Not Tantamount To Rarity: Fifty Years of Collecting

The department holds LGBT Studies materials in all collecting areas described in the department guide and in this exhibit, from incunabula to lesbian pulp fiction; from the first "gay study" in English (1883) to paperback popular psychology. In addition to printed materials there are personal papers and oral histories.
The material enhances the Department's holdings of importance in the social and cultural history of Los Angeles, to include interrelated materials of persons from ethnic, racial, and other minorities.
Collections from LGBT persons place their actions and creativity with other Los Angeles history and indicate how LGBT persons themselves created the context for other events and social change, particularly during the early years of liberation.

John Addington Symonds, 1840 - 1893. A Problem in Greek Ethics. [London?] 1883. With the author's revisions and deletions made in preparation for publication as an appendix to Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion, 1897. It was suppressed. Ten copies printed privately for the author's use. [no.5]. Autograph of H. Ellis on fly leaf. With Symonds's note: This essay was written at Clifton Hill House about 1874, printed by Ballantyne & Hanson at Edinburgh in 1883. Special Collections SRLF
In this work, the first "gay study" in English, Symonds refers to German writers before him (late 1700s), writers who also looked to ancient Greece for an apologia of homosexuality (a word recently coined and not then in usage). He also refers to more recent writers, such as Sir Richard Burton. The Symonds heirs suppressed publication of this revision in Ellis's work. The work is rich in allusions to Greek literature, quoting, for example, Maximus Tyrius: "He dares to court his friend in daylight and rejoices in his love. He wrestles with him in the playground, and runs with him in the race, goes afield with him to the hunt, and in battle fights for glory at his side." At the bottom of the right hand page shown is Symonds's note referring to the work of Sir Richard F. Burton.

John Addington Symonds, 1840 - 1893. Studies in Sexual Inversion Embodying A Study in Greek Ethics and A Study in Modern Ethics. [New York]: The Medical Press of New York, 1964. On cover: The Classic Study of Homosexuality in Ancient and Modern Times. To be added

A Problem in Modern Ethics was first printed posthumously in 1901. This combination of both works was evidently first printed privately in London in 1928. Out of copyright reprints of works like Sir Richard Francis Burton's "Terminal Essay" and Symonds's essays were done for erotic interest as much as education in the 1960s when censorship began to be relaxed. At the same time circulating these 19th century works perpetuated outmoded attitudes and terminology - "sexual inversion" - in the very decade of liberation. Although, as seen above, Symonds was to have published with Havelock Ellis, this work has nothing to do with Ellis's influential work with the same title.

Grecian Guild Pictorial. v.1 no.2 (1955 Winter).
To be added
"Body building" magazines began about 1908 with Physical Culture, a publication of Bernarr Macfadden. There were others, but by the 1940s and 1950s they were still masking themselves with titles such as Adonis, Apollo, Grecian Guild Pictorial. This issue even carries an article on Greek sculpture, copying texts such as those of Victorians J. A. Symonds and Walter Pater, who had written about Greek art and wrestling - Pater about 1894 in his essay "The Age of Athletic Prizemen: A Chapter in Greek Art." The naïve text in this magazine relates: "The Grecian love of physical perfection was the natural companion to their perfection in art. It expressed itself in physical culture and athletic contests ... to them the male physique at its best was among the most sublime forms of beauty."
The cover photo is of Steven Wengryn, once termed the "Liberace of physique models."
Magazines such as this are beginning to be collected by libraries. Paul Monette had copies of these, although not transferred with his papers to UCLA.

Paul Monette. Borrowed Time. First draft. 1987? 404 leaves total. Typescript and holograph. 2 selected leaves [scanned copy enlarged and scanned copy original size]. Published as and also shown, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1988, cf. pages 20 - 23. In: Monette, Paul. Papers, 1945 - 1995. Collection 1707. Box. 17 f.42
Shown at left is a leaf from the beginning of the first typescript of this work about the death of his lover Roger Horwitz from AIDS. The two travel to Greece, with a stay in Athens, then a visit to Delphi and to Crete, Santorini, Mykonos, and Delos. Monette wrote of this time stolen from the disease: "This was the last full blast of sunlight in our life."
This is but one of thousands of examples of complete manuscripts of literary works held by the Dept., enabling researchers to study the work from conception to publication, and in this case to see the author's mind at work.

