The Gay Times, Attitude and Pink News offer great journalism for the LGBTQ+ community. Shows like Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race are also hugely popular, with vast fanbases to join. You can join fanbases by using the shows’ hashtags on social media like Instagram or Twitter, looking at replies to the people featured, or using purpose-made sites like Archive of our Own (often stylised Ao3).

Online historical resources

The LGBTQ+ community has a long, rich history. Unfortunately, it’s not one that’s taught as widely as it should be. When trying to find where you fit within the wider community, it can help to look back and root yourself in time as part of a proud culture.

Particularly for people of colour, who face compounded erasure of our identities and history, archives can help you feel less alone. Jason Okundaye and Marc Thompson joined forces to create the archive ‘Black and Gay Back in the Day’. Shon Faye’s podcast, ‘Call Me Mother’, features chats with queer elders, discussing what it means to be LGBTQ+ in the world today. Looking through these archives and seeing yourself mirrored in history can help you feel less adrift. Nurturing an interest in queer history can also put you in contact with LGBTQ+ elders, a great way of knowing that you’re on the right path and things will all turn out okay.

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THE FIRST PART of this three-part series examined gay and lesbian literary output between 1940 and 1980, a period which can be summarized as almost nonexistent — a handful of books, most of them unheralded and quickly forgotten except by lesbian and gay readers for whom they were a lifeline. But it was a lifeline made of barbed wire; up until the 1970s, these books that had to conform their vision to the prevailing view of homosexuality as pathological or criminal if they ever hoped the find their way into a reader’s hands. There were few happily-ever-afters, even if writers tried to push small moments of triumph through the censors and gatekeepers. The gay and lesbian protagonists of books published in this period were lucky to escape with their lives. The emergence in the 1970s of a mass movement for lesbian and gay rights, one that conceived of such legal protections as basic civil and human rights, changed the perception of homosexuality that had dominated the culture, literary and social, of the prior decades. The evolving view of gay and lesbian people — as people, as a culture — was the fuse that, once lit, created an explosion of gay and lesbian literature between 1980 and 1995. The match that lit the fuse was AIDS.

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The Golden Age (1980–1995)

Between 1940 and 1980, books by gay and lesbian writers comprised a nearly undetectable part of the corpus of American literature. But in the decade and a half that followed, there was a vast outpouring of gay and lesbian literature. When readers held Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993, Firebrand Books) or the anthology Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out (1991, Alyson Publications, edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaʻahumanu), they caught glimmers of an expanded queer literature. The growing gay and lesbian political and cultural assertiveness in the face of attacks by religious bigots and right-wing Republicans accounts for some of this growth, but the single most important factor was the AIDS crisis. The epidemic not only galvanized the lesbian and gay community, but media coverage of that community’s suffering and heroism in the face of the devastating virus began to transform public opinion of this hitherto despised minority and created an interest — and a market — for its stories.

Before the advent of Amazon and the consolidation of American publishing into five big corporate houses, the annual American Bookseller Association expo was publishing’s equivalent of Coachella. It attracted hundreds of publishers and thousands of booksellers, authors, and readers over a long weekend where the publishers presented their forthcoming books. From the late 1980s and into the 1990s, gay and lesbian publishers planted the rainbow flag at the ABA. Joanne Passet’s biography of Naiad Press founder Barbara Grier, Indomitable, recounts the moment when Katherine V. Forrest, a Naiad author, “saw [an] entire aisle at ABA featuring gay pride flags flying from the booths for Alyson Books, Cleis Press, Firebrand Books, Naiad Press and Seal Press [and] felt tears of joy.”

All the publishers Passet names, except Alyson, were exclusively lesbian. The lesbian presses, which began to emerge out of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, were rooted in a community that had constructed its own cultural infrastructure, one that included newspapers, magazines, bookstores, music festivals, and women’s studies programs. Powerfully supported by the lesbian community, these presses were, from the start, mission-driven and operated largely outside the mainstream literary world. These characteristics helped secure an autonomy that allowed them to publish without regard to the cultural and economic vagaries that swayed New York publishing.

