A Queer History of the United States

A Queer History of the United States
Author: Michael Bronski
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807044652

Winner of the Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction The first comprehensive history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender America, from pre-1492 to the present "Readable, radical, and smart—a must read."—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, this is more than a “who’s who” of queer history: it is a narrative that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the present, a testament to how the LGBTQ+ experience has profoundly shaped American culture and history. American history abounds with unknown or ignored examples of queer life, from the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies to the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War and resistance to homophobic social purity movements. Bronski highlights such groundbreaking moments of queer history as: • In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. •Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to "Publick Universal Friend," refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. • In the mid-19th century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.” • in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. Informative and empowering, this engrossing and revelatory treatise emphasizes that there is no American history without queer history.

Living Queer History

Living Queer History
Author: Gregory Samantha Rosenthal
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2021-10-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469665816

Queer history is a living practice. Talk to any group of LGBTQ people today, and they will not agree on what story should be told. Many people desire to celebrate the past by erecting plaques and painting rainbow crosswalks, but queer and trans people in the twenty-first century need more than just symbols—they need access to power, justice for marginalized people, spaces of belonging. Approaching the past through a lens of queer and trans survival and world-building transforms history itself into a tool for imagining and realizing a better future. Living Queer History tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia. Interweaving &8239;historical analysis, theory, and memoir, Gregory Samantha Rosenthal tells the story of their own journey—coming out and transitioning as a transgender woman—in the midst of working on a community-based history project that documented a multigenerational southern LGBTQ community. Based on over forty interviews with LGBTQ elders, Living Queer History explores how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present.

Bad Gays

Bad Gays
Author: Huw Lemmey
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2023-05-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1839763280

An unconventional history of homosexuality We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive. Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson. Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century, one central to major historical events. Bad Gays is a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond questions of identity, compelling readers to search for solidarity across boundaries.

We’ve Been Here All Along

We’ve Been Here All Along
Author: R. Richard Wagner
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2019-05-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0870209132

The first of two groundbreaking volumes on gay history in Wisconsin, We’ve Been Here All Along provides an illuminating and nuanced picture of Wisconsin’s gay history from the reporting on the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 to the landmark Stonewall Riots of 1969. Throughout these decades, gay Wisconsinites developed identities, created support networks, and found ways to thrive in their communities despite various forms of suppression—from the anti-vice crusades of the early twentieth century to the post-war labeling of homosexuality as an illness to the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. In We’ve Been Here All Along, R. Richard Wagner draws on historical research and materials from his own extensive archive to uncover previously hidden stories of gay Wisconsinites. This book honors their legacy and confirms that they have been foundational to the development and evolution of the state since its earliest days

Wide-Open Town

Wide-Open Town
Author: Nan Alamilla Boyd
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2005-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520244745

Traces the history of gay men and lesbians in San Francisco, from the turn of the century, when queer bars emerged in San Francisco's tourist districts, to 1965, when a raid on a drag ball energized the gay community. Includes excerpts from oral histories of lesbians and gay men who have lived in San Francisco since the 1930s.

A Little Gay History of Wales

A Little Gay History of Wales
Author: Daryl Leeworthy
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2019-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786834820

A Little Gay History of Wales is the first book-length historical examination of LGBT activism in Wales laying out the campaign for equality in the twentieth century, the campaigns against Section 28, student and community activism, and recent developments such as Stonewall Cymru. It is an example of pioneering archival research, drawing on never-before studied records which charts the lives of ordinary LGBT men and women across Wales. It also features wide-ranging historical analysis stretching from the medieval period through to the modern-day, providing guides to changing language, places where LGBT people met and socialised, and their day-to-day experiences of coming out, threats of persecution, and acceptance.

History's Queer Stories

History's Queer Stories
Author: Natalie Marena Nobitz
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2018-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3839445434

Critical analysis of the dramatisation of homosexuality in British fiction about the Second World War is noticeable only by its relative absence from the field. Whereas feminist literary criticism has broadened the canon of war fiction to include narratives by and about women, queer scholars have seldom focused on literary representations of homosexuality during the war. Natalie Marena Nobitz closes a glaring gap in the critical attention of four novels dealing with the disruption of gender roles and institutionalised heteronormativity: Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951), Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), Sarah Waters' The Night Watch (2006) and Adam Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012).

