Discover & Discuss: LGBTQ+ History

Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right
Young, Neil J. (2024)

A revelatory and comprehensive history of the gay Right from incisive political commentator Neil J. Young.

One of the most maligned, misunderstood, and even mocked constituencies in American politics, gay Republicans regularly face condemnation from both the LGBTQ+ community and their own political party. Yet they’ve been active and influential for decades. Gay conservatives were instrumental, for example, in ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and securing the legalization of same-sex marriage—but they also helped lay the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump. 

In "Coming Out Republican," political historian and commentator Neil J. Young provides the first comprehensive history of the gay Right. From the 1950s up to the present day, Young excavates the multifarious origins, motivations, and evolutions of LGBTQ+ people who found their way to the institutions and networks of modern conservatism. Many on the gay Right have championed conservative values—like free markets, a strong national defense, and individual liberty—and believed that the Republican Party therefore offered LGBTQ+ people the best pathway to freedom. Meanwhile, that same party has actively and repeatedly demonized them. With his precise and provocative voice, Young details the complicated dynamics of being in—and yet never fully accepted into—the Republican Party. 

"Coming Out Republican" provides striking insight into who LGBTQ+ conservatives are, what they want, and why many of them continue to align with a party whose rank and file largely seem to hate them. As the Republican Party renews its assaults on LGBTQ+ rights, understanding the significant history of the gay Right has never been more critical. - Publisher's Description

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My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan and Bush Years
Schulman, Sarah (2019)

Sarah Schulman’s writing is bold, provocative, and refreshingly unrepentant. First published in 1994, "My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan and Bush Years" combines critical commentary with a rich and varied collection of news articles, letters, interviews, and reports in which the author traces the development of lesbian and gay politics in the U.S. In her coverage of many tireless campaigns of activism and resistance, Sarah Schulman documents a powerful political history that most people – gay or straight – never knew happened. 

In her Preface to this second edition, Urvashi Vaid argues for the continued relevance of Schulman’s writing to activism in the 21st century, particularly in light of the resurgence of the right in American politics. Also included is a selection of articles by Sarah Schulman for "Womanews," in their original print format, with illustrations by Alison Bechdel. The book closes with an interview with the author, conducted by Steven Thrasher, especially for this new edition. It explores AIDS and homophobia during the Reagan/Bush administrations and at the dawn of the Trump era. 

"My American History" is a collection that gives voice to both the personal and political struggles of feminist and lesbian and gay communities in the 1980s. It is an important historical record that will enlighten and inform activists, as well as academics of women’s, gender and sexuality studies, in the 21st century. - Publisher's Description

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The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After
Hilderbrand, Lucas (2023)

Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. 

In "The Bars Are Ours" Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. Hilderbrand cruises from leather in Chicago and drag in Kansas City to activism against gentrification in Boston and racial discrimination in Atlanta; from New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and discos and Houston’s legendary bar Mary’s to the alternative scenes that reimagined queer nightlife in San Francisco and Latinx venues in Los Angeles. "The Bars Are Ours" explores these local sites (with additional stops in Denver, Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas) to demonstrate the intoxicating---even world-making---roles that bars have played in queer public life across the country. - Publisher's Description

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Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement
Johnson, David (2019)

In 1951, a new type of publication appeared on American newsstands--the physique magazine produced by and for gay men. For many in Cold War America, these magazines served as an initiation into an extensive world of photography studios, mail-order catalogs, pen-pal services, and book clubs targeting a gay market. In "Buying Gay," David K. Johnson shows how this gay commercial network--long thought to be a result of the gay rights movement--was actually a crucial catalyst for the gay rights movement. 

Each chapter offers a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at a physique entrepreneur and their battle with the U.S. Post Office, which considered their products obscene and engaged in a relentless campaign to shut them down. It reveals how Bob Mizer founded Physique Pictorial in Los Angeles as a direct response to postal authority intimidation. It uncovers the story of "The Grecian Guild," founded by a gay couple who met at the University of Virginia, who offered their subscribers access to a gay fraternal order. It tells the story of a New York publishing executive who pioneered the notion of niche marketing of gay books. It tells the story of Elsie Carlton, a straight woman who ran one of the nation's first gay mail-order book clubs. 

Threatening all these physique entrepreneurs was Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, who had members of the first gay pen pal service arrested and sent its founders to prison. It would take Lynn Womack, who consolidated the field into a physique publishing empire--including his own distribution network, printing plant, and legal library--to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and win one of the first and most important gay rights cases. Manual v. Day in 1962 paved the way for a vibrant gay print and commercial world that could help sustain a movement. 

