Gregory Woods

Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods looks at the informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called "the Homintern" by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some defense against dominant heterosexual exclusion, the grouping brought solidarity, celebrated talent, and, in doing so, invigorated the majority culture. Traveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this book presents a portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.

How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World

Homintern

Account of male gay literature across cultures and languages and from ancient times to the present. It traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion. It includes writers of wide-ranging literary status (from high cultural icons like Virgil, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Proust to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett) and of various locations (from Mishima s Tokyo and Abu Nuwas s Baghdad to David Leavitt s New York). It also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men.

The Male Tradition

A History of Gay Literature

Quidnunc

Walter Baxter

Look down in Mercy

L. P. Hartley

Harness Room

May I Say Nothing is a collection of homo-erotic verse on both personal and broader social themes. The book is in three parts. The first opens with formal poems about key figures in past gay culture, whom Woods implicitly connects with aspects of contemporary life. The second part consists of twelve-line poems on themes progressing from desire, through consummation, to loss and the renewal of desire. The third part contains mainly longer, narrative poems in a variety of forms, exploring themes of masculinity and power, love and hatred, youth and ageing. May I Say Nothing integrates his celebrations of male physicality into a context of repression and violence. The victory is in the fact that the beauty of the male body survives the questionable causes it is expected to serve.

May I Say Nothing

Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2022 Gregory Woods is the leading British critic and historian of gay literature. He has published five previous Carcanet poetry collections, the first being We Have The Melon (1992). Ten years in the making, Records of an Incitement to Silence revisits many of the original themes, but here Woods brings them closer to the endgame. The sequence of stripped-down, unrhymed sonnets, and the longer poems that accentuate it, suggest a missing narrative: the growth of the individual in a world of upheaval, the search for and loss of love, the formation of memories, the limits of what can truthfully be said, the traces we leave and the chance of their survival. 'One of my creative habits,' Woods writes, 'is the wringing-out of a single form until it's bone dry: the unrhymed sonnets; the monosyllabic syllabics of the long poem 'Hat Reef Loud'; the incompatible yoking-together of iambic pentameter and dactylic trimeter in the long poem 'No Title Yet'.' His formal stringency intensifies the poems' emotional and erotic charge, their celebration and their plaint.

Records of an Incitement to Silence

An Ordinary Dog is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision. They bear sceptical witness to - what? To the affecting ordinariness of human needs, to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about desire: sacred and profane, serene and frantic, refined and grubby - often betrayed by cussedness, always complicated by external events. Looking back to times of crisis when history is endured and re-invented, An Ordinary Dog explores where myth degenerates into faith and reason falters. The mood veers between equanimity and desperation; the focus between detachment and intimate involvement.

An Ordinary Dog

Michael Nelson

'[Nelson's] style is swift and straightforward, his narrative gift considerable ... Consistently diverting, this may be the novel about homosexuality to end all novels on the subject .. . [W]ill make many a reader's day.' - Julian MacLaren-Ross, "Punch" 'Talented, amusing ... the story is told with sustained suspense: the various men in it are not merely types, but flesh and blood, even if one wishes that Patrick had never been born.' - John Betjeman, "Daily Telegraph" 'Odiously funny and delightfully unwholesome ... a distinct relief after the ponderous treatment homosexuality has tended to get in some recent novels.' - "Sunday Times" '[S]harp, witty, malicious ... wonderfully developed in the best Machiavellian tradition.' - Malcolm Bradbury, "New York Times Book Review" 'Classic high camp.' - "Books and Bookmen" Patrick, the book's opening line tells us, is 'very, very rich'. He's also single, and he has his sights set on Nicholas Milestone, a handsome young provincial journalist. Having lured Nicholas to London with the promise of a job on a tabloid magazine, Patrick moves the young man into his suite at a posh hotel, where he lavishes money and expensive gifts on him. Nicholas enjoys his luxurious new lifestyle and meeting Patrick's amusing and fashionable friends, but he soon understands what Patrick's really after. Knowing he won't be able to resist the older man's advances forever, the greedy Nicholas will have to choose between his conscience and his newly acquired love of money. "A Room in Chelsea Square" (1958), the semi-autobiographical second novel by Michael Nelson (1921-1990), was published anonymously both because of its frank gay content at a time when homosexuality was still illegal and because its characters were thinly veiled portrayals of prominent London literary figures. Witty, clever, and very funny, Nelson's novel has long been recognized as a gay classic and returns to print in this edition, which features a new introduction by Gregory Woods.

A Room in Chelsea Square

Obra polémica que estudia la literatura gay masculina desde la Antigüedad hasta nuestros días, incluyendo asismismo la visión que tienen de este mundo los escritores no homosexuales.

Historia de la literatura gay

Arguing that homosexual poetry is part of the mainstream of poetic writing--not a distinct and differentiated category within it--Gregory Woods provides a fastidious study of homosexual poetry in the twentieth century that emphasizes the homo-erotic themes in the works of D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Thom Gunn. Woods's controlled and elegant study demonstrates that a critic who ignores the sexual orientation of a poet, particularly a love poet, risks overlooking the significance of the poetry itself.

Gregory Woods

About

Books

Join the club