The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation

The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation
Author: Craig Griffiths
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-02-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198868960

This book explores the different ways West Germans thought about and discussed being queer in the 1970s; a decade in the midst of the Cold War, sandwiched between the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1969 and the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s.

Stand by Me

Stand by Me
Author: Jim Downs
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 046509855X

From a prominent young historian, the untold story of the rich variety of gay life in America in the 1970s Despite the tremendous gains of the LGBT movement in recent years, the history of gay life in this country remains poorly understood. According to conventional wisdom, gay liberation started with the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969. The 1970s represented a moment of triumph -- both political and sexual -- before the AIDS crisis in the subsequent decade, which, in the view of many, exposed the problems inherent in the so-called "gay lifestyle". In Stand by Me, the acclaimed historian Jim Downs rewrites the history of gay life in the 1970s, arguing that the decade was about much more than sex and marching in the streets. Drawing on a vast trove of untapped records at LGBT community centers in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, Downs tells moving, revelatory stories of gay people who stood together -- as friends, fellow believers, and colleagues -- to create a sense of community among people who felt alienated from mainstream American life. As Downs shows, gay people found one another in the Metropolitan Community Church, a nationwide gay religious group; in the pages of the Body Politic, a newspaper that encouraged its readers to think of their sexuality as a political identity; at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, the hub of gay literary life in New York City; and at theaters putting on "Gay American History," a play that brought to the surface the enduring problem of gay oppression. These and many other achievements would be largely forgotten after the arrival in the early 1980s of HIV/AIDS, which allowed critics to claim that sex was the defining feature of gay liberation. This reductive narrative set back the cause of gay rights and has shaped the identities of gay people for decades. An essential act of historical recovery, Stand by Me shines a bright light on a triumphant moment, and will transform how we think about gay life in America from the 1970s into the present day.

Pink Triangle Legacies

Pink Triangle Legacies
Author: William Jake Newsome
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2022-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501765493

Pink Triangle Legacies traces the transformation of the pink triangle from a Nazi concentration camp badge and emblem of discrimination into a widespread, recognizable symbol of queer activism, pride, and community. W. Jake Newsome provides an overview of the Nazis' targeted violence against LGBTQ+ people and details queer survivors' fraught and ongoing fight for the acknowledgement, compensation, and memorialization of LGBTQ+ victims. Within this context, a new generation of queer activists has used the pink triangle—a reminder of Germany's fascist past—as the visual marker of gay liberation, seeking to end queer people's status as second-class citizens by asserting their right to express their identity openly. The reclamation of the pink triangle occurred first in West Germany, but soon activists in the United States adopted this chapter from German history as their own. As gay activists on opposite sides of the Atlantic grafted pink triangle memories onto new contexts, they connected two national communities and helped form the basis of a shared gay history, indeed a new gay identity, that transcended national borders. Pink Triangle Legacies illustrates the dangerous consequences of historical silencing and how the incorporation of hidden histories into the mainstream understanding of the past can contribute to a more inclusive experience of belonging in the present. There can be no justice without acknowledging and remembering injustice. As Newsome demonstrates, if a marginalized community seeks a history that liberates them from the confines of silence, they must often write it themselves.

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 1, General Overviews

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 1, General Overviews
Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 645
Release: 2024-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 110890128X

Volume I offers historiographical surveys and general overviews of central topics in the history of world sexualities. Split across twenty-two chapters, this volume places the history of sexuality in dialogue with anthropology, women's history, LGBTQ+ history, queer theory, and public history, as well as examining the impact Freud and Foucault have had on the history of sexuality. The volume continues by providing overviews on the sexual body, family and marriage, the intersections of sexuality with race and class, male and female homoerotic relations, trans and gender variant sexuality, the sale of sex, sexual violence, sexual science, sexuality and emotion, erotic art and literature, and the material culture of sexuality.

