Talk and Book Launch: Nights in Fairland by Will Straw
February 13 | 15:30 - 17:00
Clusters: Media and Materiality
Join the Media History Research Centre for the launch of Nights in Fairland, the latest publication by Will Straw.
In its time (the 1920s and 1930s), the New York-based periodical Broadway Brevities was best known as the basis of a blackmail racket made public in a widely-covered trial that sent its Canadian-born editor to prison in 1925. In recent years, interest in Broadway Brevities has focused instead on its relentless exposure of the places of Queer nightlife in New York in the 1920s and 1930s.
The fourteen episodes of the “Nights in Fairyland” series saw Brevities’ editor venture into the queer gathering places of Manhattan, denouncing the people he found there even as he revelled in the rich details of their lives. This talk will deal with the historical usefulness of these accounts, and with the problem of researching magazines which were rarely preserved in libraries and, until very recently, ignored by historians.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Will Straw is James McGill Emeritus Professor of Urban Media Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America (Andrew Roth Gallery, 2006) and the new Nights in Fairyland: Gossip, Blackmail, and the Many Lives of Broadway Brevities. Will Straw is also the co-editor of numerous books, including Formes Urbaines (with Anouk Bélanger and Annie Gérin, 2014), Night Studies : Regards croisés sur les nouveaux visages de la nuit (with Luc Gwiazdzinski and Marco Maggioli, 2020) and the forthcoming Routledge Handbook to the Night Time Economy(with Jess Reia and Alessio Koliulis). Dr. Straw has published more than 200 articles on cinema, music popular culture and the urban night.
February 13, 2026
3:30-5 PM
Milieux Resource Room EV 11.705
🎟️ Please make sure your register for this event