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Through its comprehensive history of post-war queer writing in Boston and San Francisco from the 1940s through the 21st century,
Never By Itself Alone provides a new view of queer history. Grundy intertwines analysis of lesbian, gay, and queer literature of the time, centering voices which have not yet before been explored in existing criticism. The book elevates the underrepresented work of writers of color and those with gender-nonconforming identities, underscores the link between activism and literature, and insists upon the vital importance of radical accounts of race, class and gender in any queer studies worthy of the name.
List of contents
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One. Beginnings (1943-1969)
- Chapter 1. 'Homosexuals in Society': Poetry and Gay Community in the 1940s
- Chapter 2. Identity and Community in The Work of Jack Spicer
- Chapter 3. The Occult School of Boston (1): "Levels above and below"
- Chapter 4. The Occult School of Boston (2): "Queer Shoulders at the Wheel"
- Part Two. Gay Liberation in Boston (1969-1983)
- Chapter 5. "A Gay Presence": John Wieners and Fag Rag
- Chapter 6. "My Real Name": Racial Framings, Queer Imaginings
- Chapter 7. "We cannot live without our lives": From the Combahee River Collective to This Bridge Called My Back
- Part Three. Bay Area Communities: Lesbian Feminism to the AIDS era (1969-Present)
- Chapter 8. "She Who": Judy Grahn and Bay Area Gay Women's Liberation
- Chapter 9. "The first everything": Pat Parker
- Chapter 10. "blasting the true story into breath": Writing, Work and Socialist Feminism
- Chapter 11. New Narrative, New Communities from Left Write to AIDS
- Coda. "When politics show"
- Works Cited
- Index
About the author
David Grundy is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019), and co-editor with Lauri Scheyer of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). Formerly a Teaching Associate at the University of Cambridge and a British Academy Fellow at the University of Warwick, he is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin.
Summary
Providing an unprecedented exploration of key moments in queer literary history, Never By Itself Alone changes our sense of both the American literary and political landscapes from the late 1940s through the 21st century. Grundy presents the first comprehensive history of post-war queer writing in Boston and San Francisco, intertwining analysis of lesbian, gay, and queer writing, and insisting on the link between activism and literature.
The book centers a host of underrepresented writers, especially writers of color and those with gender non-conforming identities, and challenges the Stonewall exceptionalism of queer historiography. Starting with Robert Duncan's 1944 essay, 'The Homosexual in Society', one of the first significant public defenses of homosexuality in the US, Grundy takes the reader through pioneering works by queer voices of the era, including Adrian Stanford's Black and Queer, the first published book by an out, Black gay poet in the US; the Boston collective Fag Rag and their radical reconsideration of family, private property and the State; the Combahee River Collective, whose Black Feminist analysis drew together race, class, and sexuality; the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, in which women of color spoke truth to power, together; and New Narrative writing, which audaciously mixed Marxism, porn and gossip while uniting against the New Right. Linking these works to the context which produced them, Grundy uncovers the communities formed around activism and small press publishing during this era and elevates neglected voices to narrate a history that before now has never been told in its entirety.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Never By Itself Alone is a rigorous and unmatched work of both literary criticism and queer scholarship which underscores the vital importance of radical accounts of race, class, and gender in any queer studies worthy of the name.
Additional text
Never By Itself Alone is a colossal study of how poetry and poets can be based in, creative of, and inspired by, community. In doing this study, Grundy creates a literary, yet real, tradition or network or confederation of explicit, self-consciously transgressive, Gay, Lesbian, and Trans poetry with activism, stretching from the 1940s through the 1990s and beyond. Such a joy for me to read, to catch up with my antecedents and those coming after, and to be reminded of the overlap of Gay grassroots publications and people. As Grundy puts us all into contexts that become a river of similarities, solidarities, and differences -- I'm weeping my way through. That I had to wait so long to feel what a thick weaving this has all been, the fast stream hard won amidst the cruelties, and steadfastly continuing.