Lesbian small presses launched and nurtured the careers of major lesbian writers. The first of these, Daughters, Inc., founded by partners June Arnold and Parke Bowman in 1971, published Rita Mae Brown’s classic novel Rubyfruit Jungle. Among the most impressive of the other early presses was Firebrand Books, established in 1984 by Nancy K. Bereano. Bereano published one of Dorothy Allison’s first books, the short story collection Trash; Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For; and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, a founding work of transgender literature. She also published Black fiction writer Jewelle Gomez and Black poet Cheryl Clarke. Short-lived but vastly influential was Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (1980–1992), founded by Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde. Among Kitchen Table’s titles were the 1983 second edition of the anthology This Bridge Called My Back edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, which introduced the concept of intersectionality; Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; and Lorde’s I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities. Naiad Press was home to many popular writers like Forrest, a genre-crossing novelist who became one of the best-selling lesbian writers of her generation, and Canadian writer Jane Rule, whose 1964 novel Desert of the Heart was republished by Naiad and became the basis of the acclaimed film Desert Hearts. Naiad, which emerged as the largest of the lesbian presses, was run by Barbara Grier, an energetic and controversial figure in the lesbian and gay publishing world.

No one questioned Grier’s commitment to lesbian literature. As “Gene Damon,” she compiled the most definitive bibliography of lesbian books then available, The Lesbian in Literature, first published in 1967, then updated in 1975, and finally reprinted in 1981 under her own name. Before beginning Naiad Press in 1973, Grier wrote for and eventually became editor of The Ladder, the publication of the Daughters of Bilitis, which evolved from a secret, social group to the first national organization for lesbians. She built Naiad into the largest and most profitable lesbian press, but she was also criticized for the quality of the books she published.

Grier was unapologetic about Naiad’s routine fare of “romances, mysteries, a few Westerns and works of science fiction, all featuring lesbian heroines and happy endings.” Her biographer observes that she “eschewed the ‘women’s studies’ direction because of her commitment to working-class readers and to ‘the girl out there who had no place else to go.’” When Bereano criticized Naiad for “scal[ing] down” the reach of lesbian publishing, Grier replied, “Yeah, I publish for the sixteen-year-old reader.” (Grier was a mentor to Bereano, as she was to other lesbian publishers, and they had a long and cordial relationship.)

Grier understood that a literary culture consists of more than its greatest works or its greatest writers and that, especially for gay and lesbian readers, the books that readers love are the ones they most identify with, and that those books are not necessarily the ones enshrined in the academic canon. Moreover, as she once told Forrest, she published the books she needed to publish because they allowed her to publish the books she wanted to. Those included Jane Rule’s works, reprints of the Ann Bannon books, Highsmith’s The Price of Salt as well as Gale Wilhelm’s Torchlight to Valhalla and We Too Are Drifting, thus returning to print key volumes in lesbian literary history. She also launched the career of Sarah Schulman, who would become one of the most distinguished queer writers of her generation, by publishing Schulman’s first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story. Grier took serious risks, too, publishing Pat Califia’s Sapphistry, a book about lesbian sexuality that contained a chapter on sadomasochism which, as Grier’s biographer observes, “foreshadowed broader conversations about sexuality that would become known as the ‘feminist sex wars’” of the late 1980s.

Grier’s gay counterpart — and temperamentally her polar opposite — was Sasha Alyson, the reserved and laconic founder of Alyson Publications. Like Naiad, Alyson Publications was a general interest publisher that published everything from coming-out novels to memoirs and biographies (including an important biography of gay founding father, Harry Hay), to mysteries and gay vampire fiction, to works about BDSM and a series of “Alyson Almanacs” that were compilations of all things gay and lesbian, including short biographies of historical figures and glossaries of slang.

