From February House to the State House: A Pulitzer Tour of LGBT History Month

Jos Charles received the finalist distinction in 2018 for this collection, cited by the Pulitzer Board as "a volume of imaginative, idiosyncratic verse that merges contemporary speech with Middle English tradition to interpret the transgender experience." A transgender woman who was born to an evangelical family in 1988, Charles earned an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona before enrolling as a doctoral student in English at the University of California, Irvine, where she continues to study today. Although recent works by art historian Roland Betancourt and literary scholar Marion Turner have drawn attention to the long-suppressed intersectional valences of medieval and early modern European culture, Charles evokes the seamless continuity between the agrarian past and the urban present. "a tran lik all metall is a series of sirfase in folde / wee call manie of thees foldes identitie," she writes, adding: "this is struktur or gendre or tellavision or a united stats," juxtaposing the exclusionary London-based diction employed by Chaucer in "The Wife of Bath's Tale" against the comparatively inclusive American present. Elsewhere in the text, Charles evokes the pain of gender dysphoria while alluding to the timeless, liberatory imperatives of Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up" and Pulitzer winner Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages": "but wen i was a childe/ i was so olde / inn my dreems / a grl / ther bieng no pardon / from the reel / its form a dream." But while literary praxis offers some recompense, trans life remains subaltern and misunderstood among the general populace, the very act of survival itself a triumph in a society where barriers to employment and discrimination remain nauseatingly quotidian: "did u knowe not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesn't dye / just shye off 27 / its such a plesure to be alive / in this trembled soot," she reflects. Much as the archetypes of "The Canterbury Tales" came to dominate Western literature in the modern era, Charles offers a compelling vision where "tran" life will take its rightful place in the world's newly interconnected literary cultures.

Non-binary performer and playwright Taylor Mac (who employs the pronoun "judy") made history when judy's "A 24-Decade History of Popular Music" was named a Drama finalist in 2017. The ambitious work (cited by the Board as an "inspired bardic creation") devotes an hour to each decade of popular music from 1776 to the present, replete with vivid commedia dell'arte costumes designed by judy's longtime collaborator, Machine Dazzle. Drawing upon the legacy of David Mancuso, the gay Manhattan DJ who played records running the gamut from live albums by Ravi Shankar to late 2000s releases by LCD Soundsystem for more than 40 years at his home-cum-nightclub, The Loft, Mac interpolates traditional folk ("Cotton-Eyed Joe," "Turkey in the Straw"), ragtime (Special Citation recipient Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag"), the traditional pop era ("Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)," "All of Me"), 50s R&B ("I Put a Spell on You") and British post-punk ("Heroes," "Love Will Tear Us Apart") in a kaleidoscopic stew. Some of the choices speak to the spirit of reclamation; by invoking the Bee Gees' "Staying Alive" alongside Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," judy contextualizes the legacy of the former song (which arguably served as a de facto anthem for the commodification of LGBT culture by homophobic audiences in the late 1970s) alongside a touchstone of the not-entirely-dissimilar "Disco Sucks" movement; later on, Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" is thoroughly shorn of the male gaze that improbably catapulted the veteran blue-eyed soul singer to instant stardom. In a review of the musical for The New York Times, 2012 Criticism winner Wesley Morris relished his "night of dreamlessness": "What if some of America’s trouble is that we’ve been too caught up in our own individual dreams — that some dreams mean a nightmare for somebody else. What if Mr. Mac’s fantasia was the anti-dream, and those 24 beautiful hours were about the wisdom of staying woke?"

The state of Vermont has remained politically anomalous since its inception, spurning Franklin Roosevelt throughout each of his four presidential runs before electing the likes of Rockefeller Republican standard-bearer Robert Stafford and self-identified democratic socialist Bernie Sanders to the Senate. One year after same-sex marriage was federally prohibited by the Defense of Marriage Act, three affected couples sued the state in Baker v. Vermont following the denial of marriage licenses. In a December 1999 ruling, the court enjoined the state legislature to devise a solution that could "[take] the form of inclusion within the marriage laws themselves or a parallel 'domestic partnership' system." In February and March, the bicameral state legislature approved a "civil rights package" that allowed same-sex couples to enter civil unions that were nearly analogous to marriage. However, Gov. Howard Dean did not conduct a public signing of the legislation, while public acrimony ranged from discriminatory newspaper ads to a "Take Back Vermont" political campaign. Playwright and Rutland Herald editorial writer David Moats received the 2001 Editorial Writing Prize for his coverage of the legislative and popular debates. Moats cast the struggle in plainspoken and relatable terms, invoking the legacy of a former Chamber of Commerce president who was unable to marry his partner of 56 years before his death. "It is our responsibility, however, to conduct public policy in a way that does not consign a portion of the public to a policy ghetto," he wrote, "forbidden to enjoy the rights that are accorded to others." Elsewhere, he added: "The moral condemnation of homosexuality has not prevailed. Rather, a Legislature that has listened to the many voices of Vermont is moving toward a conclusion that humanity is diverse and that fair treatment for all should be the goal." More than 15 years before the United States Supreme Court's landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, Moats offered a formative signpost to the future.

