Jim Kepner: Jim Kepner was founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives, and co-founder of ONE Institute. A major pioneer of the Gay movement as well as a founder of Gay Studies, he died in 1997. His most recent book is ROUGH NEWS, DARING VIEWS: PIONEER GAY PRESS JOURNALISM IN THE 1950S, published by Haworth Press.
This is an encyclopedic reference work systematically summarizing the life and work of over 100 gay and lesbian writers, current and historic, though it is strongest on recent writers who have appeared in book form, largely ignoring those printed in gay periodicals, as well as pioneer gay novelists and poets from the 1930s through the 1950s. Only a few foreign writers whose work has not appeared in English are included. Notably missing are Saikaku Ihara, Bayard Taylor, James (Barr) Fugate, Gerald Heard, et al, but what is covered is covered excellently. It begins to show how vast our literature is.
I was a bit miffed that they cut out my brief but detailed criticism of biographer Arnold Rampersad's claim in his 1986-88 volumes that Langston Hughes was not gay. Rampersad wrote that people thought Hughes was gay because he ran around with cute young guys, but Rampersad insists that Hughes could not have been gay because, 1) he wasn't swish; 2) he didn't hate women; 3) his sexuality, whatever it was, remained invisible to his many gay friends, and, when he sailed to the coast of Africa, the “homeland,” and fellow sailors gangbanged two native boys, Hughes refused to join in the fun, as any homosexual would presumably have done. These assumptions by Rampersad are spurious and quite problematic, to say the least.
Whether Hughes was an overt, self accepting gay man might remain a mystery, but writer-priest Malcom Boyd claims to have had an affair of some duration with him. In 1945, Hughes' friend, the poet Dorothy Parker, offered to set me up with him (“You're just his type,” she said). Sadly, I was not able to follow up.
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