Nearly fifteen years before the Stonewall Rebellion and the birth of gay liberation came the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). Like its predominantly gay male counterparts, the Mattachine Society and ONE, Inc., DOB was launched in response to the oppressive antihomosexual climate of the McCarthy era, when lesbian and gay people were arrested, fired from jobs, and had their children taken away simply on the basis of their sexual orientation. It was against this political backdrop that in 1955 a circle of San Francisco women formed a private club where lesbians could meet other lesbians in a safe, affirming setting. A year later, they produced The Ladder, the first ongoing monthly magazine for lesbians. Over the next two decades, what began as a small social group evolved into a national women's organization that counted more than a dozen chapters.

In Different Daughters, Marcia Gallo draws on interviews with former members of DOB, many of whom have never spoken on record before, as well as extensive research in both archival and personal collections. She chronicles how through its leaders, magazine, and international network of activists, the Daughters played a crucial role in creating lesbian identity, visibility, and political strategies in Cold War America--and in the process laid the foundation for today's lesbian and feminist movements.

In "No One Helped" Marcia M. Gallo examines one of America's most infamous true-crime stories: the 1964 rape and murder of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens, New York. Front-page reports in the New York Times incorrectly identified thirty-eight indifferent witnesses to the crime, fueling fears of apathy and urban decay. Genovese's life, including her lesbian relationship, also was obscured in media accounts of the crime. Fifty years later, the story of Kitty Genovese continues to circulate in popular culture. Although it is now widely known that there were far fewer actual witnesses to the crime than was reported in 1964, the moral of the story continues to be urban apathy. "No One Helped" traces the Genovese story's development and resilience while challenging the myth it created."No One Helped" places the conscious creation and promotion of the Genovese story within a changing urban environment. Gallo reviews New York's shifting racial and economic demographics and explores post–World War II examinations of conscience regarding the horrors of Nazism. These were important factors in the uncritical acceptance of the story by most media, political leaders, and the public despite repeated protests from Genovese's Kew Gardens neighbors at their inaccurate portrayal. The crime led to advances in criminal justice and psychology, such as the development of the 911 emergency system and numerous studies of bystander behaviors. Gallo emphasizes that the response to the crime also led to increased community organizing as well as feminist campaigns against sexual violence. Even though the particulars of the sad story of her death were distorted, Kitty Genovese left an enduring legacy of positive changes to the urban environment.

For a generation that has seen the legalization of gay marriage, increasing numbers of families with two mothers or two fathers, and the respected presidential candidacy of an openly gay man like Pete Buttigieg, the 1960s - 1990s can seem a time remote in every regard. Yet the present grows out of the past, and understanding the ways in which life was different in another era deepens our thinking about the present and the future.

Where the Pulse Lives is a personal memoir, the author's account of growing up in Connecticut at a time when gay desire represented an unspeakable shame, experiencing in New York City the highly sexual and politically charged climate of the 1970s, and coming to terms with what it meant to be a gay man in the years dominated by the tragedy of AIDS, the empowering activism of gay men and lesbians in ACT UP, and a growing interest in gay history. These were the years in which gay men no longer wanted to be defined by the values of the dominant culture. Self-definition proved more complicated than expected, however.

New York’s LGBTQ+ history is everywhere, but rarely is it visibly documented. Aside from current venues and a handful of landmark plaques, important queer spaces from the city’s past have otherwise been forgotten about, or remain entirely hidden.

This multifaceted book joyfully and poignantly explores a century of LGBTQ+ gathering spaces across Manhattan through hundreds of historic photographs, flyers, posters, club membership cards, magazine spreads, and more. Author Marc Zinaman’s carefully researched, engaging text includes first-person accounts and little-known facts that range from the humorous to the heartbreaking.
From 1920s bathhouses, drag balls, and the ascent of homophobia during World War II, to the protests and parades of the 1960s and 1970s, to the horrors of AIDS; from the vibrant nightlife scene of the 1990s to 2018’s Rainbow Wave, which saw a record number of queer elected officials in the US, to the rise of geosocial dating apps, every major milestone of LGBTQ+ social history is thoughtfully documented.

The result is a powerful and compelling testament to the endurance of queer culture, and an important contribution to its preservation and celebration.

A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in popular culture?

Positive Images is the first detailed examination of how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past two decades. From Queer as Folk to Chemsex, The Line of Beauty to The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this 'post-crisis' period. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the modern queer consciousness.

It’s Saturday night in Key West, and the “best show in town” is about to begin. Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret tells the story of the 801 Girls, a troupe of drag queens who perform every night of the year in Key West, Florida. It is the story of drag and what it means in contemporary American…

After World War II, Atlanta and Charlotte emerged as leading urban centers in the South, redefining the region through their competing metropolitan identities. Both cities also served as home to queer communities who defined themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings and profited to…

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…

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…

Beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a new generation of LGBT students in California began to organize publicly on college and university campuses, inspired by contemporaneous social movements and informed by California’s rich history of LGBT community formation and political…

This comprehensive reference guide tracks the development of the HIV/AIDS pandemic as it occurred in Toronto, Canada, during the years 1981 through 1990. Each entry in the chronology is combined with a brief bibliography of sources. Coverage is selective, and focuses on news reports and articles…

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,…

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and…

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,…

Last Call South Florida sweeps aside the glitter and glamour of the Sunshine State’s LGBTQ nightlife scene to reveal the vibrant tapestry of real people who thrived on both sides of the bar. From the harrowing days of bar raids and police arrests to the triumphs of hard-won rights, this book dives…

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…

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.…

Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s is an edited companion volume to Loftin’s monograph, Masked Voices. Letters to ONE contains 127 letters written from 1953 to 1965 to the first openly gay magazine in the United States. Most of the letters reproduced in this book were…

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…

Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America analyzes approximately 1000 letters written to ONE, the first openly gay magazine in the United States, from 1953 to 1965. In these letters, a diverse cross-section of gay men and lesbians across the U.S. and beyond shared their anxieties about…

Though today’s LGBTQ people owe a lot to the generations who came before
them, their historical inheritances are not always obvious.
Working with the archives of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical
Society, artist E.G. Crichton decided to do something to bridge this generation
gap.…

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America was first published in 1991 by Columbia University Press; won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction in 1992; was selected as the “Editor’s Choice” at the…

Between 1873 and 1879, the Prefecture of the Police in Paris kept a ledger of arrests for public offenses against decency, which they entitled “Pederasts and Others.” In it they included male prostitutes, thieves, and vagrants, as well as men who sought the company and sexual favors of other men. In…