A work whose influence reverberates in such contemporary efforts as Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Steven Canals' ballroom culture-inspired FX television series "Pose," the first part of Kushner's duology is an incisive explication of the psychological and interpersonal effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The playwright offers a heterogeneous and mimetic New York where oleaginous power brokers (Roy Cohn), closeted Mormon attorneys (Joe Pitt, Cohn's fictional protege), retired drag queens (the nurse Belize) and a lonely WASP scion (the prophetic Prior Walter) are destined to collide. But while "Angels" is primarily set in the complex tableau of Koch-era New York, viewers also see the legacy of past discrimination in the disjunctive characterizations of the heroic Louis Ironson (whose grandmother is eulogized at the beginning of the play as a representative of the immigrants who risked their lives to build contemporary America) and the parvenu Cohn, who has rejected his ethnic and sexual identities as a servitor of an establishment that failed to take stock in their value. "Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men," he snaps in his delirium. "Homosexuals are men who in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through [the] City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows." By litigating (and, in the end, thoroughly refuting) the fictive Cohn's assertions for a mass audience, "Millennium Approaches" remains a definitive encapsulation of a difficult period in American LGBT history.

A second-generation serialist who enjoyed early collaborations with the likes of Brooklyn Philharmonic conductor Lukas Foss, Charles Wuorinen was an assistant professor at Columbia University (his alma mater and the milieu where he had spent most of his life by virtue of his father, a history professor) when he became the youngest recipient of the Music Prize in 1970, a record that would endure until Princeton University graduate student Caroline Shaw received the award in 2013. Yet the pop-influenced minimalist vanguard (exemplified by such contemporaries of Wuornien as 2009 Music winner Steve Reich) soon rendered the "uptown" atonal wave obsolescent in the popular consciousness, while Wuorinen struggled to find an institutional home after being denied tenure at Columbia in 1971, ultimately settling at Rutgers University after a post-Columbia stint at the Manhattan School of Music. Wuorinen's Pulitzer-winning "Time's Encomium" remains both a curio in his formalistic legacy (aside from subsequent pink noise experiments at Bell Labs, he would continue to work exclusively with traditional instrumentation) and a timbral landmark in the history of electronic music. Although Wuorinen was reticent to reflect upon his identity as a gay man, maintaining in a late interview that the tragedy of 1994 Fiction winner Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" (adapted as a 2014 opera by the composer) rested in the emotional repression of its protagonists vis-à-vis the experiences of "poor, oppressed gay people," it is difficult to separate "Time's" veneration of the quantitative and frenetically dyspeptic arrangements from the LGBT community's powder keg-like annus mirabilis of 1969, a year that inspired political action (the Stonewall rebellion; the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front) and transgressive art (the high-low Menippean satire of John Waters' "Multiple Maniacs"; the cathartic writings of Samuel R. Delany). And as she commenced her gender transition, fellow Columbian Wendy Carlos would soon allude to Wuorinen's influence in the similarly discordant "Timesteps," recorded for the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" in 1971. While Wuorinen remained consciously recondite into his last years, lamenting in 2018 that "the apostles of the diatonic world have not produced work that measures up to the music of the past," his compositional legacy remains a singular lodestar of a transformative era.