Combining LGBT studies and the history of capitalism for the first time, "Buying Gay" reconceives the history of the gay rights movement and shows how consumer culture helped create community and a site for resistance. - Publisher's Description

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Pride Parades: How a Parade Changed the World
Bruce, Katherine McFarland (2016)

On June 28, 1970, two thousand gay and lesbian activists in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago paraded down the streets of their cities in a new kind of social protest, one marked by celebration, fun, and unashamed declaration of a stigmatized identity. Forty-five years later, over six million people annually participate in 115 Pride parades across the United States. They march with church congregations and college gay-straight alliance groups, perform dance routines and marching band numbers, and gather with friends to cheer from the sidelines. 

With vivid imagery, and showcasing the voices of these participants, Pride Parades tells the story of Pride from its beginning in 1970 to 2010. Though often dismissed as frivolous spectacles, the author builds a convincing case for the importance of Pride parades as cultural protests at the heart of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Weaving together interviews, archival reports, quantitative data, and ethnographic observations at six diverse contemporary parades in New York City, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Burlington, Fargo, and Atlanta, Bruce describes how Pride parades are a venue for participants to challenge the everyday cultural stigma of being queer in America, all with a flair and sense of fun absent from typical protests. Unlike these political protests that aim to change government laws and policies, Pride parades are coordinated, concerted attempts to improve the standing of LGBT people in American culture. - Publisher's Description

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A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, D.C.
Beemyn, Genny (2015)

Rooted in extensive archival research and personal interviews, "A Queer Capital" is the first history of LGBT life in the nation’s capital. Revealing a vibrant past that dates back more than 125 years, the book explores how lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals established spaces of their own before and after World War II, survived some of the harshest anti-gay campaigns in the U.S., and organized to demand equal treatment. Telling the stories of black and white gay communities and individuals, Genny Beemyn shows how race, gender, and class shaped the construction of gay social worlds in a racially segregated city. 

From the turn of the twentieth century through the 1980s, Beemyn explores the experiences of gay people in Washington, showing how they created their own communities, fought for their rights, and, in the process, helped to change the country. Combining rich personal stories with keen historical analysis, "A Queer Capital" provides insights into LGBT life, the history of Washington, D.C., and African American life and culture in the twentieth century. - Publisher's Description

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Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism
Stein, Marc (2022)

Over the course of the last half century, queer history has developed as a collaborative project involving academic researchers, community scholars, and the public. Initially rejected by most colleges and universities, queer history was sustained for many years by community-based contributors and audiences. Academic activism eventually made a place for queer history within higher education, which in turn helped queer historians become more influential in politics, law, and society. 

Through a collection of essays written over three decades by award-winning historian Marc Stein, "Queer Public History" charts the evolution of queer historical interventions in the academic sphere and explores the development of publicly oriented queer historical scholarship. From the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and the rise of queer activism in the 1990s to debates about queer immigration, same-sex marriage, and the politics of gay pride in the early twenty-first century, Stein introduces readers to key themes in queer public history. A manifesto for renewed partnerships between academic and community-based historians, strengthened linkages between queer public history and LGBT scholarly activism, and increased public support for historical research on gender and sexuality, this anthology reconsiders and reimagines the past, present, and future of queer public history. - Publisher's Description

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Menergy: San Francisco's Gay Disco Sound
Niebur, Louis (2022)

For most of the US, disco died in 1979. Triggered by the infamous "Disco Demolition" night at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 12, 1979, a backlash made the word "disco" an overnight punchline. Major labels dropped disco artists and producers, and those mainstream musicians who had jumped on the bandwagon just as quickly threw themselves off. Gay men, however, continued to dance, and in the gay enclave of the Castro District in San Francisco, enterprising gay DJs, record producers, and musicians started their own small dance music record labels to make up for the lack of new, danceable music. Almost immediately this music reached far beyond the Bay, with Megatone Records, Moby Dick Records, and other labels achieving worldwide success, creating the world's first gay-owned, gay-produced music for a dancing audience. This music reflected a new way of life, a world apart and a culture of sexual liberation for gay men especially. 

With "Menergy," author Louis Niebur offers a project of reconstruction in order to restore these lost figures to their rightful place in the legacy of 20th-century popular music. "Menergy" is the product of years of research, with dozens of personal interviews, archival research drawing upon hundreds of contemporary journals, photographs, bar rags, diaries, nightclub ephemera, and, most importantly, the recordings of the San Francisco artists themselves. With its combination of popular music theory, cultural analysis, queer theory and gender studies, and traditional musical analysis, the book will appeal to readers in queer history, popular music history, and electronic dance music. - Publisher's Description

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Rainbow History Class: Your Guide Through Queer and Trans History
McElhinney, Hannah (2023)

As seen on Tiktok, Rainbow History Class is your entry into LGBTQ+ history, covering queer and trans stories from the ancient world through to lesser-known moments in recent history. 

