Download Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World AudioBook Free
In the hugely ambitious review that crosses continents, dialects, and almost a hundred years, Gregory Woods identifies the ways that homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Increasing from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation age, this publication examines an interval where increased awareness made approval of homosexuality one of the steps of modernity. Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called "the Homintern" (an echo of Lenin's "Comintern") by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such sites connected gay authors, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some security against prominent heterosexual exclusion, the grouping helped bring solidarity, celebrated ability, and, in doing this, invigorated the majority culture. Woods introduces an enormous ensemble of gifted and remarkable characters, the majority of them working with surprising openness, but also explores such issues as creative influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Touring from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York, and beyond, this sharply witnessed, warm-spirited book reveals a surpassing portrait of 20th-century gay culture and the women and men who both redefined themselves and altered history.
