chrisrodley/every-gay-sentence

every-gay-sentence

This is a #NaNoGenMo project with the working title: "Every Gay Sentence In English Literature"

Another title I'm playing with is: "Moscowitz Kissed Him": Every Gay Sentence In English Literature (the Moscowitz line is one of the sentences in the work, obvs).

The idea is to search and tabulate every conceivably homoerotic line from classic English literature.

My inspiration is the way that, before the rise of gay lit in the 70s, queer people -- hungry for the barest glimpse of self-representation -- would keep a constant lookout in popular culture for lines, characters and situations that could conceivably be regarded as homoerotic.

Currently I am looking at a corpus of Project Gutenberg, potentially supplemented by Google Books.

I'm an absolute coding beginner. To get this done in time for the end of the month, I'm going to be sourcing the text via manual site searches, dumping it into an Excel spreadsheet, and performing some simple operations on it. Once my 50k proof-of-concept is made, I plan to use Python to create a much more comprehensive version which will probably be several times as long, because it can search for a much wider range of hits.