The Wisdom Bar-"Queer Melville: A Secret History of America's Gay Writers"

💡 A smarter night out in NYC—fascinating speakers and real conversation. 💡

Who doesn't love to learn a secret history previously untold? Especially when it pertains to one of the most iconic writers of all time...Join us as we learn about the man behind the myths!

Herman Melville's legacy as one of the most important figures in queer literary history is somewhat obscured and contested, but his work is suffused with male intimacy, homoerotic encounters, same-sex desire, and permutations of radical faggotry. Melville was not openly gay in the modern sense, because the categories of sexual identity through which we understand such concepts today had not yet been developed. He uneasily maintained the role of husband and father throughout his life. The term “homosexual” itself wasn't coined until he was in his 50s. Yet many readers, starting within his own lifetime, understood the queerness that was often allegorically encoded in his narratives, but sometimes achingly blatant.
Whether it's sperm-squeezing and interracial same-sex marriage in Moby-Dick, cross-cultural sexual explorations of Polynesia in his early adventure tales, the gay blade who takes the protagonist of Redburn to a male brothel in London, the unwholesome and sexualized father-worship of Pierre, or Melville's own febrile romantic yearning for his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, the textual and historical evidence for a queer reading of Melville's life and works is abundant and compelling.
While this aspect of the author has often been suppressed or minimized by heteronormative scholarship, for well over a century queer readers and critics have repeatedly discovered something in Melville that speaks to their own experiences of desire and difference. Before the author was posthumously canonized during the Melville Revival, his obscure and unpopular work was appreciated by subcultural groups of gay men. Recognition of Melville's homoeroticism developed from there, sometimes causing scandal along the way, until coming to a head with the emergence of late twentieth-century Queer Studies.
Lonely Christopher exhaustively presents the case that, as we uplift the contemporaneous writer Walt Whitman as America's Great Gay Poet, Herman Melville has been and will be our Great Gay Novelist. Against the charges of ahistoricism, Lonely illuminates a secret history of queer desire and deconstructs the ways that sexual difference was expressed before modern conceptions of sex and gender were codified, insisting upon a continuity of experience while also exploring the ways that modes of identity formation have changed across a large swath of human history.
The fact is that Melville really sets off our gaydar, and we're going to discuss why.

We'll explore:

• Why is Herman Melville not more prominently celebrated in the pantheon of queer American writers?
• What exactly about his style and perspectives reads to us today as "queer"?
• How can we re-examine Melville's work and see a new perspective?

This might be for you if you...

• Are a Melville or Moby Dick enthusiast
• Are intrigued by the secret histories of literary icons that were previously unexplored
• Are curious about LGBTQ+ representation throughout history
• Enjoy lecture-based and conversation-focused events of any kind — think Ted Talks in bars, Lectures on Tap, or micro learning meets dinner party
• Want to switch up your usual weeknight. Why not make it interesting? 🤓

Event venue

Bibliotheque, 54 Mercer Street, New York, United States

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