Like Naiad, Alyson’s long, eclectic list included some important firsts, among them the first novels by Black gay writers Larry Duplechan, Steven Corbin, and James Earl Hardy. At a time when gays and lesbians were still demonized as pedophiles, Alyson published the first queer children’s books, including Lesléa Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies, which was for years one of the most banned books in the country according to the American Library Association. Sasha Alyson also personally initiated the publication of You Can Do Something About AIDS, a collaborative publishing industry project in the form of a 126-page book with a foreword by Elizabeth Taylor that was distributed free in bookstores. A civic-minded person of great integrity, Alyson was recognized far beyond the confines of gay and lesbian publishing when, for example, in 1994 he and his company were named “Publisher of the Year” by the New England Booksellers Association. (Alyson currently works with a children’s literacy project in Laos called Big Brother Mouse, which he founded in 2003.)

The gay and lesbian publishing boom did not go unnoticed by the New York publishing industry. In the late 1970s, gay male writers found homes in the New York houses with the publication of novels by writers including Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, and Edmund White. However, it was in the ’70s that interest in gay writers (and they were mostly gay men) really picked up steam. This was abetted by the advocacy of two extraordinary gay editors: Michael Denneny at St. Martin’s Press and David Groff at Crown.

Denneny came to New York from Chicago in 1971 “mainly to be gay,” he said in a 2014 interview. In 1976, he co-founded Christopher Street, a magazine that covered culture and politics for its nearly 20-year run. That cost Denneny his job at Macmillan Publishers; he then moved to St. Martin’s Press where, as an openly gay editor, he would oversee, among other books, the publication of Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, the groundbreaking history of the AIDS epidemic, and a celebrated line of gay fiction published under the Stonewall Inn Editions imprint.

At Crown, Groff, also a distinguished poet, published, among many other books, the final novels of AIDS memoirist Paul Monette, Frank Browning’s The Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today, books that addressed the AIDS epidemic, and boundary-pushing works exploring then-outré topics such as gay and lesbian parenting and being gay and Christian. Groff was also instrumental in founding the Publishing Triangle, a publishing-industry-led literary organization that promoted gay and lesbian visibility through panels and workshops, a lending library, a newsletter, and annual awards for, among other categories, lifetime achievement in LGBTQ literature. The organization continues to this day.

In a 1993 essay in Poets & Writers, Groff was upbeat about the gay and lesbian boom among New York publishers during that time, attributing it to the emergence of “an ever-growing audience out there eager for the facts, entertainment, stories, education, and self-definition that gay and lesbian books can provide.” Groff pointed out the unique and crucial role books played in a community that otherwise had few or no representations of itself in other cultural platforms: “We don’t really have movies, television, or music to call our own,” he said. “[M]ostly what we have is books. Gay and lesbian books sell so consistently because we need them so urgently.”

The phenomenal surge of gay and lesbian literature in the 1980s and 1990s, at small presses and big ones, would not have been possible without a reading audience and distribution channels that brought the books to those readers. As noted above, lesbian presses benefited from the existence of women’s bookstores and newspapers that started up in the 1970s. They were joined in the 1980s by a chain of independent gay and lesbian bookstores and the explosive growth of the gay and lesbian presses.

Craig Rodwell, a veteran of the homophile movement, opened the first gay bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, in 1967 in Greenwich Village. By 1990, there were gay bookstores in all the major cities, including A Different Light, with locations in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco; Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia; Glad Day in Boston; Lambda Rising in Washington, DC; and Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago. But these bookstores were not confined to the usual urban suspects — there were also gay bookstores in Minneapolis; New Orleans; Nashville; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Atlanta; among other places. In his 1993 essay, Groff estimates there were by then a hundred gay, lesbian, and feminist bookstores that stocked gay and/or lesbian books, shops that were “part of a larger network of up to twelve hundred bookstores in the U.S. and Canada.” (Moreover, as the boom in gay and lesbian books continued into the early 1990s, the big chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble would see profitability in having sections, although maybe no more than a couple of shelves, dedicated to gay and lesbian books.)