Self-Esteem

Self-Esteem
Author: Ian Miller
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2024-02-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1509559418

At the end of the last century, the idea of self-esteem became enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self-help literature was published, and before long was devoured by readers. Self-esteem initiatives permeated American schools. Self-esteem became the way of understanding ourselves, our personalities, our interactions with others. Nowadays, few people think much about the idea of self-esteem—but perhaps we should. Self-Esteem: An American History is the first historical study exploring the emotional politics of self-esteem in modern America. Written with verve and insight, Ian Miller’s expert analysis explores the critiques of self-help which accuse it of propping up conservative agendas by encouraging us to look solely inside ourselves to resolve life’s problems. At the same time, he reveals how African American, LGBTQ+ and feminist activists endeavored to build positive collective identities based upon self-esteem, pride and self-respect. This revelatory book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of mental health, well-being, emotions in the United States’ unique society and culture.

The Queer Art of History

The Queer Art of History
Author: Jennifer V. Evans
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2023-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1478024364

In The Queer Art of History Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.

Gay Berlin

Gay Berlin
Author: Robert Beachy
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307473139

Winner of Randy Shilts Award In the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day.

Ambivalent Affinities

Ambivalent Affinities
Author: Jennifer Dominique Jones
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2023-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN:

In the early twenty-first century, comparisons between the modern civil rights movement and the movement for marriage equality reached a fever pitch. These comparisons, however, have a longer history. During the five decades after World War II, political ideas about same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity—most often categorized as homosexuality—appeared in the campaigns of civil rights organizations, Black liberal elected officials, segregationists, and far right radicals. Deployed in complex and at times contradictory ways, political ideas about homosexuality (and later, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects) became tethered to conceptualizations of Blackness and racial equality. In this interdisciplinary historical study, Jennifer Dominique Jones reveals the underexamined origins of comparisons between Black and LGBT political constituencies in the modern civil rights movement and white supremacist backlash. Foregrounding an intersectional framing of postwar political histories, Jones demonstrates how the shared non-normative status of Blackness and homosexuality facilitated comparisons between subjects and political visions associated with both. Drawing upon organizational records, manuscript collections, newspaper accounts, and visual and textual ephemera, this study traces a long, conflicting relationship between Black and LGBT political identities that continues to the present day.

Passionate Politics

Passionate Politics
Author: Jeff Goodwin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2009-03-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0226304000

Emotions are back. Once at the center of the study of politics, emotions have receded into the shadows during the past three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis. With this new collection of essays, Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta reverse this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger, indignation, fear, disgust, joy, and love into research on politics and social protest. The tools of cultural analysis are especially useful for probing the role of emotions in politics, the editors and contributors to Passionate Politics argue. Moral outrage, the shame of spoiled collective identities, or the joy of imagining a new and better society, are not automatic responses to events. Rather, they are related to moral institutions, felt obligations and rights, and information about expected effects, all of which are culturally and historically variable. With its look at the history of emotions in social thought, examination of the internal dynamics of protest groups, and exploration of the emotional dynamics that arise from interactions and conflicts among political factions and individuals, Passionate Politics will lead the way toward an overdue reconsideration of the role of emotions in social movements and politics generally. Contributors: Rebecca Anne Allahyari Edwin Amenta Collin Barker Mabel Berezin Craig Calhoun Randall Collins Frank Dobbin Jeff Goodwin Deborah B. Gould Julian McAllister Groves James M. Jasper Anne Kane Theodore D. Kemper Sharon Erickson Nepstad Steven Pfaff Francesca Polletta Christian Smith Arlene Stein Nancy Whittier Elisabeth Jean Wood Michael P. Young

Out in the Union

Out in the Union
Author: Miriam Frank
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-06-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1439911398

Out in the Union tells the continuous story of queer American workers from the mid-1960s through 2013. Miriam Frank shrewdly chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers in the 1970s and 1980s. She documents coming out on the job and in the union as well as issues of discrimination and harassment, and the creation of alliances between unions and LGBT communities. Featuring in-depth interviews with LGBT and labor activists, Frank provides an inclusive history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests. She carefully details how queer caucuses in local unions introduced domestic partner benefits and union-based AIDS education for health care workers-innovations that have been influential across the U.S. workforce. Out in the Union also examines organizing drives at queer workplaces, campaigns for marriage equality, and other gay civil rights issues to show the enduring power of LGBT workers.