** Fighting for LGBTQ Rights ** Standing Up to Tyranny ** Those who Dared to be Different **

1. Poems, Quotes & Poetry - Walt Whitman was a 19th-century American poet, essayist, and journalist, best known for his influential poetry collection. Due to extensive evidence of his romantic and sexual relationships with men, and the prominent homoerotic themes in his poetry, especially the "Calamus" poems in his seminal work, Leaves of Grass. He is one of the earliest LGBTQ figures in Americacn Literature. Much of his work was rejected in his lifetime. Born in Long Island in 1819, he left school at age 11 to work and became largely self-taught, with careers in printing, journalism, and teaching before focusing on poetry. During the Civil War, he volunteered in Washington, D.C., caring for wounded soldiers, an experience that heavily influenced his writing. He continued to revise Leaves of Grass until his death in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892. Have read any of the works of Walt Whitman?

2. Tennessee Williams (born Thomas Lanier Williams III) was an influential American playwright known for works like A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Born in 1911, his turbulent childhood, particularly his difficult relationship with his father and the mental illness of his sister, deeply influenced his writing. Williams achieved major success in the 1940s and 1950s, winning two Pulitzer Prizes, but struggled with personal demons, including addiction, throughout his life. He died in 1983. Have you seen any plays or films written by Tennessee Williams?

3. Alison Bechdel's parents—Bruce and Helen (Fontana) Bechdel—were teachers, and her father was a part-time funeral director (the funeral home was nicknamed the "fun home" by Bechdel and her siblings). When Bechdel was 19 years old, just months after she had revealed to her parents that she is a lesbian, her father was struck and killed by a truck, an event that Bechdel later theorized was actually an act of suicide. After she earned a B.A. (1981) from Oberlin College, she moved to New York City. Alison Bechdel (born September 10, 1960, Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American cartoonist and graphic novelist best known for the comic strip "D*kes to Watch Out For" (1983–2008)—which introduced the so-called Bechdel test, a metric that evaluates movies on the basis of gender inequality—and the graphic memoir Fun Home (2006). Are you familiar with her work as a cartoonist?