Rictor Norton
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Rictor Norton, Ph.D., American author, social and literary historian and writer, specializing in gay history.
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[edit] Biography
Rictor Norton was born in Friendship, New York on June 25, 1945, Florida Southern College, BA 1967; Florida State University, MA, PhD 1972 English literature. His doctoral dissertation was on homosexual themes in English Renaissance literature, published as The Homosexual Literary Tradition, 1972. Instructor at Florida State University, 1970-72, where he taught a course on gay and lesbian literature in 1971, one of the earliest gay courses in the United States. "His book The Homosexual Literary Tradition was based on his Ph.D. study of homosexual themes in English Renaissance Literature." (My Dear Boy) Member of the Gay Liberation Front, Florida, 1971-72, he campaigned against Florida's sodomy statute. He immigrated from Florida to London in 1973, where he has since lived.
He edited The Homosexual Imagination, a special issue of College English, the first all-gay issue of an academic journal, 1974; introduction "The Homophobic Imagination" reproduced on Norton's website. Research Editor for the fortnightly news journal Gay News, London, 1974-78. He wrote articles on gay history and literature for Gay Sunshine, The Advocate, Gay News, etc. during the 1970s, and for Gay Times later. He published academic articles in Renascence, American Imago, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, the London Journal, etc. He was the Foreign Rights Manager for Western Publishing Company (Golden Books) from 1979 to 1990, and a freelance publishing consultant from 1991 to 1994. He has been a freelance writer and editor since 1995. Among his works, his The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, is a critique of social constructionism, and his contributions to Sex Doctors and Sex Crimes consist of several facsimile collections of eighteenth-century British erotica. He is a contributor of entries to Who's Who in Gay & Lesbian History (Routledge, 2001) and a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
He maintains an extensive website on Gay History and Literature, with large subsections on Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook and on the "father of gay history" John Addington Symonds, as well as a non-gay site on Early Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Reports: A Sourcebook. In December 2005 he formed a civil partnership with his partner of nearly thirty years. He spoke at the launch of Britain's LGBT History Month February 2006.
His work My Dear Boy edits sixty sets of love letters from men to other men, some of the included sets are letters from Marcus Aurelius to Marcus Cornelius Fronto, Paulinus of Nola to Ausonius, Marbod of Rennes to a young lover, Baudri of Bourgeuil to various lovers, Hilary the Englishman to two boys, Desiderius Erasmus to Servatius, Michelangelo, James I to George Villiers, Alexander Hamilton to John Laurens, Hans Christian Andersen to Karl Alexander, Walt Whitman, Henry James and W.H. Auden.
[edit] Works
[edit] Books
- The Homosexual Literary Tradition: An Interpretation. New York: Revisionist Press, 1974.
- Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700—1830. London: Gay Men's Press, 1992.
- A second edition, revised and enlarged, was published by Chalfont Press (an imprint of Tempus Publishing, United Kingdom) on October 10, 2006.
- The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity. London: Cassell, 1997.
- (ed.) My Dear Boy:Gay Love Letters through the Centuries. Leyland Publications, San Francisco. 1998 ISBN 0-943595-71-1
- Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. London: Leicester University Press, 1999
- Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840. London: Leicester University Press, 2000.
- (ed.) Sex Doctors and Sex Crimes: Vol. 5 of Eighteenth-Century British Erotica Part I
- (ed.) Sodomites, Mollies, Sapphists & Tommies: Vol. 5 of Eighteenth-Century British Erotica Part II
[edit] Essays reprinted in Gay Roots
Gay London in the 1720s; Ganymede Raped - The Critic as Censor; Reflections on the Gay Movement; The Passions of Michelangelo; Hard Gemlike Flame: Walter Pater and His Circle; The Historical Roots of Homophobia (containing material not previously published). Ed. Winston Leyland, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, Vol. I, 1991; Vol. II, 1993.
[edit] Articles
[edit] References
- Norton's homepage
- A conversation with Rictor Norton
- The Writers Directory. 16th edition, 2001. Detroit: St. James Press, 2001.
- My Dear Boy:Gay Love Letters through the Centuries. Leyland Publications, San Francisco. 1998 (some biographical material extracted from the "About Author" on back leaf)
- Rictor Norton, "Bibliography of Works by Rictor Norton".
