Rictor Norton

Background

Rictor Norton was born on June 25, 1945 in Friendship, New York, United States.

Education

Rictor Norton received a Bachelor of Arts from Florida Southern College in 1967, and a Doctor of Philosophy from Florida State University in 1972.

Career

As a graduate student at Florida State University, Rictor Norton taught one of the nation’s first courses on male and female homosexual writers.

After receiving his doctorate, Norton immigrated to England, where he worked for and contributed to the bi-weekly Gay News for five years before moving on to the London office of an American-based children’s book publisher. In 1990 he gave up regular employment in order to write a book. The result was Mother Clap's Molly House, an in-depth examination of eighteenth-century England’s gay subculture. Using private letters, court records, public notices, and contemporary press coverage, sodomy laws, anti-homosexual tracts, and literary sources, Norton portrays a London gay community drawn largely from the working class and middle classes, with its own social networks, cultural practices, and slang. Norton devotes chapters to popular prejudice and violence against gays, homosexuality within the clergy and aristocracy, the prevalence of blackmail, prominent scandals, and eighteenth-century lesbianism, among other topics.

Norton’s next book, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, contests the view that homosexual identity is socially constructed as a response to historically specific factors like a capitalist economy or modern family structure. Refuting scholars who uphold the “social constructivist” theories in gay studies, Norton proposes an “essentialist” view of homosexuality, according to which homosexuality is simply a part of human history, and not a social construct created by specific historical circumstances.

Rictor latest book is Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840, which was published in 2000.

Norton was the editor of My Dear Boy, an anthology of gay love letters dating from the second century (Ro-man philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius) to the twentieth century (Allen Ginsburg).

Achievements

• Rictor Norton was a finalist of the Lambda Book Award in 1993 for Mother Clap’s Molly House and finalist of the Lambda Book Award in 1998 for My Dear Boy.

Works

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  • Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity

    (The volume reviews the fundamental historiographical issu...)

    1997
  • Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830

    (This pioneering study breaks new ground in presenting the...)

    1992
  • My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries

    (My Dear Boy is an anthology of gay love letters between i...)

    1998
  • Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840 2000
  • Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe 1999
  • The Homosexual Literary Tradition: An Interpretation 1974

Views

Throughout Norton’s book, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, he emphasizes the relevance of his conception of gay cultural history, which he believes will allow gay people, male and female, to reclaim a past from which they have been disconnected.

Membership

Rictor Norton was an active member of National Trust, Royal Horticultural Society, Alpine Garden Society, London Natural History Society, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and International William Beckford Society.

Connections

In December 2005 Rictor Norton formed a civil partnership with his partner.