Open Access Facilitates Rereading of LGBT Equality Legacy
In celebration of Open Access Week, the University of Chicago Library will host a webinar on October 24 featuring author John-Manuel Andriote discussing why he chooses to prioritize community over commercialization by granting open access to his book, Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America.
When Victory Deferred was published in 1999, it was acclaimed as a significant chronicle of how the LGBT community’s responses to HIV-AIDS had transformed the equality movement for the marginalized people. The book subsequently won a Lambda Literary Award (Editors’ Choice Award), and was a finalist for the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards and the New York Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction respectively.
In the years since its publication, Victory Deferred disappeared down the memory hole. It means that important lessons conveyed in the hundreds of interviews behind the book can benefit only those who happen to read the physical book or visit the Smithsonian’s Archive Center at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., where the John-Manuel Andriote Victory Deferred Collection is available to scholars and visitors.
To mark the book’s 25th anniversary, Andriote as the rightsholder has chosen to turn Victory Deferred into an open access book for anyone around the world. He explains, “The value of Victory Deferred to the LGBT and broader American community—in its many accounts and insights from firsthand interviews with heroes and pioneers in the HIV-AIDS epidemic and the LGBT equality movement—exceeds my own commercial interests in the book.”
Please join us for the webinar, Rereading a Heroic Legacy: How AIDS Built the LGBT Equality Movement, for a discussion of why open access to an award-winning title matters societally and intellectually, especially in the face of continuing oppression against the fight for equality.
This event will be closed captioned. To request other accommodations, please contact the University of Chicago Library as soon as possible.
