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LGBTQ Nonfiction / Joyceana
Bugger Courage: How One Man’s Homophobia Almost Killed Ulysses
On lesbian publishers, James Joyce, and censorship
When people talk about the most important novel of the 20th century, James Joyce’s Ulysses is at the top of the list. It is complex, stylistically innovative, and devoted to realism like no book before it.
Taking place on a single day, the novel goes into incredible detail about the lives of its characters, from their most profound thoughts to their most mundane actions. Characters talk, eat, and sleep, but also poop, bathe, menstruate, give birth, masturbate, and have sex. And at the heart of it all is Leopold Bloom, wandering the streets of Dublin while avoiding going home — where his wife Molly is sleeping with another man.
Because of this unfiltered realism, Joyce had trouble getting anyone to print Ulysses. But the novel’s biggest threat didn’t come from censorship alone — it also came from one of Joyce’s own supporters: a lawyer named John Quinn, whose homophobia became a significant obstacle in the book’s journey to publication.
The Little Review
Starting in 1918, American avant-garde literary magazine The Little Review serialized episodes of Ulysses. Founded and…
