- Figure 3.1. My friend Michaela Bronstein brought this to my attention: the Harvard library bookplate for Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History specifies a fund “to portray a positive image of homosexuality and gay men and gay women”—which is by no means what Love, in her rigorous book, straightforwardly portrays. In an email exchange, Michaela remarked how she saw this as an example of a “clash between academic paranoia and institutional optimism.” This shows the front matter of a book, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, by Heather Love. The Harvard library bookplate contains Harvard’s insignia (with the word “Veritas”), below which runs the following: “From a fund established by Douglass Roby, A.B. 1965, to portray a positive image of homosexuality and gay men and gay women.”
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