Paul Knobel

Paul Knobel (born 1948) is an Australian poet and the author. He was born in Mackay, north Queensland, and educated at Rockhampton Grammar School and the Anglican Grammar School in Brisbane and then at the Universities of Queensland, New England and Sydney.


An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry

He is the author of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and its Reception History (2002), a CD-ROM encyclopedia of 1 million words covering 243 languages and 118 countries and containing 6,300 entries. It is believed to be the largest work in the field of male homosexuality compiled by one person. He worked on it for 19 years. The work is now on the internet in a single alphabetical sequence on the web site of Erwin Haeberle of Berlin. The CDROM is in a Filemaker Pro database which allows for more complex searching. Also on the internet is "A World Overview of Male Homosexual Poetry" taken from An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and its Reception History. In 2005 he published An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Art (2005), a CD-ROM with 8,500 entries which is a skeleton of a larger work also available as a database.


Gay bibliographies

In 2009 he published Bibliography of Homosexuality: The Non-English Sources and in 2011 two other bibliographies: Bibliography of Homosexuality: 1486 to 1800 and Bibliography of Homosexuality: 1984—2010. These works supplement the annotated bibliography of Wayne Dynes, Homosexuality: A Research Guide (1987), and that of Gary Simes, A Bibliography of Homosexuality in the University of Sydney Library (1998), to which Knobel contributed many entries. The three bibliographies were taken from Worldcat and compiled in the Digital Humanities Laboratory at Columbia University, New York, and can be so used since they are not for profit. They are available on the web site of Erwin Haeberle of Berlin.


Poetry and gay literary criticism and bibliography

He is also the author of several books of poetry including Events (1982), A tale of Sydney Uni (1988), A Gay Saga (1999), Eighties (2007), and Nineties (2007), and the critical works Male Homosexuality and Australian English Language Poetry (1999), the first gay reading of Australian English language poetry, and an annotated bibliography of the gay novel in Australia published in 2010, The Male Homosexual, Gay and Queer Novel in Australia: A Bibliography, which discussed 43 gay novels from Australian and German gay literature.

The Homosexual Caravaggio lecture

In 2005 he gave a lecture, "The Homosexual Caravaggio", which has been published on an audio CDROM and was the first detailed gay reading of Caravaggio. It was provoked by a seminar at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, in relation to the Caravaggio exhibition "Darkness and Light" in which the word homosexuality was not mentioned (including by Caravaggio's latest biographer). He has been widely published in Australian periodicals and has also published many poem cards and broadsheets. Two poems, "My Homeland" and "Universal Responsibility", have been translated into Chinese by the Australian poet Ouyang Yu and My Homeland into Arabic twice, latterly by the Syrian writer Sumar Attar.


A gay history of the world/ A world history of human male homosexuality"

He is known to be working on A gay history of the world/ A world history of human male homosexuali, by country with each of the world's 193 countries having a chapter. This work is believed to be over 700,000 words and is slated for publication in 2015. . He reviewed Robert Aldrich's edited work, "Gay Life and Culture: a world history" which review is on the internet on the site of Erwin Haeberle which gave him the idea of attempting to write a world history of human male homosexuality. He has done gay research in over 60 countries and has been proclaimed by the Canadian gay bibliographer and poet Ian Young as one of the leading gay scholars in the world. The gay bibliographer and editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, Dr Wayne Dynes, a former professor of art at Hunter College in New York, in his Memoirs on the internet called him "my closest disciple."

Gay Rights

He has been involved in the cause of gay rights from the early 1980s and in 1985 gave a slide illustrated lecture at the Canadian Gay Archives conference in Toronto, "Walt Whitman and some Australian poets", which dealt with Whitman's critical reception in Australia by the Sydney poet John le Gay Brereton, the first Australian gay poet, and Bernard O'Dowd of Melbourne who corresponded with Whitman. This work was the first such work by a gay Australian scholar. In 1990 he also gave a slide illustrated lecture "4,000 years of male homosexuality in Art" in Sydney. He has also written many letters to editors and op ed columns. He wrote the entry on Nora Chadwick in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography (2004), the latest biographical dictionary from Great Britain. He is openly gay.

He was an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney from 2002 to 2005.

Bibliography

Events (Sydney, 1993) Poetry

A tale of Sydney Uni (Sydney 1988) Poetry chapbook.

A gay saga (Sydney, 1999) Poetry chapbook.

An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and Its Reception History (Sydney, 2002) CDROM in Filemaker Pro database.

The homosexual Caravaggio (Sydney, 2005) Aural recording of slide illustrated lecture.

An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Art (Sydney, 2005) CDROM in Filemaker pro database.

A World Overview of Male Homosexual Poetry (Washington DC, 2005)

Eighties (Melbourne, 2007) Poetry

Nineties (Melbourne, 2007) Poetry

Bibliography of Homosexuality: The Non-English Sources (New York, 2009) Internet work: see sexology web site of Erwin Haeberle.

Bibliography of Homosexuality: 1486 to 1800 (New York, 2010) Internet work: see web site of Erwin Haeberle

Bibliography of Homosexuality: 1984—2010 (New York, 2010) Internet work: see web site of Erwin Haeberle.

The Male Homosexual, Gay and Queer Novel in Australia: A Bibliography (Sydney, 2010) Annotated bibliography.

Paul Knobel : bio-bibliography current to 17 December 2010 (Randwick, 2010)

An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry, its background and reception history (Berlin, 2012) Internet work: see web site of Erwin Haeberle. The text of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexuual Poetry with entries arranged in a single alphabetical sequence.

Germany's Gay Achievement (Auckland, 2014) Pamphlet from A gay history of the world/ A world history of human male homosexualty

Various poem cards published from 1983

External links