Commonhouse Aleworks

Join us for a community discussion held on the Common Ground with Commonhouse Aleworks as part of our event series Brewing on Books: A Community Book Club. This series focuses on local topics of interest for community members. For Park Circle's annual Gay Pride Festival, we're hosting author Harlan Greene for a discussion of Charleston's little-known LGBTQ history from the author's new book, The Real Rainbow Row. Along with the author's books, we'll have further LGBTQ+ titles from our curated shelves available at the event. Cheers! Books are available from Itinerant Literate: The Real Rainbow Row: tinyurl.com… Why We Never Danced the Charleston: bit.ly… About the Book Though Charleston has a reputation for holding onto the past longer than most other places, it could not avoid the shock of change. Much has been written of the city’s history of civil rights, and its rich African American, women’s, ethnic, and religious past. One of the minority groups long left out of the club has been Charleston’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other sexual minorities community. It’s not that they haven’t been here all along, making history, contributing greatly to the creation of one of America’s most distinctive cities. But, even now, with so many people out and acknowledged, marching in the streets, being elected to public office, and marrying, there are still discrepancies. There are no statues to LGBTQ people (while some discriminatory statutes linger), and very few official mentions anywhere. While other pasts blaze brightly, there is just a flickering of knowledge about local LGBTQ history. About the Author Harlan Greene is author of the novels Why We Never Danced the Charleston, What the Dead Remember and The German Officer's Boy. His non-fiction works include Charleston: City of Memory (with photographs by N. Jane Iseley), Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance and Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina, 1783-1865 (with Harry S. Hutchins Jr. and Brian E. Hutchins). With James Hutchisson, he co-edited Renaissance in Charleston: Art and Life in the Carolina Lowcountry, 1900-1940. The Real Rainbow Row is his latest release.