Thursday, November 12, 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.
The popularity of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), and Hanya Yanagihara’s recent hit A Little Life (2015) indicates the profound connection people feel with LGBTQ+ fiction. But who authored the first gay American novel? Scholars have proposed origins for the tradition in Margaret Sweat's Ethel's Love-Life (1859) and Bayard Taylor's Joseph and His Friend: A Tale of Pennsylvania (1870).
However, Professor Don James McLaughlin of the University of Tulsa makes the case in this virtual talk that A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel serialized in The Atlantic by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), is significant for being the first novel to explore major, now-familiar facets of a burgeoning modern gay American consciousness.
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