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.

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 New York reporter, an OSS spy, and the friend of countless artists and celebrities as an expatriate in France, Greece, and Sri Lanka. He lived much of his life as an openly gay man with his longtime partner, Charles Hulse. His 1970 novel, The Lord Won’t Mind, broke new ground by showing that an affirming, explicitly gay novel could be a bestseller. His subsequent gay novels were both a cultural phenomenon and a lightning rod for literary critics. This book also examines the complex, often conflicting responses to Merrick’s novels by gay readers and critics, and it thus recovers the early post-Stonewall debates over the definition of “gay literature.” By reconstructing Merrick’s life and critical fortunes, this book expands our understanding of what it means to be a gay man in the twentieth century.

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 reception of leading gay periodicals published in these countries, including community-based gay liberation publications and commercially oriented gay lifestyle and erotic magazines. He demonstrates how they aimed to visualize the political goals of gay liberation, particularly those concerning the liberation and celebration of homoerotic desires. Mezo González contends that visualizing these goals allowed activists, editors, publishers, and artists to foster the formation of gay communities and identities while advancing gay liberation movements at the local, national, and international levels. In so doing, he furthers understandings of the transnational nature of gay periodicals, the relationship between gay liberation politics and visual culture, and the existing tensions between the liberation of some and the oppression of others across the American continent.

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 research with wry observation, Adam Zmith explores the cultural forces and improbable connections behind the power of poppers.

What emerges is not just a history of pub raids, viral panics and pecs the size of dinner plates. It is a collection of fresh and provocative ideas about identity, sex, utopia, capitalism, law, freedom and the bodies that we use to experience the world.

In Deep Sniff, what starts as a thoughtful enquiry into poppers becomes a manifesto for pleasure.

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, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings.

Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris.

In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire.

When Garrett Glaser came out as gay to his mother at age fourteen, she said, "You are going to a psychiatrist right now, young man! We are going to nip this in the bud." Fortunately, she came around to accept her son's orientation, and Garrett used his psychiatric sessions to address the challenges…

This first critical biography of radio broadcaster, stage director, and auteur filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis examines his prolific body of work within the socio-political context of his times. Best known as a bold modernist for triple-Oscar-winner ‘Zorba the Greek’, Michael likewise was hailed as an…

An unconventional but undeniable story of love and family between men

Originally published in 1950, the long out-of-print novel The Bitterweed Path was rediscovered in 1996 with the support of John Howard’s critical introduction. In the years since, new generations have witnessed its subtle yet…

Love in the Lav uncovers Ireland’s queer lives of the past. Averill Earls investigates how same-sex-desiring men lived and loved in a country where their sexuality was illegal and seen as unnatural. Across seven social biographical chapters, each highlighting individuals at the nexus of these…

Joseph Fischel’s provocative book, Sodomy’s Solicitations, builds out a politics of sexual justice that challenges state sex exceptionalism. By tracing several twenty-first century contestations around Louisiana anti-sodomy laws, Fischel examines patterns and practices of sexual injustice that are…

“ Create A More Positive Rehoboth” was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, which was established in the 19th century as a Methodist Church meeting camp, has, over time, become a thriving mecca for the LGBTQ+ community. In…

In nineteenth-century England, sodomy was punishable by death; even an accusation could damage a man’s reputation for life. The last executions for this private, consensual act were in 1835, but the effort to change the law that allowed for those executions was intense and precarious, and not…

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…

In 1975, National Airlines was shut down for 127 days when flight attendants went on strike to protest long hours and low pay. Activists at National and many other U.S. airlines sought to win political power and material resources for people who live beyond the boundary of the traditional family. In…

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is…

Act Up–Paris became one of the most notable protest groups in France in the mid-1990s. Founded in 1989, and following the New York model, it became a confrontational voice representing the interests of those affected by HIV through openly political activism. Action = Vie, the English-language…

In the twentieth century, countless Americans claimed gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities, forming a movement to secure social as well as political equality. This collection of essays considers the history as well as the historiography of the queer identities and struggles that…

Most studies of lesbian and gay history focus on urban environments. Yet gender and sexual diversity were anything but rare in nonmetropolitan areas in the first half of the twentieth century. Just Queer Folks explores the seldom-discussed history of same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in…

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+…

The book overturns conventional notions that same-sex marriage is new. It presents evidence that the union between Charity and Sylvia was regarded as a marriage or something like it in the early nineteenth century.
This is the only history of a marriage between two American women before the Civil…

The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling…

We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long…

To date, lesbian and gay history has focused largely on the East and West coasts, and on urban settings such as New York and San Francisco. The American South, on the other hand, identified with religion, traditional gender roles, and cultural conservatism, has escaped attention. Southerners…

Funded and published by the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District, this extensively illustrated booklet is based on original research using archives, oral history interviews, and primary and secondary sources to trace the emergence of one of the world's most famous gayborhoods back to the early 1950s. The…

The growth in cultural studies has brought homosexuality to the center of work on gender and sexuality. The lesbian is now an accepted subject for scrutiny - she exists, but how do we define her history, when did it begin, and whom do we include? Lesbian Subjects gathers essays - primarily from…