For some years now, June 28 has been reserved on the calendar to celebrate Pride Day. This holiday, whose purpose is none other, as the word says, than to reaffirm the feeling of pride about sexual and gender identities and orientations, chose this date in commemoration of the Stonewall riots of 1969, considered the first time in the story in which the LGTBIQ community fought together against a system that repressed them.
Throughout history, there are many novels that have spoken openly about homosexuality and transsexuality, even knowing that their authors would almost certainly end up being persecuted for it. Here is a small sample of some of them.
If there is someone who promoted and defended the LGTBIQ movement in its pages at a time when it was persecuted and punished, it is none other than Virginia Woolf. The author did not hide her bisexuality and tried to talk about this and other issues in some of her works, for example, in Orlando. In this novel, written as a tribute to fellow writer Vita Sackville-West, with whom she had an affair, there are several themes that the author wanted to reflect, such as homosexual relationships and transsexuality, without a doubt, a taboo at the time and a challenge to established conventions.
As the story progresses, the protagonist experiences the sudden transition from a male body to a female body. But society will not be her only problem, as bureaucratic issues will also arise that she had not foreseen. And it is that her new identity does not agree with that of her property deeds, so Orlando will be devoid of assets. “He was a man; he was a woman; he knew the secrets and shared the weaknesses of both”.
This classic of literature, worthy of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983, could not be missing from this list. It centers on the story of two sisters: Nettie, who works as a missionary in Africa, and Celie, who lives in the American South and is forced to walk down the aisle with a brutal man who constantly abuses her. just like his father did. It won't be until she meets Shug Avery, a well-known singer, that she finds the courage to take control of her life. And to free herself from her past.
The book made the leap to the big screen at the hands of Steven Spielberg, who years later regretted having softened some aspects, such as the relationship between Shug and Celie, "very detailed in Alice's novel, but that would not allow us to access a PG-13 rating,” the filmmaker told Entertainment Weekly. “I took something that was very erotic and intentional and boiled it down to a simple kiss. And I was heavily criticized for it,” admitted the director.
The relationship that Patricia Highsmith created in her novel Carol, initially titled The Price of Salt, has over the years become an icon of lesbian culture, both in literature and film, after Todd Haynes adapt it to the big screen. Set in 1950s New York, its protagonists are Carol Aird and Therese Belivet. The first is trapped in an unhappy marriage and the other is a young shop assistant who aspires to a better life. An immediate attraction arises between them, each time more intense and profound, that will change their lives forever.
Being a leader and homosexual are two things that are not at odds. It seems obvious, however, it was not always so. For this reason, the fact that Mary Renault claimed it in her work, published in 1972, was a milestone, especially since her protagonist was none other than Alexander the Great. The author does it deftly and uses Bagoas, her faithful servant and lover, as the narrator. Thus, she offers a more intimate point of view of the personality of the conqueror that has never been treated before, at least not in depth. The book marked a before and after, since there were not many historical novels that had been told with this approach to date.
Everyone knows the story of Dracula, but very few of Carmilla, the female antecedent of the famous Count of Transylvania who inspired Bram Stoker to create his work.
The author and creator of this lesbian vampire, a groundbreaking protagonist for the time, is the Irishman Sheridan Le Fanu. The author was clear that he would follow a homosexual erotic theme as well as a gothic one. And it is that Carmilla does not attack randomly. She only bites extremely beautiful young women in the neck. A dynamic that her colleague will repeat half a century later.
Although The Picture of Dorian Gray is now considered a classic that should be read before dying, it must be said that at the time it brought more than one headache to its author. And it is that it was branded as an openly homosexual work, which led the monarchy itself to label it an "aberration". But the qualification was not only in words, because the writer ended up behind bars for two years for writing it.
His trial was the most mediatic. Wilde was a very popular character in British society at the time, so an exhaustive follow-up was made of both the work and the judicial process followed by the author who, by the way, despite being married with children, never hid his preferences. for the male company.
“This is the story of the most beautiful and delicate girl who ever wet a bed. She was called Evangeline Musset and had been decorated with a huge red cross for the dedication, the relief and the distraction that she provided to the girls in their posterior parts, in their anterior parts and in any of those parts that so cruelly makes them suffer ” .
With this statement, the intentions of this work by Djuna Barnes are clear, which parodies the crazy sapphic circle of Natalie Barney and her Académie des Femmes with irony, acidity and a lot of humor, something not common at the time. First published in 1928, the book raises issues such as affective inbreeding, transvestism or the differences between sex and gender.
