Banner image from Vecteezy.com
"Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI) Pride Month is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. The Stonewall Uprising was a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as "Gay Pride Day," but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the "day" soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events. Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBTQ Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally."
Source: Library of Congress
Proclamation on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI) Pride Month
This libguide is a collaborative endeavor of the Hay Library and Western's DEI Committee.
(This LibGuide is by no means an exhaustive list of resources, but we do endeavor to keep this list of materials updated.)
Select the individual's name to view their works available in the Hay Library or online. Select the individual's picture to view their biography information.
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry ushered in a new era of U.S. theater history. She brought to the stage the realistic portrayal of urban, working-class African American life. Writer James Baldwin offered insights into the impact of her work through his description of the staging of her landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun: “I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater,” he related in a 1969 introduction to Hansberry’s adapted autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black. “And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage.”
But Hansberry did more than just expand the content of realistic stage drama to include African Americans. When her additional writings became available in the 1980s, several literary critics argued for an even broader recognition of her stature. In his 1991 book Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity, Steven R. Carter commented: “When Lorraine Hansberry died at 34, she left a wide and rich dramatic heritage, although only a small part of it was visible then, and some parts have yet to become known. When all of her work is brought into view, she should be seen as one of the most important playwrights of this century, not simply on the basis of the one play already considered a classic, but on her collective work.” In recognition of her accomplishments, Hansberry was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2017. Impressive as her achievement is in the field of literature, she has now become recognized as a pioneering defender of lesbian relationships, as part of a wider campaign to apply the principles of the U.S. Constitution to all disadvantaged groups. Hansberry was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 1999.
Truman Capote (1924-1984) was one of the most famous and controversial figures in contemporary American literature. The ornate style and dark psychological themes of his early fiction caused reviewers to categorize him as a Southern Gothic writer. However, other works display a humorous and sentimental tone. As Capote matured, he became a leading practitioner of "New Journalism," popularizing a genre that he called the nonfiction novel.
The British author Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was part of the "art for art's sake" movement in English literature at the end of the 19th century. He is best known for his brilliant, witty comedies.
At the age of 23 Wilde entered Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1878 he was awarded the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Ravenna." He attracted a group of followers, and they initiated a personal cult, self-consciously effete and artificial. "The first duty in life," Wilde wrote in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894), "is to be as artificial as possible." After leaving Oxford he expanded his cult. His iconoclasm contradicted the Victorian era's easy pieties, but the contradiction was one of his purposes. Another of his aims was the glorification of youth.
Wilde published his well-received Poems in 1881. The next six years were active ones. He spent an entire year lecturing in the United States and then returned to lecture in England. He applied unsuccessfully for a position as a school inspector. In 1884 he married, and his wife bore him children in 1885 and in 1886. He began to publish extensively in the following year. His writing activity became as intense and as erratic as his life had been for the previous six years. From 1887 to 1889 Wilde edited the magazine Woman's World. His first popular success as a prose writer was The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). The House of Pomegranates (1892) was another collection of his fairy tales.
The English novelist, critic, and essayist Virginia Stephen Woolf (1882-1941) ranks as one of England's most distinguished writers of the period between World War I and World War II. Her novels can perhaps best be described as impressionistic.
Dissatisfied with the novel based on familiar, factual, and external details, Virginia Woolf followed experimental clues to a more internal, subjective, and in a sense more personal rendering of experience than had been provided by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. In the works of these masters the reality of time and experience had formed the stream of consciousness, a concept that probably originated with William James. Virginia Woolf lived in and responded to a world in which certitudes were collapsing under the stresses of changing knowledge, the civilized savagery of war, and new manners and morals. She drew on her personal, sensitive, poetic awareness without rejecting altogether the heritage of literary culture she derived from her family.
The American civil rights movement had many eloquent spokesmen, but few were better known than James Baldwin. A Black, queer novelist and essayist of considerable renown, Baldwin found readers of every race and nationality, though his message reflected bitter disappointment in his native land and its white majority. Throughout his distinguished career Baldwin called himself a "disturber of the peace"--one who revealed uncomfortable truths to a society mired in complacency. As early as 1960 he was recognized as an articulate speaker and passionate writer on racial matters, and at his death in 1987 he was lauded as one of the most respected voices--of any race--in modern American letters.
Baldwin's greatest achievement as a writer was his ability to address American race relations from a psychological perspective. In his essays and fiction the author explored the implications of racism for both the oppressed and the oppressor, suggesting repeatedly that whites as well as blacks suffer in a racist climate. In The Black American Writer: Poetry and Drama, Walter Meserve noted: "People are important to Baldwin, and their problems, generally embedded in their agonizing souls, stimulate him to write.... A humanitarian, sensitive to the needs and struggles of man, he writes of inner turmoil, spiritual disruption, the consequence upon people of the burdens of the world, both White and Black." His legacy lived on in his writings and the many people he inspired. In 2016, the documentary I Am Not Your Negro was based on Baldwin's unfinished manuscript of his memoir titled Remember This House. The film received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature and won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for best documentary.
Rita Mae Brown's writing career has been extraordinary for both the rate and variety of its output. She is best known for her semiautobiographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), which follows its bisexual heroine, Molly Bolt, as she comes of age in Florida, moves to New York City, and rises to prominence as a filmmaker. The novel is often criticized for its undeveloped characters (Molly, most particularly) and polemical voice. Yet others defend Rubyfruit for its humor and social satire and for its massive, international impact as an unabashed celebration of lesbian identity. Initially published by Daughter's Press, the novel was picked up in 1977 by Bantam (which has published most of Brown's work since) and helped create an upsurge of lesbian publishing. Yet Rubyfruit represents just a small fraction of Brown's writing and only one of her many genres. Her first book was a collection of feminist poetry entitled The Hand That Cradles the Rock (1971), and she has published two poetry collections since, Songs to a Handsome Woman (1973) and Poems of Rita Mae Brown (1987).