In both large and small cities, these bookstores functioned not simply as retailers but as informal community centers. They provided forums for readings and meetings, and they kept books on their shelves for much longer than other independent bookstores. Groff noted in his Poets & Writers essay that the rate of return from bookstores for lesbian and gay trade paperbacks “can be lower than five percent whereas nongay trade paperbacks have return rates of up to seventy percent.”

The bookstores were the original safe spaces for queer people. Dorothy Allison remembers the first time she went into Oscar Wilde as a “baby dyke.” The gay man behind the counter kept his eyes on her because, she thought, he was afraid she was a shoplifter

but actually he was admiring my leather jacket. That was a tiny but wonderful bookstore. Without gay and lesbian bookstores, and the many feminist bookstores of my youth, I would never have found my people, my community, never had the encouragement and commentary of other gay and lesbian writers. I would not be who I am without those voices, those closely watching eyes, those critical and understanding perspectives.

In 1987, the owners of Washington’s Lambda Rising began publication of The Lambda Book Report, the only literary journal dedicated solely to reviewing gay and lesbian books. Two years later, they initiated the Lambda Literary Awards to recognize excellence in gay and lesbian literature. Both the review and the awards were later turned over to an independent nonprofit, the Lambda Literary Foundation, which continues to flourish.

As with bookstores, there was also an explosive proliferation of gay and lesbian newspapers across the country and, again, this growth was not limited to major coastal cities. Dozens of newspapers from Sacramento (Mom … Guess What) to Boston (Gay Community News, founded in 1973) provided space for dozens of book review columns. In practical terms, that meant that, while a straight, first-time novelist might receive a handful of reviews, a gay or lesbian debut might get dozens from newspapers across the nation that spoke specifically and directly to the writer’s potential audience.

The AIDS epidemic brought both the culmination and the beginning of the end of the queer literary spring of the 1980s and 1990s. AIDS heightened the community’s visibility and, in a way, forced the straight population to take a side: either with men and women compassionately and courageously responding to a lethal disease, or with those who called that disease the righteous judgment of God. In this heightened and emotional cultural moment, when gay and lesbian writers bore witness to actual life-and-death struggles on the most simultaneously granular and broad level, they became the writers de jour. The New York houses, sensing a vast untapped audience of readers, began to sign gay and (some) lesbian writers as never before.

This flurry of activity produced some brilliant writing about the epidemic and gay life. In books like Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time and David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, gay writers, many of them, like Monette and Feinberg, infected with the virus, wrote for their lives. These books, affirming and furious, could not have been more different from their 1950s ancestors. It was a heady time for gay and lesbian writers, readers, publishers, and editors, culminating in the OutWrite conferences of the early 1990s that drew together hundreds of queer literati. Ultimately, the epidemic produced a literature as significant to American letters as the literature of the Harlem Renaissance; it marked the arrival of a hitherto marginalized community that was finally free to speak of its experience in its own voices, and prominent in that movement were the voices of Black gay and lesbian writers including Joseph Beam, Assotto Saint, Essex Hemphill, Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke, Sapphire, and Jewelle Gomez, among others.

My own experience is illustrative of that time. When I finished writing my first novel, a mystery with a gay defense lawyer named Henry Rios, in 1985, I submitted it to 13 New York publishers. This was an era when even big publishers would consider unagented or “over the transom” manuscripts. I was roundly rejected by all of them. Most of the rejections were form letters, but a handful of editors sent personal notes, all which said, in effect, “Good book, but there’s no audience for it.” A friend told me about Alyson Publications and suggested I try my luck there. I sent in the manuscript of The Little Death, and it was accepted for publication almost by return mail. The reader who sent the note — not Sasha Alyson, but an assistant — said he’d stayed up all night reading the book.

