Harper lee gay

Lee had not given an interview sinceyet there she was, the talk of the publishing world at Go Set a Watchman is not a good novel. She had been best friends with the flamingly, flamboyantly gay Truman Capote, who appears in To Kill a Mockingbird as Dill Harris, the strange, fey boy who spends his summers in fictional Maycomb, the stand-in for Monroeville, playing with Scout and her older brother Jem.

A year ago, the literary world was set aflutter as news that another novel by the reclusive Lee had been discovered after her older sister Alice died a few months earlier. The six-year-old Scout was so similar to the six-year-old I had been, was so androgynous and gender-non-conforming at a time before those words were in common parlance, was such a mirror of who I was, that she became a kind of touchstone.

But when I was assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high, that was something different. And so when I saw Harper Lee had died, I felt as if a family member had passed. She is the girl who claps back long before that was even a thought for girls.

Some literary historians have devoted their lives and theses to the deconstruction of To Kill a Mockingbird and they each have their own agendas invested in that deconstruction. Harper Lee." Harper Lee in when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Scout was the courageous and rugged tomboy who never wore dresses and kept her hair short—like Lee herself.

A Queer Look at

Scout is the lesbian prototype many of us yearned for as kids and her friend Dill is the quietly gay boy she befriends and protects. There are those who will argue against this assertion about Scout. These two were markedly different from the young protagonists we were used to reading in the years before LGBT fiction for young adults existed.

She had spent time in New York City in her 20s and 30s and had gone to literary parties and been on TV and sat set-side as her best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was made into an Oscar-winning box office hit. Lee was the maiden aunt who had modeled quiet gender-non-conformity for us for decades.

It would be a decade or so before I would realize that the girl named George was a lesbian and the femme Bess was her lover and that Nancy was in heteronormative limbo between her fondness for Ned was it ever more than that? The genesis of my request and her response began in July when the Bay Area Reporter published an article I wrote on gay travel to southern Alabama.

Here was a book—a famous book that even the nuns thought we should read—that had a girl like me in it. The story included Monroeville, a small town about 90 minutes north of Mobile. The question "Is Harper Lee gay or straight?' still appears on the site VIPFAQ, stating, "Many people enjoy sharing rumors about the sexuality and sexual orientation of celebrities.

She had written that novel and revealed Scout to us. When news broke on Feb. Scout is the girl who despises dresses, gets into fights, feels suffocated by being indoors and yearns to have the kind of freedom her older brother has to roam at will, responsible to no one.

Mockingbird passing Closeted traditions

I am trying to remember a time when I didn’t want to meet her, to be the writer who got that interview with her. But it was reported that after interviews were done with Lee at the assisted living facility where she was living when HarperCollins announced publication of the novel, investigators decided Lee had indeed consented to publishing the book.

But what it does do for those of us who loved Scout, is bring her to adulthood. A decidedly lesbian adulthood. Scout is the girl who rejects femininity but not femaleness. Yet for those of us who grew up reading To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high, the shock of recognition cannot be dismissed.

The return of Harper Lee is, for lesbian and gay devotees of To Kill a Mockingbird, not a little maddening.