So much of queer and trans history and culture has been erased, but Hannah McElhinney, writer and creative director of "Rainbow History Class," is here to help us all with this crash course. This history lesson isn’t dry and academic, nor is it glitter-soaked or reductive. It’s a comprehensive and entertaining romp through queer and trans history, full of secret queer codes, gender-bending icons, pop-culture knowledge and incredible activists. 

More than anything, "Rainbow History Class" will make you feel connected to the stories of our rich and vibrant community. This knowledge will help spark conversations between your friends and family and be a source of comfort as you stand up for yourself and your community on the internet. This illustrated hardback book is a celebration for all LGBTQ+ people, and an invitation to the newly out that says, ‘Welcome to the club, let’s get you caught up!’ - Publisher's Description

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Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern
LaFleur, Greta; Raskolnikov, Masha; Klosowska, Anna (2023)

Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives—literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. 

The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, "Trans Historical" also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. - Publisher's Description

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The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance
DeVun, Leah (2021)

"The Shape of Sex" is a pathbreaking history of nonbinary sex, focusing on ideas and individuals who allegedly combined or crossed sex or gender categories from 200–1400 C.E. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, Leah DeVun reveals how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex. 

"The Shape of Sex" examines a host of thinkers—theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists—who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. "The Shape of Sex" charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions. 

In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, "The Shape of Sex" casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human. - Publisher's Description

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The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets
Pitman, Gayle; Sargeant, Fred (2019)

A timely and necessary read, "The Stonewall Riots" helps readers understand the history and legacy of the LGBTQ+ movement. The book includes contemporary photos, newspaper clippings, and other period objects, as well as a timeline, a biography, and an index. Interviews with people involved as well as witnesses bring an immediacy to the story. 

In clear prose and short chapters, the book takes readers through a history of American gay life leading up to the Riots, the Riots themselves, and the aftermath. In a starred review, "Shelf Awareness" noted: “With meaningful content delivered in an innovative format, The Stonewall Riots deserves to be required reading for people of all ages.” 

"The Stonewall Riots" were a series of spontaneous, at times violent demonstrations by members of the gay (LGBTQ+) community in reaction to a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The Riots are attributed as the spark that ignited the LGBTQ+ movement. - Publisher's Description

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Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century
Aldrich, Robert; Wotherspoon, Garry (2020)

Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century is a comprehensive and fascinating survey of the key figures in gay and lesbian history from classical times to the mid-twentieth century. Among those included are:

* Classical heroes - Achilles; Aeneas; Ganymede
* Literary giants - Sappho; Christopher Marlowe; Arthur Rimbaud; Oscar Wilde
* Royalty and politicians - Edward II; King James I; Horace Walpole; Michel de Montaigne. 

Over the course of some 500 entries, expert contributors provide a complete and vivid picture of gay and lesbian life in the Western world throughout the ages. - Publisher's Description

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Fighting Proud: The Untold Story of the Gay Men Who Served in Two World Wars
Bourne, Stephen (2017)

In this astonishing new history of wartime Britain, historian Stephen Bourne unearths the fascinating stories of the gay men who served in the armed forces and at home, and brings to light the great unheralded contribution they made to the war effort. "Fighting Proud" weaves together the remarkable lives of these men, from RAF hero Ian Gleed - a Flying Ace twice honoured for bravery by King George VI - to the infantry officers serving in the trenches on the Western Front in WWI - many of whom led the charges into machine-gun fire only to find themselves court-martialled after the war for indecent behaviour. Behind the lines, Alan Turing's work on breaking the 'enigma machine' and subsequent persecution contrasts with the many stories of love and courage in Blitzed-out London, with new wartime diaries and letters unearthed for the first time. 

Bourne tells the bitterly sad story of Ivor Novello, who wrote the WWI anthem 'Keep the Home Fires Burning', and the crucial work of Noel Coward - who was hated by Hitler for his work entertaining the troops. Fighting Proud also includes a wealth of long-suppressed wartime photography subsequently ignored by mainstream historians. This book is a monument to the bravery, sacrifice and honour shown by a persecuted minority, who contributed during Britain's hour of need. - Publisher's Description

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Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France
Chaplin, Tamara (2024)

In "Becoming Lesbian," historian Tamara Chaplin argues that the history of female same-sex intimacy is central to understanding the struggle to control the public sphere. This monumental study draws on undiscovered sources culled from cabaret culture, sexology, police files, radio, TV, photography, the Minitel (an early form of internet), and private letters, as well as over one hundred interviews filmed by the author. Becoming Lesbian demonstrates how women of diverse classes and races came to define themselves as lesbian and used public spaces and public media to exert claims on the world around them in ways that made possible new forms of gendered and sexual citizenship. Chaplin begins in the sapphic cabarets of interwar Paris. These venues, she shows, exploited female same-sex desire for profit while simultaneously launching an incipient queer female counterpublic. Refuting claims that World War II destroyed this female world, Chaplin reveals instead how prewar sapphic subcultures flourished in the postwar period, laying crucial groundwork for the politicization of lesbian identity into the twenty-first century. 

