The Queer Radical Lineage of Common Sense

IMPORTANT - This is NEW LOCATION at a different library.

The Queer Radical Lineage of Common Sense: A reckoning with historian Robert W. Fieseler

On this year, the 250th anniversary of the publication of a two-shilling pamphlet that sold 120,000 copies and birthed a continental revolution – none other than Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, we consider the queer lineage of a nation delivered from the fallout of an imperial overthrow and find patriotic reverberations in history’s sexual, gender and racial dissidents, who bent the knee to no apartheid system or sociopolitical throne.

IMPORTANT: Due to voting needs at our regular location, we will meet at the Charles A Wagner Library
(6646 Riverside Drive · Metairie)

**Doors open at 2:30pm... program starts at 3pm**

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER - Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist who investigates marginalized groups and an author who excavates forgotten histories. He’s also the public scholar who convinced the New Orleans City Council to pass an apology resolution for the city's apathetic response to the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge fire. He married his longtime partner at Walden Pond and proudly lives in the Crescent City.

Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He’s currently pursuing a PhD in History at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. He was the 2019 NLGJA (National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association) Journalist of the Year and won the Columbia Journalism School Alumni Association’s First Decade Award. To be honest, none of these accolades massage his existential dread or impress his husband.

As a little boy in flat flat Chicago, Fieseler’s favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz, and he thought he lived in Kansas. He loved the Wicked Witch and melted everywhere he could, including one time in the middle of Cook Country traffic court when his mother was disputing a ticket. As a grown-up, he wrote his debut book beside an opinionated Cairn Terrier – same breed as Toto – who accompanied him to the library. (Sadly, after a long happy life, that beautiful dog crossed over the rainbow in 2021.) Perhaps unsurprisingly to his mother, Fieseler grew to be a proud gay American.