In the first decades of the postwar era, classical music entered a unique phase. Figures such as conductor George Szell, pianist Van Cliburn and the multifarious Leonard Bernstein emerged as household names, their achievements dominated by interpretations of the pre-20th century standard repertoire. Conversely, exponents of the atonal serialist movement pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg (including Pulitzer winners Roger Sessions, Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt) benefited from Cold War-era institutional largesse, but seldom attracted new listeners outside of academic settings. One of the few contemporary composers to resonate with popular audiences during this period was two-time Pulitzer winner Samuel Barber. Raised in suburban Philadelphia, Barber realized that he was destined to be a composer at age 9, writing to his mother that he was "not meant to be an athlet [sic]." At the Curtis Institute, he emerged as a triple prodigy in voice, composition and piano; it was here that he also met his life partner, fellow two-time Pulitzer winner Gian Carlo Menotti. While Menotti would not reach his artistic apogee until the 1950s, Barber immediately established himself with a range of enduring compositions, including "Dover Beach" (1931; for voice and string quartet) and the "Adagio for Strings" (1936), an ode adapted by generations of popular artists, including The Doors, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Tiësto. Primarily working out of Capricorn, the Mount Kisco, N.Y. house he shared with Menotti, Barber largely eschewed operas and symphonic works over the next two decades in favor of smaller-scale pieces, including piano concertos, ballets and vocal compositions; while his first opera ("Vanessa," with a libretto by Menotti) received the 1958 Music Prize, the 1963 Music Prize-winning "Piano Concerto" is more representative of Barber's mature style, serving as a kind of bilious, equivocal counterpoint to fellow Pulitzer winner George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." This effect is most pronounced in a contemporaneous recording by Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra that features Barber's intended soloist, the virtuosic John Browning. When Barber died at his Fifth Avenue apartment (with the then-estranged Menotti by his side) from complications of cancer at the age of 70 in 1981, the vestigial luster of "early [...] persistent and such long-lasting acclaim" ensured a front page obituary in The Times, though it took decades of subsequent performances (and the ever-enduring "Adagio") to ensure Barber a posthumous reputation on par with modern tonalists like Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

After graduating from Christ College, Oxford with a third-class degree in 1928, W. H. Auden pursued careers as a poet, playwright, schoolteacher and political journalist, often in collaboration with friend and occasional lover Christopher Isherwood. With World War II imminent and homosexuality actively prosecuted in their native country, the writers emigrated to the United States in early 1939. While Isherwood (who had experience in the film industry) settled in Los Angeles, Auden found his American Dream in an altogether different place. The previously posh enclave of Brooklyn Heights had declined in social importance following the consolidation of Greater New York in 1898. By the Depression era, its spacious Italianate brownstones had been subdivided into apartments and rooming houses for bohemians seeking inexpensive accommodation beyond Greenwich Village. A working class waterfront neighborhood encircling the Heights offered some of New York's most vibrant bars — and a welcoming atmosphere for the city's queer communities. Auden initially settled on stately Montague Terrace before moving to former Harper's Bazaar editor George Davis' house at 7 Middagh Street on the border with the waterfront district. While living with a litany of artists — including Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee and Paul and Jane Bowles — at the so-called "February House" (coined by Anais Nin because of the profusion of February birthdays among the residents), he settled into the most significant relationship of his life with Brooklyn College student Chester Kallman. In reality, life at February House was complicated: Auden was a taskmaster who assigned chores, budgets and rules for dinnertime conversation, while his relationship with Kallman soon evolved into a close platonic friendship. Ultimately, Auden left Brooklyn in 1941 to teach at the University of Michigan, never to return as a resident. Yet the borough he left behind is the essence of "The Age of Anxiety," the long poem that earned Auden the Pulitzer in 1948. Written between 1944 and 1946 and fashioned after both the classical eclogue and the Old and Middle English epics that Auden studied under J. R. R. Tolkien, it concerns a group of people (including a readerly shipping clerk, a Royal Canadian Air Force intelligence officer, a department store buyer and a Navy officer) who convene at an unspecified dive of dubious provenance. "Semi-intoxicated," they "[seek] that state of prehistoric happiness which [...] can only be imagined in terms of a landscape bearing a symbolic resemblance to the human body," passing "all the signs of a facetious culture." After walking by a series of institutional buildings and remarking on the evolution of "slums [...] suburbs [...] tennis courts," they arrive at "a little insurrection of red sandstone" built by "a scholarly old scoundrel," a clear evocation of the Queen Anne mansions of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The night continues until "the train comes out on the Manhattan Bridge" and they disembark, sharing contact information for future meetings: "The Cycle of Nature/Revolved as usual." In other words, a timeless New York morning. Although Auden remained a trenchant and vital poet for decades to come, "The Age of Anxiety" is a special panacea that, contrary to its title, revels in the amiability of fellowship. It is a salutary, escapist space for those who have communed with the city — and those who have just found a new friend in its inclusive grasp.