East End Books Ptown welcomes Aaron S. Lecklider, Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture 6/29 @6pm
for a special In-person and virtual book event. Aaron is a Boston and Ptown resident. We are happy to partner with The Provincetown Business Guild and the Provincetown LGBTQ Welcome Center for this special event.
Buy the book via the link below.
Register with Eventbrite for in-person and virtual tickets. The in-person event will be a social distanced COVID19 safe outdoor event, just behind the bookstore facing the water.
Register with Evenbrite here: Love's Next Meeting Virtual & In-Person w/ Aaron S. Lecklider 6/29 at 6pm Tickets, Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 6:00 PM | Eventbrite
Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83720057057 Meeting ID: 837 2005 7057
*The Zoom link can be used by all who register with eventbrite. Click on the Eventbrite link a few minutes before the event begins. You'll be in a virtual waiting room. We'll let you into the event at the start time.
Facebook Event Page: https://fb.me/e/1gVUiyunJ
How queerness and radical politics intersected—earlier than you thought.
Well before Stonewall, a broad cross section of sexual dissidents took advantage of their space on the margins of American society to throw themselves into leftist campaigns. Sensitive already to sexual marginalization, they also saw how class inequality was exacerbated by the Great Depression, witnessing the terrible bread lines and bread riots of the era. They participated in radical labor organizing, sympathized like many with the early prewar Soviet Union, contributed to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, opposed US police and state harassment, fought racial discrimination, and aligned themselves with the dispossessed. Whether they were themselves straight, gay, or otherwise queer, they brought sexual dissidence and radicalism into conversation at the height of the Left's influence on American culture.
Combining rich archival research with inventive analysis of art and literature, Love’s Next Meeting explores the relationship between homosexuality and the Left in American culture between 1920 and 1960. Aaron S. Lecklider uncovers a lively cast of individuals and dynamic expressive works, revealing remarkably progressive engagement with homosexuality among radicals, workers, and the poor. Leftists connected sexual dissidence with radical gender politics, antiracism, and challenges to censorship and obscenity laws through the 1920s and 1930s. In the process, a wide array of activists, organizers, artists, and writers laid the foundation for a radical movement through which homosexual lives and experiences were given shape and new political identities were forged. Love's Next Meeting cuts to the heart of some of the biggest questions in American history: questions about socialism, about sexuality, about the supposed clash still making headlines today between leftist politics and identity politics. What emerges is a dramatic, sexually vibrant story of the shared struggles for liberation across the twentieth century.
Aaron Lecklider is a cultural historian and professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His work focuses on the history of sexuality, class, race, and gender in the twentieth-century United States. His most recent book, Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture, explores the relationship between homosexuality and the Left in the US between 1920 and 1960. His first book, Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture, studied how working-class Americans, particularly women, African Americans, and immigrants, imagined themselves as intellectuals outside the walls of the ivory tower.
A cultural critic with an energetic voice, Lecklider also writes frequently about culture, politics, literature, film, and art for venues such as Slate, Salon, Huffington Post, Abusable Past, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and he curated an exhibit of recent work by the artist Avram Finkelstein at UMass Boston’s Harbor Gallery in 2013.
Aaron is based in Boston and Provincetown.