Published as a trade paperback original, The Little Death was reviewed in the mystery book column of The New York Times by a critic who complimented the author for his “dignified” handling of the “homosexual” theme. No other Alyson book had ever been reviewed in the Times, and the book’s success led me to write a second book with the same character, titled Goldenboy, published by Alyson in 1988. That book was reviewed in the expanding network of gay and lesbian media, including the then-influential magazine The Advocate. Goldenboy was also the first of my novels that dealt with AIDS, a theme that became central to the remaining books in the series.

Following publication of Goldenboy, I was approached by a New York literary agent, the late Jed Mattes, a gay man who would come to represent a number of other gay writers. Jed told me that if I agreed to continue to write more Henry Rios books, he would get me a New York publisher. Though I had not set out to be a mystery writer, I agreed. He negotiated a two-book deal with Harper & Row (now HarperCollins), and from there I moved to Putnam, which published my books until 2000 when I began a 15-year break from publishing and the literary world.

My jump from a small gay press to a New York house was not unique. A number of other lesbian and gay writers, including Katherine V. Forrest, Sarah Schulman, Dorothy Allison, and Larry Duplechan, also made the transition. Publication by the big houses gave our books the kind of exposure and distribution the small presses were unable to provide, but we also became cogs in a corporate publishing machine. When I worked with Sasha Alyson, I knew I was part of a larger mission; with the New York publishers, I felt like an employee, and a pretty low-ranking one at that. (My editor at Putnam, a perfectly affable man, was Tom Clancy’s editor, so I knew my place in that food chain.) While my books were widely reviewed by the mainstream press — a review in People magazine generating more excitement among my friends than reviews in The New York Times — my audience remained primarily gay and lesbian. Sometime in the early 1990s, a straight literary agent told me in passing that if Henry Rios was straight, my books would sell 10 times what they were then selling, and this was a perfect encapsulation of big publishing’s priorities, not just then, but always.

The big gay boom did not last. The big publishers were the first to bail out when gay and lesbian books failed to meet their economic expectations. As early as 1993, Groff was firing warning shots. “For all the brouhaha over lesbian and gay book-publishing triumphs, there is still a low ceiling on that success,” he cautioned. “Few hardcovers can exceed sales of 20,000 copies and few promise to assemble a large enough audience to be a lead title for a mainstream publisher, with the attendant publicity and promotion that could attract new queer and straight readers alike.” In a 2020 email, he parted the curtains and showed what had been going on behind the scenes at the big houses. “At the New York houses we were under great pressure: every single book we published that succeeded or failed became an immediate and weighty metric indicating the viability or futility of the entire LGBTQ category,” he explained. “No other genre of book endured that same reflex of dubiousness and dauntedness.”

Denneny was less circumspect. In a conversation after he’d left publishing, he told me that as soon as the New York houses realized queer books weren’t the Golden Calf they’d imagined, publishers, many of whom had held their noses as they published these titles, couldn’t dump them fast enough. By the mid-1990s, contracts were being canceled and, more grimly, writers were dying of AIDS, including Monette and Feinberg.

Around this time, too, gay bookstores began to disappear, driven out of business first by the big bookstore chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble, and then by Amazon. The gay and lesbian presses also began to contract, a process accelerated by the spread of the internet. The small presses continued to publish, though in diminishing numbers, as they changed hands or went out of business entirely. Barbara Grier retired and Naiad closed up shop, sending much of its backlist to Bella Books. Sasha Alyson sold Alyson Publications in 1995 and it changed hands again in 2008 before disappearing entirely. Nancy Bereano retired in 1994 and Firebrand Books ceased publication. Both Denneny and Groff left publishing to become respected freelance editors. By 2000, the Golden Age was over.

¤

Michael Nava is the author of a groundbreaking series of novels featuring gay Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios.

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Banner image: “Giovanni’s Room book store” by chrisinphilly5448 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Image has been cropped.