"Becoming Lesbian" is filled with colorful vignettes about female cabaret owners, singers, TV personalities, writers, and activists, all brought to life to make larger points about rights, belonging, and citizenship. As a history of lesbianism, this book represents a major contribution to modern French history, queer studies, and genealogies of the media and its publics. - Publisher's Description

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Queer Lives Across the Wall: Desire and Danger in Divided Berlin, 1945-1970
Rottmann, Andrea (2023)

"Queer Lives Across the Wall" examines the everyday lives of queer Berliners between 1945 and 1970, tracing private and public queer life from the end of the Nazi regime through the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s. 

Andrea Rottmann explores how certain spaces – including homes, bars, streets, parks, and prisons – facilitated and restricted queer lives in the overwhelmingly conservative climate that characterized both German postwar states. With a theoretical toolkit informed by feminist, queer, and spatial theories, the book goes beyond previous histories that focus on state surveillance and the persecution of male homosexuality. - Publisher's Description

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A Body of One's Own : a Trans History of Argentina
Simonetto, Patricio (2024)

As a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, "A Body of One’s Own" places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and community-based archives, this book explores the mainstream medical and media portrayals of trans or travesti people, the state policing of gender embodiment, the experiences of those transgressing the boundaries of gender, and the development of homemade technologies from prosthetics to the self-injection of silicone. 

"A Body of One's Own" explores how trans activists' challenges to the exclusionary effects of Argentina’s legal, cultural, social, and political cisgender order led to the passage of the Gender Identity Law in 2012. Analyzing the decisive yet overlooked impact of gender transformation in the formation of the nation-state, gender-belonging, and citizenship, this book ultimately shows that supposedly abstract struggles to define the shifting notions of "sex," citizenship, and nationhood are embodied material experiences. - Publisher's Description

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Gay Sydney: A History
Wotherspoon, Garry (2016)

Garry Wotherspoon's "Gay Sydney: A History" is an updated version of his 1991 classic, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-culture, written in the midst of the AIDS crisis. 

In this vivid book Wotherspoon traces the shifts that have occurred since then, including majority support for marriage equality and anti-discrimination legislation. He also ponders the parallel evaporation of a distinctly gay sensibility and the disappearance of once-packed gay bars that have now become cafes and gyms. This book also tells the story of gay Sydney across a century, looking at secret, underground gay life, the never-ending debates about sex in society and the role of social movements in the '60 and '70s in effecting social change. - Publisher's Description

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Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten
Kong, Travis (2019)

“This is very personal and private, but I’ve told you everything.” Old Chan thus gives voice to the attitude expressed in all thirteen stories told in this intimate oral history of life at the margins of Hong Kong society, stories punctuated by laughter, joy, happiness, and pride, as well as tears, anger, remorse, shame, and guilt. 

Illustrated with photos, letters, and other images, "Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong: Unspoken but Unforgotten" gives voice to the complexities of a “secretive” past with unique hardships as these men came to terms with their sexuality, adulthood, and a colonial society. The men talk with equal candour about how their sexuality remains a complication as they negotiate failing health, ageing, and their current role in society. 

While fascinating as life histories, these stories also add insight to the theoretical debates surrounding identity and masculinity, coming out, ageing and sexuality, and power and resistance. Confined within the heteronormative culture prescribed by government, family, and religion, these men have lived the whole of their lives struggling to find their social role, challenging the distinction between public and private, and longing for a stable homosexual relationship and a liberating homosexual space in the face of deteriorating health and a youth-obsessed gay community. - Publisher's Description

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A Little Gay History of Wales
Leeworthy, Daryl (2019)

This pioneering book traces Welsh LGBT life and politics from the Middle Ages to the present. Drawing on a rich array of archival sources from across Britain together with oral testimony and material culture, this original study is the first to examine the experiences of ordinary LGBT men and women and how they embarked on coming out, building community, and changing the world. 

This is the story of poets who wrote about same-sex love and translators who worked to create a language to describe it; activists who campaigned for equality and politicians who shaped the resultant legislation; teenagers ringing advice lines for guidance and revellers in the underground bars and clubs on Friday and Saturday nights. In this rich social history, Darryl Leeworthy presents a study of prejudice and of intolerance, of emigration and isolation, of HIV/AIDS and counter-movements that conveys the complex reality of LGBT life and same-sex desire. Engaging and accessible, this book is an important advance in our understanding of Welsh history. - Publisher's Description

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