The gay love letters book
Reviewed by Hayden Thorne
FROM THE AUTHOR&#;S Novel PAGE:
My Dear Boy is an anthology of gay adoration letters documenting the heartbreak and bliss of love between men for almost two thousand years. Emperor Marcus Arelius, Bo Juyi, Saint Anselm, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Mashida Toyonoshin, Thomas Gray, William Beckford, Walt Whitman, Tchaikovsky, Henry James, Countee Cullen, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg are just a few of the correspondents included, who range from kings and aristocrats, musicians and artists, military men and monks, to farm labourers and herring merchants, political activists and aesthetes, black poets and Japanese actors, drag queens and hustlers.
For more information, visit Mr. Norton&#;s page.
REVIEW:
Rictor Norton&#;s book is a treasure trove of primary sources for writers, scholars, and casual fans/readers of homosexuality (or homosexual romance) through history. The book&#;s introduction is prolonged and detailed as Norton explains the purpose of the volume in relation to its place in the explore of same-sex adore through the centuries. He gives us a qui
In , hundreds of treasure letters between two queer WWII soldiers, Gilbert Bradley and Gordon Bowsher, were discovered and then sold to Owestry Town Museum.
One of them said, &#;Wouldn&#;t it be superb if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in romance we are.&#; The want came true. Their story was made into a movie that premiered at Tribeca in
The concise film is called &#;The Letter Men,&#; and is directed by Andy Vellentine.
A more enlightened time
During WWII, soldiers who were discovered as gay could be imprisoned, or much worse. That is why the men hoped they would be discovered in the future, under circumstances where they could be appreciated, rather than hidden.
For more information about the movie, check out this article. And to read the full story of the men, check out the BBC article linked to above and this article here.
Enjoy! And happy lgbtq+ fest month. Check out our new podcast Socially Awkward History!
In WWII, Two Male lover Soldiers&#; Forbidden Romance Lives On In Their Cherish Letters
Soldiers separated from their loved ones during World War II gazed at photographs of their sweethearts, and wrote admire letters in the hopes that one day, they would be reunited and start a family. One soldier, Gilbert Bradley, wrote his letters, too, but he could never hold a photo of his true love because he was a man named Gordon Bowsher.
For decades, their love story remained a secret, and it was hidden away from the eyes of the planet. Gilbert Bradley died in , and an estate company cleaned out his house and sold his letters to an antique dealer who specialized in war ephemera. A historian and volunteer at the Oswestry Museum in Shropshire, England named Mark Hignett stumbled upon the letters on eBay while he was searching for historic documents from his hometown. At first, Mark Hignett thought that Gilbert Bradley was writing to a girlfriend or fiance, because they simply signed the letters with the letter “G”. Once he realized that “G” stood for Gordon Bowsher, he was
6 &#; 9 inches, pages, softcover
ISBN
Design by
Co-published by Inventory Press & Library Stack
Available for Pre-order
Shipping September
"This book skillfully and lovingly re-conceives of typography as a prime vessel for smuggling, as an instrument for remembering and imagining, and as both a type keeper and time traveler."
—Tauba Auerbach
"Yes, yes and more yes! This is the book everyone's mothers brothers cousins uncle and then some have been waiting for. It's all that and a bag of percolated barbecue truffle potato chips. If thats not enough, and you may think it isn't, one gets as a bonus the glorious G. B. Jones being interviewed in poetic depth-sublime."
—Vaginal Davis
"The word "erasure" makes me think of erasers. This book is a pencil. Record with it."
—Ellen Lupton
A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure is a toolkit for writing and remembering queer and trans histories. Expanding on Nat Pyper’s series of fonts whose letterforms derive from the life stories and printed traces of countercultural queers of the last several decades