Networks of Anglophone LGBTQ+ Exile Writers from 1900-1969

This interactive online platform will visualize global connections between Anglophone LGBTQ+ exile writers from 1900 to 1969. A series of visualizations, including graphs, maps, and timelines, will display the movements and creative exchanges between these writers. The project aims to track the migration of LGBTQ+ exile writers during the decades before the gay liberation movement, a time when many people were forced out of the United States and the United Kingdom due to the criminalization of homosexuality. During this period, US and British writers moved from their home countries to places in continental Europe and North Africa, particularly to international hubs such as Capri, Paris, Berlin, and Tangier, where homosexuality was either legal or tolerated. By resettling, these writers helped to establish a widespread LGBTQ+ exile network, which this publication will allow users to explore visually. The platform draws on data sets that capture international connections between Anglophone LGBTQ+ exile writers. The data sources are published and unpublished diaries, letters, and memoirs by US and British authors who relocated to foreign queer communities between the 1900s and 1960s. The visualizations will display these authors meetings across global locations as well as their creative exchanges across borders. The publication will reveal how diverse communities in North America, Europe, North Africa, and the wider world were linked thorough the widespread movements of LGBTQ+ exile writers. Drawing on new tools from the digital humanities, the platform will demonstrate how these exile writers travelled and collaborated across international communities. It will feature cutting-edge interactive network visualizations, maps, and timelines that will allow users to navigate the extensive connections between these writers and to follow how these connections unfolded across space and time. The visualizations will make important contributions to literary studies, migration and diaspora studies, and LGBTQ+ history. First, they will reveal the global connections and forms of dialogue that led to the production of exile literature. Second, by focusing on international routes of migration, the visualizations will display unexpected connections between writers who have previously been viewed as belonging to separate subcultures. Finally, they will show how minority groups maintained contact and promoted each others work across borders during a time of intense oppression of LGBTQ+ people.