Before publishing his gay classic The Picture of Dorian Gray (a novel that would be used against Wilde in trials that led to his imprisonment for homosexuality), Oscar Wilde presented lectures throughout the United States. He appeared on the UNL campus during his visit to Lincoln, and he spoke to poetry students as a guest of English professor George Woodberry. According to an article in The Nebraska State Journal, Wilde criticized the university architecture and called for a gymnasium where “might be seen models of the old Greek athletes, such splendid examples of physical beauty.”

Willa Cather is enrolled at UNL as a student of English. Cather would go on to win international awards and recognition for her novels set in Nebraska, including the Pulitzer Prize; and she lived for 40 years with a woman named Edith Lewis. (Their relationship is the subject of Professor Melissa Homestead’s book, The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, published by Oxford University Press in April 2021.)

Cather’s sexuality, though widely recognized as queer today, was the source of decades of debate and denial among scholars. But letters she wrote to her friend, Louise Pound (also an English student and also queer), in 1892 reveal the complexity of her feelings for Pound, and for years served as evidence of Cather’s queerness for literary scholars and biographers. Among the young Cather’s protestations to her crush: “It is manifestly unfair that ‘feminine friendships’ should be unnatural.”

Scrip, a student-run literary journal in the UNL Department of English, had the opportunity to publish an original poem by the acclaimed countercultural poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg, who at that point was already a controversial figure—his poem “Howl,” a classic of queer literature, faced obscenity charges in 1956—was invited to campus by a group of student activists. For the occasion, Ginsberg wrote for Scrip a new poem titled “Auto Poesy to Nebraska.” The poem included references to Lincoln and Omaha, and ended with a reference to O Street, which he calls “Zero Street” in the poem. (You can listen to a recording of Ginsberg himself reading the poem, thanks to Smithsonian Folkways).

The student work to be published in the special issue of Scrip was specifically inspired by Ginsberg, and the cover featured a collage of photos of the poet. A university authority restricted publication of the Ginsberg poem in the journal, so the student editors (including Steve Abbott, who would go on to become an acclaimed queer poet himself) simply mimeographed the four-page-long Ginsberg poem, stapled it, and slipped it between the covers of every issue of Scrip sold.

“Proseminar in Homophile Studies,” a course designed by English professor Lou Crompton, becomes one of the first LGBTQ studies courses to ever be offered at a U.S. university.

Sinister Wisdom, the first journal of lesbian scholarship, is housed in Lincoln for issues #7-14, with English professor Julia Penelope as one of its editors. Dr. Penelope would also offer the first lesbian novel class in the nation.

emily danforth published her first novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, set at an LGBTQ conversion therapy camp, which she wrote as a graduate student at UNL and submitted as her creative dissertation for an English Ph.D. The book was later adapted into a film that won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

The leading award for LGBTQ+ literature, the Lambda Literary Awards, recognized four books by authors who once studied English and writing at UNL: two books by Roxane Gay (Hunger, a memoir which won in the category of “bisexual nonfiction,” and Difficult Women, a finalist for short fiction); the novel Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu (the novel was also recognized with an award by The Publishing Triangle, the other leading award for LGBTQ+ authors); and Blind Girl Grunt: The Selected Blues Lyrics and Other Poems by Constance Merritt.