But the gender debate is equally spirited and often ugly within the LGBTQ+ community. The gender wars have, until recently, been dominated by the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard courtroom drama, with aggrieved Depp fans usually muscling their way into 1,000-word online discussions and late-night party conversations, where passionate arguers try hard to maintain their wokeness, if not wakefulness. Two strong images to contend with during what is known as ‘Pride Month’-a celebration of queer identities-in the US and elsewhere in the world. Woolf, meanwhile, is known as the woman-loving-woman feminist author, who, among other stream-of-consciousness novels, wrote Orlando, in which the sex of the protagonist changes from century to century. “Papa” Hemingway has for decades been held up as the gold standard for fiction-writing, with millions worshipping at the altar of his staccato stories’ hypermasculinity. I’m writing this standing up, like both Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf famously did, lest anyone think of writers as a somnolent species, lazily nibbling the backs of their quills while sprawled in a bed filled with cookie crumbs.
