In the 1990s, gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists adopted the term LGB, supplanting narrower terms such as "gay or lesbian". Terminology eventually shifted to LGBT, as transgender people became more accepted within the movement. Around that time, some activists began to reclaim the term queer, seeing it as a more radical and inclusive umbrella term, though others reject it, due to its history as a pejorative. In recognition of this, the 2010s saw the adoption of LGBTQ, and other more inclusive variants. (Full article...)
The Well of Loneliness is a lesbian novel by British author Radclyffe Hall that was first published in 1928 by Jonathan Cape. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" (homosexuality) is apparent from an early age. She finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while serving as an ambulance driver during the First World War, but their happiness together is marred by social isolation and rejection, which Hall depicts as the typical sufferings of "inverts", with predictably debilitating effects. The novel portrays "inversion" as a natural, God-given state and makes an explicit plea: "Give us also the right to our existence".
Shortly after the book's publication, it became the target of a campaign by James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express. Douglas wrote that "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel." A British court judged it obscene because it defended "unnatural practices between women"; not until 1949, twenty years later, was it again published in England. In the United States, the book survived legal challenges in New York state and in Customs Court. (Full article...)
I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
Helmut Kolle was a German modernist painter who emigrated to France where he lived together with art collector Wilhelm Uhde for the rest of his life (which was unfortunately cut short by heart disease). Kolle's paintings almost exclusively feature males—at the start of his career rather effeminate-looking boys, sometime later muscular men, particularly sailors, toreros, and soldiers, usually in poses that are rarely overtly homosexual but certainly suggestive, at least to gay viewers. In this painting from about 1927 a torero puts his hand softly on the shoulder of a picador.
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