Kate Bornstein is an American playwright, performance artist, and activist. Born as a male, Bornstein grew up feeling that her personal identity was incomplete. She ultimately underwent gender reassignment surgery and began sharing her life experiences coping with the issue of gender by publishing books and conducting workshops and theatrical performances on the topic.
Bornstein published her first book, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, in 1994. The memoir outlines Bornstein's belief that the current definitions and limitations of gender cause social injustice and prejudice because a number of people do not comfortably fit or easily identify within those constraints of male or female gender roles.
Select the individual's name to view works about them that are available in the Hay Library or online. Select the individual's picture to view their biography information.
Harvey Milk (1930-1978), a San Francisco city politician, helped open the door for LGBTQ+ people in the United States by bringing their civil rights, among many other issues, to the political table. Since Milk's murder in 1978, he has remained a symbol of activism.
Milk's 1977 election to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors brought a message of hope to LGBTQ+ people across the country. Milk served as a city supervisor for less than a year before being murdered along with Mayor George Moscone by a rival politician, but he was instrumental in bringing the gay rights agenda to the attention of the American public. Milk was not a one-issue politician, however. For him, gay issues were merely one part of an overall human rights perspective. During his tragically short political career, Milk battled for a wide range of social reforms in such areas as education, public transportation, child-care, and low-income housing. Milk's murder--and the surprisingly light sentence his killer received by virtue of the famous "Twinkie Defense"--made him a martyr to members of LGBTQ+ communities throughout the United States.
RuPaul was the first Black American, disco-loving drag queen to secure a contract with a major cosmetics company (M.A.C., 1995). RuPaul, a stunning beauty at six-feet-seven-inches in heels, propagated an ethic of self-love, acceptance of others, finger-wagging questioning of convention, and self-promotion not seen since Andy Warhol. Projecting total comfort in his ever-changing identity, RuPaul's gentle warmth brought a new visibility to the world of drag and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) community in general. He hosted a number of drag-themed shows, most notably the hit reality competition series RuPaul's Drag Race. In 2019 RuPaul briefly hosted his own daytime talk show RuPaul.
Bayard Rustin never stood directly in the media spotlight that shone upon other Black activists, but his contributions as a strategist and tactician place him among the most influential of twentieth-century civil rights leaders. In a career spanning more than five decades, Rustin worked on behalf of equal rights with a variety of organizations--including the Communist party, labor unions, and pacifist groups--and exercised a leading role in the creation of two significant civil rights organizations: the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Rustin was particularly instrumental in the development of the nonviolent protest movement that evolved from the Montgomery bus boycott associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. Although it was King who was catapulted into a position of national leadership by the boycott, it was Rustin, a man twenty years King's senior, who provided much of the organizational know-how, political savvy, and theoretical underpinning for King's civil rights victories.
The British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954) was noted for his contributions to mathematical logic and to the early theory, construction, and use of computers. Turing has also become an icon in the LGBTQ+ community for having faced government persecution for living as an openly gay man in the 1950s.
Turing's exceptional mathematical abilities were first generally recognized in his college years (1931-1936) at King's College of Cambridge University. His most important mathematical work, "On Computable Numbers," was written in Cambridge in 1936. In this paper Turing answered a question of great significance to mathematical logic--namely, which functions in mathematics can be computed by an entirely mechanical procedure. His answer was phrased in terms of a theoretical machine (today known as the "Turing machine") which could mechanically carry out these computations. Embodied in the Turing machine idea is the concept of the stored program computer.
International tennis star Billie Jean King (born 1943) did much to win equal treatment for women in sports.
Billie Jean (Moffit) King was born on November 22, 1943, in the southern California city of Long Beach. Both she and her brother, Randy, who would become a professional baseball player, excelled in athletics as children and were encouraged by their father, an engineer for a fire department. Outed as a lesbian in 1981, King used her strength and persistence as she supported women's rights and LGBTQ causes. At the age of 70, she represented the United States at the closing ceremonies of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia. In 2018, she won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award.
Eclectic performer Janelle Monáe rose from her humble beginnings and gained a well‐deserved place in the spotlight for her unique style and vision. She has been compared to music legends Michael Jackson, David Bowie, James Brown, and Grace Jones, but her creative talent and music is all her own, a product of her wild imagination and various influences. After taking on roles in several noteworthy films, Monáe also proved that she was also a talented actress. In 2020, she starred in the popular television series Homecoming.
Marlene Dietrich worked hard to become a mythological Hollywood figure. The German-born Dietrich emerged as a screen idol in the 1930s, was an entertainer of Allied troops during World War II, and ended her career as an age-defying concert singer in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Her many decades of stardom were predicated on her ability to remain sexually ambivalent and mysterious, and she influenced modern pop icons such as Madonna.
Born in Berlin, Maria Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich was the daughter of a policeman who died when she was young. During World War I her stepfather, a colonel, died of battle wounds. Although Dietrich played the violin and the piano, she was not accepted to music school. Thus, following the war, she forsook her middle-class background and embarked on a more dangerous and decadent path: the stage. She gained entry into the Max Rheinhardt School, a renowned theater institution with good connections. Dietrich was on the stage by 1922. With tireless energy, she worked her way through small roles and, as many stage actors did at the time, appeared in silent films.
© 2019 Western Wyoming Community College. Western Wyoming Community College does not
discriminate on the basis of race, color, nation origin,
marital status, sexual preference,
sex, age, religion, political belief, disability, or veteran status, in employment,
admission and/or access to program or activities.