Michael Bronski is an independent scholar, journalist, and writer who’s been involved in social justice movements since the 1960s. He was active in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and theorist since 1969. He is the author of numerous award-winning books, including The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (1998), Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics (2015), and, most recently, A Queer History of the United States for Young People (2019). In 2017 he was awarded the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. Past recipients include Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Martin Duberman, Samuel R. Delany, Lillian Faderman, Alison Bechdel, and Jonathan Ned Katz. He is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.
In part two, the purposes and ambitions of queer literature change in the ‘80s with the rise of AIDS and a punishing, homophobic backlash. These cultural conditions birthed a new political awareness—one that linked queer communities to other historically marginalized and oppressed people.
In part one of this candid personal memoir, Michael Bronski recalls the birth, life, and future of a queer polity of literature, circa 1964 to 1980.
In his lifetime, writer and activist Charles Shively filled his Boston rowhouse with the printed residue of 20th-century queer liberation. His friend Michael Bronski recalls what he found when packing it up for the Beinecke Library archive—poetry at the heart of politics.
