Not that long ago, an eager reader could have read in a single summer all the books on LGBTQ+ history that had been written. Now, more and more books are being published all the time. “Book Shelf” is an attempt to introduce you to some of those books and encourage you to read them and learn more about their subjects. We provide short summaries of the book and a link to the publisher's website. The Book Shelf highlights the most recent five books added and then features all of our books in alphabetical order. If you are an author and want us to add your book to the Book Shelf, please contact us at marcs@sfsu.edu.
Through decades of repression – both intentional and unintentional – the powerful story of 20th century queer community-building and activism in this province has remained largely ignored. Until now. Journalist Rhea Rollmann, through extensive interviews, archival work and investigative reporting, brings that history to light in A QUEER HISTORY OF NEWFOUNDLAND.
Organized queer activism dates back to at least 1974 in this province, but queer presence and community stretches back much farther. Rollmann spent years scouring archives, newspapers and court records to chronicle that history. She draws on archival work as well as more than 120 first-hand interviews with activists and community members to document this history behind the history of the province. The book focuses on the fight for human rights protections, AIDS activism, the growth of the city's vibrant queer bar scene, lesbian struggles for space in the feminist movement, trans struggles for recognition and health care, and more. Just as same-sex intimacy emerged in spaces as varied as the fishing industry and campus dorms, queer liberation also took diverse forms in this province, from quiet living-room consciousness-raising groups to angry, in-your-face marches on homophobic bars. Newfoundland and Labrador has been tied into national and international queer liberation networks ever since the 1970s, but NL'ers also played a major role in shaping those national movements. This book explores all of these stories, and more. The story of the queer rights movement in this province is one of great pride and joy; one of hardship and struggle; and ultimately, one of triumph. Why? Because: There have always been – and always will be – queers in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Hospital Time is a memoir about friendship, family, and caregiving in the age of AIDS. Amy Hoffman, a writer, lesbian activist, and former editor of Gay Community News, chronicles with fury and unflinching honesty her experience serving as primary caretaker for her friend and colleague, Mike Riegle, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Hoffman neither idealizes nor deifies Riegle, whom she portrays as a brilliant man, devoted prison rights activist, and very difficult friend.
Hoffman became central to Riegle’s caregiving when he asked her to be his health-care proxy, and although she willingly chose to do this, she explores her conflicting feelings about herself in this role and about her involvement with Riegle and his grueling struggle with hospitalization, illness, and, finally, death. She tells of the waves of grief that echoed throughout her life, awakening memories of other losses, entering her dreams and fantasies, and altering her relationships with friends, family, and even total strangers.
Hoffman’s memoir gives voice to the psychological and emotional havoc AIDS creates for those in the difficult role of caring for the terminally ill and it gives recognition to the role that lesbians continue to play in the AIDS emergency. A foreword by Urvashi Vaid, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, offers a meditation on the politics of AIDS and the role of family in the lives of lesbians and gay men.
Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now.
Queer Newark charts a history in which working-class people of color are the central actors and in which violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire. Drawing from rare archives that range from oral histories to vice squad reports, this collection’s authors uncover the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches. Exploring the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, they offer fresh perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community relations with police, Latinx immigration, and gentrification, while considering how to best tell the rich and complex stories of queer urban life. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey’s largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America.
The Two Revolutions explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender identity and activism from the 1980s to the present. Through extensive archival research and media archeology, Avery Dame-Griff reconstructs the manifold digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who incited the second revolution of the title: the ascendance of “transgender” as an umbrella identity in the mid-1990s.
Dame-Griff argues that digital communications sparked significant momentum within what would become the transgender movement, but also further cemented existing power structures. Covering both a historical period that is largely neglected within the history of computing, and the poorly understood role of technology in queer and trans social movements, The Two Revolutions offers a new understanding of both revolutions—the internet’s early development and the structures of communication that would take us to today’s tipping point of trans visibility politics. Through a history of how trans people online exploited different digital infrastructures in the early days of the internet to build a community, The Two Revolutions tells a crucial part of trans history itself.
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.
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present was first published in 1981 by William Morrow; was a New York Times Notable Book of 1981; won the Stonewall Book Award in 1982; was named by Lambda Literary Review as One of the 100 Best…
For decades, the history of sexuality has been a multidisciplinary project serving competing agendas. Lesbian, gay and queer scholars have produced powerful narratives by tracing back as continuous or discontinuous a homosexual or queer subject. Yet organizing historical work around modern…
Fashioning Sapphism draws on the tools of historical inquiry, the theoretical strengths of feminist and queer theories, and the interpretive strategies of various disciplines to scrutinize the social, cultural and political context surrounding the 1928 publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of…
In September 1897 Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) contemplated crafting a poem to his new love, western writer Charles Warren Stoddard. Recently arrived in California, Noguchi was in awe of the established writer and the two had struck up a passionate correspondence. Still, he viewed their relationship as…
The variety of gay life in Chicago is too abundant and too diverse to be contained in a single place. But since 1981, the Gerbert/Hart Library & Archives on the city’s North Side has strived to do just that, amassing and cataloging a wealth of records related to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender,…
Bayard Rustin is one of the most important social justice activists in mid-twentieth-century U.S. history. He was a critical figure in the movement for racial justice and equality. Before Martin Luther King, Jr., before Malcolm X, Rustin was working to bring the cause to the forefront of America’s…
Eve Adams was a rebel. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912. The young woman took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York.
Then, in 1925, Adams…
Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC’s gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed…
The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History presents a broad overview and more than 200 primary sources on the LGBT rebellion that erupted when New York City police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar in 1969. The book explores the developments in the 1960s that culminated in the uprising, the…
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…
Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such…
Recent victories for LGBT rights, especially the spread of same-sex marriage, have gone faster than most people imagined possible. Yet the accompanying rise of gay 'normality' has been disconcerting for activists with radical sympathies. Global in scope and drawing on a wide range of feminist,…
This authoritative reference guide covers the first twelve years of the organized homophile/gay liberation movement in Canada, from 1964 (when the Association for Social Knowledge [ASK], Canada's first large-scale homophile organization, was formed in Vancouver) through 1975 (the year of the…
This comprehensive reference guide is a continuation of Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology, 1964–1975. It starts where the first volume left off, and highlights some of the seminal events and people involved in the fight for gay rights in Canada to the end of 1981.…
The autobiography of Jim Egan (1921–2000), Canada's pioneer gay activist, who publicly fought for gay civil rights from 1949 through the 1990s.
“I cannot understand why so many men spend years, sometimes even a lifetime, agonizing over the fact that they are gay. Homosexuality was never a problem…
This illustrated history highlights the triumphs and tribulations of publishing an openly gay periodical in Toronto in the mid-1960s, several years before the establishment of a viable Canadian gay liberation movement. GAY lasted only two years, and was in many ways a failure. But it also had…
Models are everywhere. From the couture runway to the catalogue shoot, models sell things by soliciting our attention, sparking our desires. Whether performing live or in front of the camera, models produce sales through the affective labor of posing. Models do the work of representation in…
Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today’s Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Capó Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami’s transnational connections reveal that the city has…
LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements. Lavender and Red recounts a far different story: a history of queer radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war, and…
Contagious Divides explores a century of epidemics and racial crises to show how Chinese immigrants were demonized as medical menace in the nineteenth century to model citizen in the mid-twentieth century. Public health officials, politicians, women social reformers, white labor union leaders and…