Und die einen sind im Dunkeln, und die andern sind im Licht, doch man sieht nur die im Lichte, die im Dunkel sieht man nicht
— Bertholt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper
Over the past six days I suspended a complex series of postings on LGBTQ people integrating sexual lives, relationships, and identities with lives of accomplishment, slowly focusing on the examples closest to me: gay men in linguistics. I intended to begin with one specific example that came my way a while back, in this announcement (with special emphasis on a passage I’ve boldfaced; read it in conjunction with the Brecht quote above):
The George A. Smathers Library [of the University of Florida, Gainesville] cordially invites you to the Michael Gannon Lecture on Tuesday, April 1st, from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m., featuring linguistic anthropologist George Aaron Broadwell [AZ: called Aaron], Ph.D., the Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at University of Florida. A booksigning will be held immediately following the event.
“Reading Florida’s First Native Authors: Towards an Understanding of Timucua Literature”
This talk introduces the public to some of the most interesting passages of Timucua literature and discusses the techniques that our team has used to read and interpret Timucua texts.
Having assembled a host of texts written in Timucua, the native language of the inhabitants of northern Florida from around the twelfth century into the eighteenth century, Broadwell has spent years working to translate what the writers were recording. Through his own efforts, work with colleagues, and assistance from students Broadwell has reconstructed substantial parts of Timucua vocabulary, in some cases interpreting previously untranslated texts, and also offering new revelations about those with Spanish corollaries.
His work has revolutionized understanding of the conquest and colonial eras in Florida, giving voice to the people who lived under Spanish rule and revealing what their letters and writings say about dramatic changes taking place in their lives and world. The topic is especially appropriate for a lecture in honor of [historian, educator, priest, and war correspondent] Michael Gannon [(1927-2017)], who included in his own discussions of Florida history an example of the Timucua-language version of the Lord’s Prayer.
Alas, the world has been too much with me, so I now bring you the news of this excellent event after it has taken place; I’ve been posting little things to show that I’m still alive, while I try to cope with the threatening turmoil instigated by President Putinitsa and her sidekick Evilon (two monstrous buckets of pathologies, of different sorts); my current mantra is Stand Up and Stand Out, and I’ve been doing my best to be pointedly offensive. Meanwhile, I have a complex personal and medical life, with much I’d like to report on (I visited my department at Stanford this morning, first time in years, and showed some of the delightful campus to my caregiver J — who then showed me that I will need to post about Antigua Guatemala, all new to me).
In any case, I have tons of stuff to say and feel overwhelmed. But I intend to move on to Aaron Broadwell, and try to distill many pages of a remarkable c.v. into something digestible, before moving on to the story of his relationship with the author Peter Marino (Aaron and Peter have been together for 30 years and were in the earliest group of gay people who got married in Massachusetts, in 2004, wow. Then to get back to the larger topic, with other examples of gay male linguists of substantial accomplishment and some words on why people should care about us, especially during a time when concerns about DEI mask a concerted attack on (among many other things) LGBTQ people and our rights — one of a number of bullshit smokescreens spread by Putinitsa and Evilon in their program to establish domination over a cowering and compliant populace.
Poetic note. “The World Is Too Much With Us” is a sonnet by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807; in it, the poet maintains that industrial society has damaged the connection between people and nature and replaced it with getting and spending.
April 3, 2025 at 7:53 pm |
Bill Bright’s last language venture was some months of collaboration on Timucua before his left-hemisphere brain tumor made further work on any language impossible. I don’t recall who he worked with…
April 4, 2025 at 7:18 am |
Aaron might know who he worked with; this is a very small academic universe.
April 4, 2025 at 3:58 am |
sending you love and support! thank you for sharing, it’s very important for me to hear LGBTQ+ voices in academia, especially in linguistics 💙
April 4, 2025 at 7:58 am |
Thank you. This is sort of one of my jobs, and I’ve been in this business since 1970 — thriving through the protections of academic freedom, which were (this is very important) vigorously supported by the deanery at Ohio State; and through the strategy of being radically open about everything in my life, so that the cops and other malevolent actors were unable to ruin me.
I was extraordinarily lucky — in my family, friends, colleagues, and students — to be able to pursue this program; very few people are so well situated that they can act this way, but my moral principles told me that if I could pull this off, and still maintain a domestic life and a professional life, I had to — for the sake of others I had to make, as John Lewis put it, good trouble.
April 10, 2025 at 4:42 pm |
From comments on this posting on Facebook on 4/4: