One of the best, most jolting, and cruelly overlooked gay books from 2012 was Benjamin Wise's William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker [and Kindle]. Born in 1885, Percy was, "a queer plantation owner, poet, and memoirist. Though he is best known as a conservative apologist of the southern racial order, in this telling Wise creates a complex and surprising portrait of a cultural relativist, sexual liberationist, and white supremacist. We follow Percy as he travels from Mississippi around the globe and, always, back again to the Delta. Wise's exploration brings depth and new meaning to Percy's already compelling life story--his prominent family's troubled history, his elite education and subsequent soldiering in World War I, his civic leadership during the Mississippi River flood of 1927, his mentoring of writers Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, and the writing and publication of his classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. This biography sets Percy's life and search for meaning in the context of his history in the Deep South and his experiences in the gay male world of the early twentieth century. In Wise's hands, these seemingly disparate worlds become one."
The next time people claim the gay rights movement is a recent invention or that you’re anachronistically imposing a modern concept on a pre-Stonewall era that could not possibly have supported the idea, remind them of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1896, he wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. In 1897 with the leaders of the gay journal Der Eigene, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was “Justice through science.” Their first goal was to overturn the notorious 1871 German law Paragraph 175, criminalizing male homosexuality. Not only did they campaign openly and publicly, they urged prominent people to sign their petition to repeal the law. Among the 5,000 signatories were Einstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Hesse, and Rilke. When the bill to repeal came before the Reichstag in 1898, it failed, and, infuriated by their hypocrisy, Hirschfeld contemplated outing various members of parliament who had voted against it. Undaunted by the defeat, the committee continued to get the bill reintroduced repeatedly over the next decades.
Thirty-four years before Kinsey, Hirschfeld collected detailed information about sexual behavior in surveys from 10,000 people
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