Items

• Jack and Jim : a personal journal of the 70's
  In January 1970, Jim Brogan (1941-), a young college professor at San Francisco State University (SFSU), is about to be fired for participating in strike action. He is considering going back into therapy and thinks 1970 might be the year he finds love. By December, he has a permanent post. In August 1972, he meets the handsome Jack, and they begin seeing each other. These diaries, revised for publication by an extensive ensemble of Brogan’s friends, cover the decade up to 1981. They are a remarkable chronicle of long-term love and an ongoing search for personal, sexual and spiritual fulfilment. Brogan taught SFSU’s first lesbian and gay studies course and, with husband Jack Post, established three scholarships for the study and teaching of literature and sexuality.
• The disrobing : sex and satire
  Poet and author Royal Murdoch, known to friends as Kenneth, was born in California in 1898 and moved to Mexico City in the mid-1960s, where he died in 1981. ‘The Disrobing’, ten copies of which were seized in the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids, is a posthumously published collection spanning fifty years, including poetry, diary extracts, letters and part of an unfinished novel. It was edited by Gay Sunshine’s Winston Leyland. Murdoch himself wrote of ‘Gay Sunshine Journal’ that “I was already an old man when I first saw an issue” and “each issue brings me a renewed sense of liberation”. Murdoch’s prose works in particular describe life in pre-Stonewall America. His papers are now held by the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
• The New York diary of Ned Rorem
  The ‘New York Diary’ begins with Ned Rorem (1923-2022) returning home from Paris and is the second volume of Rorem’s diaries, covering the period 1955-1961. As with the previous volume, Rorem uses the diary form to discuss the – often famous – people he meets, his thoughts on the life of an artist and his own personal life, including his relationships and alcoholism. Rorem noted that these New York diaries were “less frivolous and more outspoken” than those he wrote in Paris. The exhibition shows Rorem’s diaries in two separate volumes, although in the list of books seized from Gay’s the Word they are listed as one title. It is likely, therefore, that the combined edition published by US paperback imprint Avon was the one seized.
• The Paris diary of Ned Rorem
  Ned Rorem (1923-2022) was an American composer of modern classical music, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1976 and a Grammy in 1989. Rorem was also gay, and documented his life in a series of diaries which began with his ‘Paris Diary’, covering the early 1950s when he was in his late twenties. Famed not only for his musical talent but also his good looks, Rorem was a dedicated socialite who gained entry to the Parisian artistic scene under the mentorship of Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles. This selection of his diaries shows the extent of Rorem’s connections not only via his writing but also through the inclusion of photographs taken of him by artists such as Man Ray and a portrait illustration by Jean Cocteau.
• The sunny side of Castro Street : a diary of sorts
  A detailed, first-person account of bars, cruising and bathhouses in 1970s San Francisco by Dan Vojir (1947-). It also includes an extended memoir of growing up gay in a second-generation Czech immigrant family in Berwyn, Illinois, before Vojir moved to San Francisco’s Castro neighbourhood in 1974. “It’s a charmer”, proclaimed one contemporary reviewer. Vojir was a writer for the ‘Castro Times’ newspaper and worked in publishing as well as hosting a radio talk show, ‘Strictly Books’. ‘The Sunny Side of Castro Street’ is illustrated by Ku Fu-Sheng in a distinctive style which combines pencil and pen-and-ink sketches with photographic collage.