It’s pride month, which means corporations are tripping over themselves to come out as allies of the LGBT community — even those corporations that are actively standing in the way of legislation that would expand protections for the members of that community. But a growing number of activists and lawmakers are calling those companies out for talking out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to gay rights.

Even as polling shows more Americans than ever — 76% according to PRRI — favor laws that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans from discrimination, 2021 is shaping up to be a record-breaking year for anti-LGBT legislation at the state level. The organization Corporate Accountability Action has launched a campaign to highlight corporate donations to anti-LGBTQ legislators in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee.

AT&T is among the worst offenders. The telecom giant, whose social media pages are presently bedazzled with rainbow banners and badges, has boldly claimed it “believe[s] we have a moral and business obligation to engage on the fundamental issues of equality and fairness.” But, according to data gathered by the National Institute on Money in Politics and compiled by Corporate Accountability Action, AT&T has made at least 327 donations totaling $204,350 to 133 anti-LGBTQ legislators. (AT&T declined to comment on the report.)

AT&T isn’t alone. General Motors — which boasts of being “first automaker to run an LGBTQ-specific ad” — made 63 donations totaling $51,000 to 35 anti-LGBTQ legislators, according to Corporate Accountability Action’s research. (GM did not respond to a request for comment.) The Coca-Cola Company claims to show its support for the gay community by doing everything “from supporting LGBTQI pride parades to running rainbow-colored billboards.” Meanwhile, Corporate Accountability Action found Coke and its affiliated PAC have made 28 donations totaling $9,550 to 23 anti-LGBTQ legislators. Asked about the gifts, a representative for Coca-Cola noted that the donations in question occurred before the company “updated our political contributions criteria” in the fall of 2020, declaring explicitly that “candidates will not be eligible for a political contribution from The Coca-Cola Company or the Coca-Cola PAC if they have made egregious remarks” on a range of topics that including the “LGBT community.” (Coke “paused” political giving in response to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.)

The beer giant Anheuser-Busch professes a commitment to “promoting inclusion and diversity across our business and supporting the communities we stand by whether through impactful partnerships or empowering our teams.” But the company has made 48 donations totaling $35,350 to 29 anti-LGBTQ legislators, according to the group. (Anheuser-Busch did not respond to a request for comment.) NBCUniversal — celebrating Pride Month with oodles of queer content on its platforms and channels — made 16 donations totaling $24,000 to 11 anti-LGBTQ legislators. (NBC Universal did not respond to a request for comment either.)

But it’s not just local lawmakers standing in the way of progress for the gay community. The U.S. Senate has the opportunity this month to pass the Equality Act, a law that would federally prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation — if enough Republicans get on board to pass it. The Equality Act first passed the House back in 2019, but then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to bring it to the Senate floor for a vote.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) has been highlighting the hypocrisy of those corporations offering lip service in support of gay rights, while also offering material support to McConnell. “AT&T donated $56,295 to Mitch McConnell’s 2020 campaign — while he was actively blocking the Equality Act. But what a great Pride Twitter banner,” Jayapal tweeted last week. She went on to call out American Airlines (which donated $46,617 to Mitch McConnell’s 2020 campaign), Walmart ($150,000 to McConnell and other GOP senators), and the defense contractor Raytheon (whose PAC gave $18,500 to McConnell’s campaign).

Jayapal and the others have a good reason to speak up: because it works. As Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage,” has written, gay marriage is legal today because of similar pressure activists applied more than a decade ago. “They demonstrated that shaming and shunning could amount to more than an online pile-on and serve as a potent tactic for political change,” Issenberg wrote recently.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has vowed to have a vote on the Equality Act this month. If all 50 Democrats support the bill — and it’s not a sure thing, as Sen. Joe Manchin, the lone Democrat who has not signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill, expressed reservations about the legislation when it passed the house two years ago — 10 Republicans would still need to sign on for the measure to pass.

The best way that Congress can celebrate #Pride is by passing the Equality Act. It’s time.

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) June 8, 2021