William Armstrong Percy

William Armstrong Percy (born December 10, 1933 in Memphis ) is an American university professor, historian, author and LGBT activist.

Life

Percy was born in Memphis. His mother was Anne Minor Dent, who grew up with her widowed uncle Dent Minor. His cousin is the Catholic author and philosopher Walker Percy and their mutual uncle is the poet and lawyer William Alexander Percy ( Lanterns on the Levee ).

After graduating from the Middlesex School in Concord , Massachusetts in 1951, Percy attended Princeton University . During his student days, he experienced the political persecution and social ostracism of the McCarthy era in the United States, in which, among other things, not only communists but also homosexual people suffered political persecution. Percy joined the US Army and studied the Norwegian language at the Army Language School and began working as a translator of French texts for the CIA on the island of Saipan . Percy received his bachelor's degree (BA) from the University of Tennessee in 1957 as he continued his education . After studying for another year at the University of Naples , Percy moved to Cornell University and achieved a Masters (MA). In 1964 he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Percy taught at the University of New Orleans , Louisiana State University and the University of Missouri in the following years . In 1968 he got a job at the University of Massachusetts in Boston , where he has been teaching ever since. In 1975 he received his doctorate professor and outed within his university colleagues. Percy joined the lesbian and gay movement in the following years and wrote articles and books in the LGBT field. He is currently writing his memoir, a modern form of Lanterns on the Levee , in which he outlines many family members.

In 1994, Percy offered a $ 10,000 prize for the successful outing of a living US cardinal, a judge on the US Supreme Court, or a four-star general in the United States Army. Since the decision of Lawrence v. Texas of the Supreme Court, which finally legalized homosexuality in the United States, Percy has narrowed the prize money to cardinals and four-star generals. Percy has now raised the prize money for US cardinals and four-star generals to $ 20,000.

Works

• in collaboration with Jerah Johnson : The Age of Recovery: The Fifteenth Century (Vol. X, The Development of Western Civilization series). New York: Cornell University Press, 1970
• in collaboration with Warren Johansson , Encyclopedia of Homosexuality . Ed. Wayne R. Dynes , 2nd Edition, New York: Garland, 1990. (The encyclopedia won six prizes: The Laud Humphreys prize; Choice; American Libraries; American Library Association; New York Public Library; Gay and Lesbian Task Force of the American Library Association )
• in collaboration with Warren Johansson, Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence , New York: Haworth Press, 1994
• Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece , Campagne / Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996, ISBN 0-252-02209-2
• in collaboration with Arnold Lelis and Beert Verstraete, The Age of Marriage in Ancient Rome , Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003
• in collaboration with Lewis Gannett, biography of Jim Kepner and CA Tripp
• Biography of Warren Johansson
• in collaboration with Lewis Gannett , The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln , Free Press, 2005 |
• in collaboration with Vern Leroy Bullough , Judith M. Saunders, and Sharon Valente, Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context , Harrington Press, 2002
• in collaboration with Warren Johansson, Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West , Haworth Press, 1994

Web links

• Biography of William Armstrong Percy , website
• William A. Percy , University of Massachusetts Boston website