sometimes i think about gay people who lived centuries ago who thought they were all alone who imagined a world where they could live openly as themselves who met in secret spoke in code defied everything and everyone just to exist and i’m like..i gotta sit down. whew i gotta sit down
this is why this sappho fragment hits me so hard
If this little book should see the light after its 100 years of entombment, I would like its readers to know that the author was a lover of her own sex and devoted the best years of her life in striving for the political equality and social and moral elevation of women.
“The Great Geysers of California” by Laura De Force Gordon, 1879, unearthed from a 100-year-old time capsule in San Francisco, 1979.
Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt spent half a century as samizdat, available only to a slack handful of people who had known him in life. And then it got properly published and is incredible! It records facets of working class gay life in London that we would never have had recorded otherwise!
But it always makes me think how many other manuscripts like it were lost - Stuff written by working class gays about the forbidden Stuff, then just hoyed in a drawer or tucked up in the lid of a typewriter case and never seen again.
Which is why we need to write.
Also, 12th of February! Record a day diary for the Mass Observation Archive’s QUEER EVERYDAY!
