Speak its Name! Quotations by and about Gay Men and Women [Hardcover]

This collection of quotations by and about gay people celebrates the advances of the international LGBT community over the past 50 years. Amusing observations by Noël Coward, Tallulah Bankhead, Quentin Crisp, Boy George and Ian McKellen are interspersed with interviews with Dusty Springfield, Alan Bennett, Freddie Mercury, Clive Barker, George Michael and William S. Burroughs, and diary entries by Kenneth Williams, Joe Orton, W.H. Auden and John Maynard Keynes. John Gielgud and Alan Turing’s accounts of being arrested contrast with letters from Violet Trefusis to her lover Vita Sackville-West, King James I to the Marquis of Buckingham, and Benjamin Britten to his partner Peter Pears. Contributions by Oscar Wilde, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, John Wolfenden, Field Marshal Montgomery, Lord Arran, Margaret Thatcher, Waheed Alli and David Cameron demonstrate enormous developments in gay rights. Reflections from celebrity icons such as Julie Andrews and David Beckham are also featured, alongside a wealth of reproductions.the experiences and plight of being gay in Britain are told chronologically, touching on topics of homophobia, sex and marriage, crossing sectors of entertainment, sports and politics....a celebration of the advances in LGBT rights in the UK over the last half-century and a demonstration of the battle against oppression and prejudice that led to them...