Shown at right is a page which was together with the first draft typescript, an added holograph leaf in which Monette suddenly discovers and states a major idea of this section: "Impossible to measure the symbolic weight of the place [Greece] to a gay man." Later in this section he elaborates: "But a gay man seeks his history in mythic fragments, random as blocks of stone in the ruins covered in Greek characters ...." He alludes to the fragments of meaning for lesbian women: "We have the poems of Sappho because the one rolled linen copy stoppered a wine jug in a cave and the blanks are the words the acid of the wine has eaten away. Fragments are all you get."

Sappho.The Songs of Sappho. In English translation by many poets; decorated by Paul McPharlin. Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1948? Special Collections SRLF
UCLA Library has long collected this press, with an exhibit of their earlier work in 1945. This is one of several editions published by the press from 1942 on. One edition is as late as 1966. Sappho's poems have been translated for all, but her name and birthplace Lesbos became the derivation for names and codes for women loving women: Sapphics (particularly in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century) or Lesbians.

M. E. Kerr. We Walk Alone: a Gold Medal original by Ann Aldrich; cover painting by Jack Floherty, Jr. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, c1955. Gold Medal book 509. Full cover title: We Walk Alone Through Lesbos's Lonely Groves. SCB 137311
This writer later wrote juvenile books under the name M. E. Kerr, but published lesbian works under the name Ann Aldrich. This is an example from the middle period of lesbian pulp writing, primarily fiction (although this is not a fictional work). Writings on homosexuality and lesbianism of this time were presented sensationally, with code words such as "alone" or "Lesbos" to indicate their content and with covers often in conflict with the meaning of the author's story, meant to attract male readers. Authors wrote under the disapproving influence of the psychiatric establishment of the times. Most theories did not discuss lesbians, but Helene Deutsch in the 1920s - 1940s developed negative concepts of lesbians, who in relation to their mothers had "an excess of infantile regressive elements or hate components."

Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love. Sappho Was a Right On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism. New York: Stein and Day Publishers, c1972. Third printing 1974. In: Schreck, Frank E. Collection of material about homosexuality, 1968 - 1981. Collection 2083 Box 7
The authors reclaim Sappho as a positive influence relatively early in the feminist movement and in the theories of lesbianism emerging after gay liberation, generally dated as after the Stonewall Riots, 1969. The authors state it is "the first serious nonfiction account of the Lesbian experience, described carefully and logically from an authentic inside perspective rather than the prejudging eyes of an orthodox psychiatric disapproval."
This cover shows a liberated lesbian whose depiction is not designed to attract male readers, as had been the case before.

[Lesbian and Gay community buttons] In: Kight, Morris. Papers, 1975 - 1993. Collection 354. Items to be added
This selection of buttons also gives positive views of lesbian and gay lives, in that the slogans and catch words are presented by and for lesbians and gays, often in satirical opposition to prevailing negative phrases.
Imagery and colors are primarily from the 1980s and 1990s using lavender and shades of pink and purple as positive symbols for the community, whereas in the past such usage might be derogatory, such as the phrase "lavender men." Other similarly derogatory terms, like "dyke," are reclaimed for slogans such as "Dyke - O - Rama." These slogans are variations on coming out of the closet or political send offs of the military such as "The Few, The Proud, The Gay." One button is a more serious quote from African American lesbian poet Audré Lorde: "Your silence will not save you."
Activist and collector Morris Kight has spent much of his life in the causes of gay liberation. He and others founded the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 1971, now the largest of its kind in the world.
Gay activist Harry Hay, who began his political work before Kight, was the first openly gay person to be interviewed by the UCLA Oral History Program.

History of Science & Technology LGBT Studies
References

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