front cover of Coming Out, Moving Forward
Coming Out, Moving Forward
Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History
R. Richard Wagner
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2020
Coming Out, Moving Forward, the second volume in R. Richard Wagner’s groundbreaking work on gay history in Wisconsin, outlines the challenges that LGBT Wisconsinites faced in their efforts to right past oppressions and secure equality in the post-Stonewall period between 1969 and 2000. During this era, Wisconsin made history as the first state to enact a gay rights law prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. It also became the first state to elect three openly gay/lesbian persons to Congress.

In this volume, R. Richard Wagner draws on historical research and materials from his extensive personal archive to not only chronicle an important movement, but also to tell the stories of the state’s LGBT pioneers—from legislators and elected officials to activists, businesspeople, and everyday citizens. Coming Out, Moving Forward documents the rich history of Wisconsin’s LGBT individuals and communities as they pushed back against injustice and found ways to live openly and proudly as themselves.

Coming Out, Moving Forward is a continuation to the first volume in this series, We’ve Been Here All Along.
 
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front cover of Coming Out, Moving Forward
Coming Out, Moving Forward
Wisconsin's Recent Gay History
R. Richard Wagner
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2020
Coming Out, Moving Forward, the second volume in R. Richard Wagner’s groundbreaking work on gay history in Wisconsin, outlines the challenges that LGBT Wisconsinites faced in their efforts to right past oppressions and secure equality in the post-Stonewall period between 1969 and 2000. During this era, Wisconsin made history as the first state to enact a gay rights law prohibiting discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. It also became the first state to elect three openly gay/lesbian persons to Congress.

In this volume, R. Richard Wagner draws on historical research and materials from his extensive personal archive to not only chronicle an important movement, but also to tell the stories of the state’s LGBT pioneers—from legislators and elected officials to activists, businesspeople, and everyday citizens. Coming Out, Moving Forward documents the rich history of Wisconsin’s LGBT individuals and communities as they pushed back against injustice and found ways to live openly and proudly as themselves.

Coming Out, Moving Forward is a continuation to the first volume in this series, We’ve Been Here All Along.
 
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Coming Out of My Skin
Jean-Baptiste Phou
Seagull Books, 2023
A compelling memoir that focuses on the intersectionality of race and sexuality experienced by a gay Asian man living in a white world.
 
Born to Chinese-Cambodian parents in France, Jean-Baptiste Phou has pursued a diverse artistic career since 2008. Through his public views and artistic works, he has focused mainly on the experiences of Asians in France. Up until now, he’s always been careful not to raise issues of sexuality—in particular, his homosexuality.
 
In this searing memoir, Phou faces his fears and shame to examine the role his ethnic origin has played in the construction of his sexual identity and his romantic relationships in a predominantly white environment. An astute observer of the various ways in which his body has been perceived, Phou explores how these perceptions have shaped his relationship with himself and others. How does a marginalized person develop emotionally and build, reclaim, and express their sexuality? Drawing on various works of history, sociology, gender studies, literature, and popular culture, Phou sensitively examines various strategies developed in response to this question.
 
Being gay in a largely straight world is difficult but being Asian within this sexual minority can be a doubly oppressive experience. Coming Out of My Skin deftly tackles this challenge and aspires for a reconciliation that can empower people of sexual and racial minorities to joyfully inhabit their bodies.
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Coming Out of Nowhere
Alaska Homestead Poems
Linda Schandelmeier
University of Alaska Press, 2018
“The earth near our place/ was cradle, / it rocked us— / became our skin. / House doors opened, / spilled us out, / we disappeared into trees— / they clothed us in delirious green. /. . . We knew the song / of this place, made it up, / sang it—”
 
Homestead life is often romanticized as a valiant, resilient family persisting in the clean isolation of pristine wilderness, living off the land and depending only on each other. But there can be a darker side to this existence.

Linda Schandelmeier was raised on a family homestead six miles south of the fledgling town of Anchorage, Alaska in the 1950s and ’60s. But hers is not a typical homestead story. In this book, part poetic memoir and part historical document, a young girl comes of age in a family fractured by divorce and abuse. Schandelmeier does not shy away from these details of her family history, but she also recognizes her childhood as one that was unique and nurturing, and many of her poems celebrate homestead life. Her words hint at her way of surviving and even transcending the remoteness by suggesting a deeper level of human experience beyond the daily grind of homestead life; a place in which the trees and mountains are almost members of the family. These are poems grounded in the wilds that shimmer with a mythic quality. Schandelmeier’s vivid descriptions of homesteading will draw in readers from all types of lives.
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Coming Out of War
Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars
Janis P. Stout
University of Alabama Press, 2005

World War I is widely considered “the Great War” and World War II, “the Good War.” Janis Stout thinks of them as two parts of a whole that continues to engage historians and literary scholars searching for an understanding of both the actual war experiences and the modern culture of grief they embody. In Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars Stout argues that poetry, of all the arts, most fully captures and conveys those cultural responses.

While probing the work of such well known war poets as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Randall Jarrell, Stout also highlights the impact of the wars on lesser studied, but equally compelling, sources such as the music of Charles Ives and Cole Porter, Aaron Copland and Irving Berlin. She challenges the commonplace belief that war poetry came only from the battlefield and was written only by men by examining the wartime writings of women poets such as Rose Macaulay, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks. She also challenges the assumption that World War II did not produce poetry of distinction by studying the work of John Ciardi, Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. While emphasizing aesthetic continuity between the wars, Stout stresses that the poetry that emerged from each displays a greater variety than is usually recognized.

A final chapter considers Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem as a culmination and embodiment of the anti-war tradition in 20th-century poetry and music, and speculates on the reasons why, despite their abundance and eloquence, these expressions of grief and opposition to war have effected so little change.
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