For generations, queer and trans Asian Americans have shaped the history of the United States—often in ways overlooked or erased from the historical record. Breathing Fire brings these lives and struggles into focus, offering a sweeping survey of queer Asian American history from the nineteenth century to the present. Through vivid stories of activists, artists, and ordinary individuals, Amy Sueyoshi reveals how queer Asian Americans forged communities, fought for LGBTQ rights, and challenged the boundaries of belonging.

Drawing on archival sources, oral histories, and a wide body of scholarship, Sueyoshi offers an introductory text that traces how queer Asians in America navigated shifting landscapes of immigration restriction, racial discrimination, and sexual regulation. Early immigrants from Asia arrived with cultural traditions that often accommodated diverse sexualities and gender expressions, yet they encountered increasingly rigid moral codes in the United States. Across the twentieth century, many lived quietly under the radar, while others helped spark transformative movements for civil rights and gay liberation. They navigated anti-Asian sentiment, homophobia, transphobia, and sex negativity to assert their freedom to be queer, some more defiantly than others.

By placing queer Asian Americans within significant signposts in LGBTQ, Asian American, and US history, Breathing Fire highlights their intimate lives and connections as well as their perseverance in pursuing queer desires.

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. In Outed, historian Timothy Stewart-Winter reveals that the effects of antigay policing were felt not only by the men but by their colleagues, families, and, in this case, the First Family.

Walter Jenkins’s political banishment had long-ranging effects, from how Johnson conducted the remainder of his presidency to how media coverage of political and sexual scandals became more explicit and salacious. Stewart-Winter reveals Jenkins’s influence and legacy, encompassing but also looking beyond the scandal. Jenkins had a significant impact on Johnson’s career and how it is remembered, including both his signal accomplishment—the programs and laws that constituted the Great Society—and his signal failure: his catastrophic judgment, after Jenkins’s exile, regarding the Vietnam War.

Drawing on Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.

Belfastmen reconstructs the everyday experiences of queer men in a region infamous for its recent history of intolerance, violence, and religious homophobia to show how queer lives before the gay rights movement were not only possible but also rich, exciting, and fulfilling. Irish churches and governmental authorities found the topic of sex between men unmentionable and imagined such vice as a problem only found in decadent and degenerate societies abroad. Belfastmen shows how this tacit ignorance and public silence paradoxically enabled male queerness to flourish with only rare exposure, condemnation, or regulation.

Tom Hulme traces the intimate lives of men across time, space, and self-understanding: their meeting places, their sexual and romantic relationships, the scientific and social models of desire they used to define themselves, and the responses to them from families, neighborhoods, and the law. From Belfast's industrial boom in the late nineteenth century to the social transformations accompanying WWII, Belfastmen reveals how homosexuality finally emerged as a recognized social problem in the 1950s. Only then did Northern Ireland start to transform into the expressively homophobic society of the more recent past.

Issues of sexuality were in an uneasy relationship with the working-class politics of the Mexican Communist Party and other left-wing organizations throughout much of the twentieth century. Rather than attributing this tension solely to ideological conservatism, Revolution in the Sheets reinterprets the sexual politics of the Mexican Left by foregrounding toleration as its governing political strategy. Tracing debates in party archives, propaganda, oral histories, and correspondence, historian Robert Franco demonstrates how leftist parties dismissed issues of sexuality when politically necessary in order to negotiate authority, discipline dissent, or project a moral public image. However, militants also privately practiced interpersonal forms of toleration that, as the social and political winds changed, were later adopted by party leaders as a pragmatic compromise to expand the Left's electoral appeal without upsetting established norms. The embrace of toleration, Franco argues, functioned as a substitute for publicly addressing gender inequality and sexual repression, ultimately circumscribing the revolutionary potential of Mexican leftist politics.

In 1971, Daniel Pinello came out as a gay man in the most public forum then conceivable for a 21-year-old: the front­ page feature article of a Williams College student newspaper. He was the first queer person there unequivocally to disclose a homosexual orientation. Then, after law school, Pinello ran a free weekly walk-in legal-counseling service for lesbians and gay men at the Mattachine Society, a foundational homophile organization near the famous Stonewall Inn.

A professor at the City University of New York, Pinello con­ducted pioneering research on gay and lesbian issues in three pivotal books: Gay Rights and American Law, America’s Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage, and America’s War on Same-Sex Couples and Their Families. The empirical foundation for the last two was more than 250 videotaped interviews he carried out between 2004 and 2012 with same­ sex couples in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin.

In 2008, Pinello and his partner committed civil disobedience to lobby the New York Legislature on behalf of marriage equal­ity. They applied for a marriage license from a Long Island town clerk. When their request was denied, the two refused to leave the office until the police issued them summonses for trespass.

All of these heartfelt events and more (including moving love stories with two men) are evocatively chronicled in Equal: A Memoir of Gay Rights.

Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities,…

3, 2, 1… inhale, deep. From the Victorian infirmary and the sex clubs of the 1970s, poppers vapour has released the queer potential inside us all.

This is the intriguing story of how poppers wafted out of the lab and into gay bars, corner shops, bedrooms and porn supercuts. Blending historical…

In Gay Print Culture, Juan Carlos Mezo González investigates the relationship between transnational gay liberation politics, periodicals, and images in Mexico, the United States, and Canada from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s. Mezo González examines the production, content, circulation, and…

Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel is the first biography of Gordon Merrick, the most commercially successful writer of gay novels in the twentieth century. This book shows how Merrick’s novels were largely based on his own life and time as a Princeton theater star, a Broadway actor, a…

Issues of sexuality were in an uneasy relationship with the working-class politics of the Mexican Communist Party and other left-wing organizations throughout much of the twentieth century. Rather than attributing this tension solely to ideological conservatism, Revolution in the Sheets reinterprets…

In 1971, Daniel Pinello came out as a gay man in the most public forum then conceivable for a 21-year-old: the front­ page feature article of a Williams College student newspaper. He was the first queer person there unequivocally to disclose a homosexual orientation. Then, after law school,…

Belfastmen reconstructs the everyday experiences of queer men in a region infamous for its recent history of intolerance, violence, and religious homophobia to show how queer lives before the gay rights movement were not only possible but also rich, exciting, and fulfilling. Irish churches and…

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making…

For generations, queer and trans Asian Americans have shaped the history of the United States—often in ways overlooked or erased from the historical record. Breathing Fire brings these lives and struggles into focus, offering a sweeping survey of queer Asian American history from the nineteenth…