Robin kindly sent me the name of some queer poets in the UK. Thanks
Robin, I did a google and find this...
# I was warned that I brought my personal life to work too much by
Gregory Woods in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 18th. September,
1998, No. 1350, page 18. "When I was recently appointed to the first
British professorship in gay and lesbian studies, I got crank mail from
rightwing political groups and Christian fundamentalists."
"However, the real assault on gay studies is more insidious: it comes
from within the education system itself. The commonest response to my
promotion was to dismiss what goes on in 'new' universities such as
Nottingham Trent as 'trendy'. Implicit in this sneer is the original
complaint about the decision to let the polys become universities at
all."
"Gay academics also have to get used to the accusation of narrowness. It
may be desirable to spend a whole career on Jane Austin's novels or the
reflexes of the frog. That is specialisation. Yet to build a career in
gay studies is to indulge a personal obsession. The faculty committee
that discussed my professorship fussed over the same objection. I had
just published a book dealing with 3,000 years of culture. But could
this compensate for the narrowness of the queer issue?"
"We are rarely encouraged to follow the intellectual directions we
choose, and they are subsequently held against us. In my case, a late
1970s PhD on gay literature was an effective barrier to employment. I
accumulated a long list of those supposedly 'liberal' institutions that
made it clear they were not interested in fostering 'that sort of
thing'. Some campuses are still dangerous places for obviously gay
students."
"When I was finally given a long-term contract I was warned that I
brought my 'personal life' to work too much. Nobody at work knew
anything about my life, but heterosexual colleagues were incessantly
going public with their latest liaisons. I was also told that employing
me was 'a bit like having a religious fundamentalist on the staff'."
http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/pressedu98.html#Gregory%20Woods2
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