A Queer History of the United States for Young People

A Queer History of the United States for Young People
Author: Michael Bronski
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 0807056138

Named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 by School Library Journal Queer history didn’t start with Stonewall. This book explores how LGBTQ people have always been a part of our national identity, contributing to the country and culture for over 400 years. It is crucial for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth to know their history. But this history is not easy to find since it’s rarely taught in schools or commemorated in other ways. A Queer History of the United States for Young People corrects this and demonstrates that LGBTQ people have long been vital to shaping our understanding of what America is today. Through engrossing narratives, letters, drawings, poems, and more, the book encourages young readers, of all identities, to feel pride at the accomplishments of the LGBTQ people who came before them and to use history as a guide to the future. The stories he shares include those of * Indigenous tribes who embraced same-sex relationships and a multiplicity of gender identities. * Emily Dickinson, brilliant nineteenth-century poet who wrote about her desire for women. * Gladys Bentley, Harlem blues singer who challenged restrictive cross-dressing laws in the 1920s. * Bayard Rustin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s close friend, civil rights organizer, and an openly gay man. * Sylvia Rivera, cofounder of STAR, the first transgender activist group in the US in 1970. * Kiyoshi Kuromiya, civil rights and antiwar activist who fought for people living with AIDS. * Jamie Nabozny, activist who took his LGBTQ school bullying case to the Supreme Court. * Aidan DeStefano, teen who brought a federal court case for trans-inclusive bathroom policies. * And many more! With over 60 illustrations and photos, a glossary, and a corresponding curriculum, A Queer History of the United States for Young People will be vital for teachers who want to introduce a new perspective to America’s story.

When Brooklyn Was Queer

When Brooklyn Was Queer
Author: Hugh Ryan
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1250169925

The never-before-told story of Brooklyn’s vibrant and forgotten queer history, from the mid-1850s up to the present day. ***An ALA GLBT Round Table Over the Rainbow 2019 Top Ten Selection*** ***NAMED ONE OF THE BEST LGBTQ BOOKS OF 2019 by Harper's Bazaar*** "A romantic, exquisite history of gay culture." —Kirkus Reviews, starred “[A] boisterous, motley new history...entertaining and insightful.” —The New York Times Book Review Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history—a great forgetting. Ryan is here to unearth that history for the first time. In intimate, evocative, moving prose he discusses in new light the fundamental questions of what history is, who tells it, and how we can only make sense of ourselves through its retelling; and shows how the formation of the Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Through them, When Brooklyn Was Queer brings Brooklyn’s queer past to life, and claims its place as a modern classic.

Hidden from History

Hidden from History
Author: Martin Bauml Duberman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 593
Release: 1990-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0452010675

Winner of two Lambda Rising Awards This richly revealing anthology brings together for the first time the vital new scholarly studies now lifting the veil from the gay and lesbian past. Such notable researchers as John Boswell, Shari Benstock, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Jeffrey Weeks and John D’Emilio illuminate gay and lesbian life as it evolved in places as diverse as the Athens of Plato, Renaissance Italy, Victorian London, jazz Age Harlem, Revolutionary Russia, Nazi Germany, Castro’s Cuba, post-World War II San Francisco—and peoples as varied as South African black miners, American Indians, Chinese courtiers, Japanese samurai, English schoolboys and girls, and urban working women. Gender and sexuality, repression and resistance, deviance and acceptance, identity and community—all are given a context in this fascinating work. "A landmark of a book and a landmark of ideas that will shatter ignorance and delusion."—Catharine Stimpson, University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University “Ground-breaking.”—Publishers Weekly “The juxtaposition of diverse perspectives and research crossing boundaries of race, gender, culture, and time encourages a lively dialogue. Highly recommended for history collections, and especially gay studies.”—Library Journal