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Les K. Wright

Leslie Kirk Wright (born 1953) is an American gay historian, literary scholar, and gay activist.

Wright was born in Syracuse, NY and studied Comparative Literature (German, Russian, and English) at several universities in West Germany and the US, earning his PhD at UC Berkeley. He was professor of English and Humanities at Mount Ida College (Boston), and taught German, Russian, and Human Sexual Diversity as an adjunct at other colleges--UC Berkeley, Hamilton College, Worcester State University, Diablo Valley College, and the Deutsch-amerikanisches Institut-Tübingen.

In 1992 Wright founded the Bear History Project, which led him to edit and co-write The Bear Book and The Bear Book II, as well as curate the Bear Icons art exhibition in Boston, Provincetown, Manhattan, and Washington. DC.

Wright came out over a two-year period (1972-74), beginning with immersion in the gay subculture in Albany, NY (where he was a student), and completely out when he began studying at the University of Tübingen. He became a gay left activist, identifying himself as a Sponti, and was involved with WüHSt [Würzburger Homosexuelle Studenten] and then the iht [Initiativgruppe Homosexualität Tübingen]. Once out of the closet, Wright started to document his life as a Stonewall-era gay man. In 1972 Wright began leading a double sexual life, frequenting gay bars, parks, and public toilets while reading Gay Liberation Front literature. (The campus GLF group shared an office with the college literary magazine, which he coedited with his girlfriend.) He started coming out to one trusted friend at a time. All of them broke off friendship with him at this news. In 1974 when he went to Würzburg to study he “arrived openly gay,” making his sexual orientation known to everyone he met. He also came out into the leather subculture in Munich.

In 1979 Wright moved to The Castro District in San Francisco. In 1981 he found sobriety (and remains an active member in the recovering community) and was infected with HIV. He is a long-term (pre-HAART) survivor of AIDS. In response to the personal and global crisis of AIDS, in 1985 Wright became a founding member and founding board member of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, now called the GLBT Historical Society (San Francisco). Through his association with Allan Bérubé, Wright joined the San Francisco Gay History Project, led by Bérubé, where now noted gay and lesbian historians met. Wright learned how to conduct oral histories, which led to the Bear History Project.

Self-identifying bears, larger, older, and hairier than the “clone” ideal of the 1970s and 1980s, created a welcoming and inclusive social and sexual alternative to their outsider status. Seeing themselves as “naturally” masculine and fetishizing secondary male sexual characteristics, they both subverted traditional notions of masculinity (bears are also nurturing, for example), while presenting themselves as “average Joe" gay men, the kind of guy you could take home to meet the family. Eric Rofes argued the bear ideal was a middle-class fetishization of working-class gay men.

In 2021 Wright relaunched the Bear History Project.

Wright had a Vermont civil union with Dale Wehrle in 2002. They divorced in 2011. In 2011 California had ruled that a civil union of 5 or more years was considered a marriage.

Career History

Wright began teaching by giving swimming lessons as a teenager. He worked as a field laborer with African-American migrant workers from the South, worked the night shift in a typewriter factory, and washed dishes in a snack bar. His first classroom teaching job was ESL at the Deutsch-amerikanisches Institut in Tübingen (1975-79).

During 1974-79 he researched German gay history and was a participant-obsever in the schwulenemanzipatorische Bewegung. He wrote articles for gay publications, such as REVOLT (Sweden), Schwuchtel (West Germany), and GPU News (Milwaukee), among others. He wrote poetry, published in various poetry magazines. He was an editor of his college magazine, Phoenix, where he was the first to publish work by Gregory Maguire. He was a founding editor of EXEMPLA: Eine Tübinger Literaturzeitschrift.

He taught German and then Introduction to Comparative Literature through Critical Writing at UC Berkeley.

He chaired the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History 2001-02.

Personal History

Growing up in social isolation during the 1960s, Wright began corresponding with numerous pen pals around the world. Many of these pen pals were fellow stamp collectors and his involvement in philately grew. He worked as a full-time stamp dealer for Jacques Minkus at the Emporium-Capwell department store in San Francisco (1983-85). Wright also oversaw the Gertrude Philatelic Society, publishing a newsletter, forming a gay stamp club in San Francisco, and creating several covers commemorating gay and lesbian events in San Francisco. Through this he met and befriended Paul Hennefeld, who toured the US with his first-ever Gay and Lesbian History on Stamps collection. Wright is still a member of the Gay and Lesbian History on Stamps study group of the American Philatelic Society.

Wright served as a peer counselor for dual-diagnosed and AIDS-infected gay men at Eighteenth Street Services in San Francisco (1986-89). He was a volunteer on the AIDS Nightline phone line at San Francisco Suicide Prevention. He was active in several other community-based AIDS support groups in San Francisco.

Between 2006 and 2010, Wright reviewed movies for CultureVulture, covering film festivals in San Francisco: German, Asian, Latin American, Jewish, and LGBT, as well as indie films [CultureVulture. Net].

He has served as board co-chair of SAGE Upstate (Syracuse, NY), and currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Cortland (NY) LGBT Center.

Bibliography

The Bear Book: Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture (Haworth Press, 1997) The Bear Book II: Further Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture (Haworth Press, 2000) “Queer Masculinities” (editor), Men and Masculinities (SAGE Publications, 2003) “Clinton, NY,” in Hometowns: Gay Men Write about Where They Belong (Plume, 1991) “Bear Spirit,” in White Crane A Journal of Gay Men’s Spirituality (2007): “Gay Genocide as Literary Trope,” in AIDS: The Literary Response (Twayne, 1992) “The Genre Cycle of German Gay Coming-Out Films, 1970-1994,” in “Queering the Canon: Defying Sights in German Literature and Culture (Camden House, 1998)

External Links

https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM07656.html

https://www.worldcat.org/title/surviving-berkeley-bearly-oral-history-transcript-1999/oclc/78261334