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.

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 feminist studies between 1980 and 1993 - and traces lesbian studies from its beginnings, examining the difficulties of defining a lesbian perspective and a lesbian past - a culture, social milieux, and states of mind. Essays range from studies of such well-known figures as the Harlem renaissance poet Alice Dunbar-Nelson, to studies of specific historical moments, such as the regulation of sexuality in the Women's Army Corps during World War II. Other essays treat well-known authors such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, lesser-known writers from the early nineteenth century to the present, postmodern definitions of the lesbian, ""Queer Theory"", and lesbian invisibility.

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 text discusses the creation of private and public space, community building, cultural production and political activism by LGBTQ people in the neighborhood. At the same time, the authors analyze external opposition from anti-LGBTQ forces including the state and conservative social structures. They also examine internal struggles over exclusion, discrimination and belonging within the gay culture of the Castro — and survey the impact of City policy, gentrification and demographic shifts in the neighborhood to the present day.

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 celebrate their past; lesbians and gays celebrate their new-found visibility; historians celebrate the South—yet rarely have the three crossed paths.
John Howard's groundbreaking anthology casts its net widely, examining lesbian and gay experiences in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee. James Schnur, by virtue of a Freedom of Information Act query, sheds light on the sinister machinations of the Johns Committee, whose clandestine duty it was to ferret out suspected homosexuals during the McCarthy years. In his essay on the great Southern writer William Alexander Percy, William Armstrong Percy provides tangible evidence that Southern citizens, historians, and archivists have long sought to repress or obscure certain individuals within what C. Vann Woodward described as the perverse section. Moving chronologically through America's past, from the antebellum and postbellum periods, through the Jim Crow era and the Cold War, to the present, this volume introduces an important new framework to the field of lesbian and gay history—that of regional history.

An Army of Ex-Lovers is a memoir about the Boston LGBT community of the 1970s and specifically about the experience of the author, Amy Hoffman, who worked on the staff of the Gay Community News from 1978 – 1982, and for several years thereafter served as a board member and writer for the paper. GCN…

Before Wilde is a social history of sex between men in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It is based on a sample of over one thousand trial reports relating to sex between men published in leading London newspapers between 1820 and 1870. Most of the cases analyzed were not sensational, and…

Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010, critically examines the development of a doctrine of “heteronormative supremacy” in U.S. law in the period from 1965 to 1973. It offers in-depth analyses of six important…

A Desired Past is an accessible synthesis of the history of same-sex sexuality in the United States, from the beginnings of interactions among Native Americans, European colonists, and enslaved Africans to the present. As the title suggestions, it both adds desire to the story of U.S. history and…

Who, and what, is “heterosexual”? How did we come to think about ourselves, and our sexualities, in terms of something called “heterosexuality” and what does it mean that we do? These questions are at the core of Hanne Blank’s Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, a look at…

Between 1957 and 1963 a Florida Legislative Investigation Committee actively pursued lesbian and gay schoolteachers, subjected them to interrogation, fired them from teaching positions, and revoked their professional credentials. The Florida legislature established the committee in 1956, in response…

Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement by Marc Stein, published originally in 2012 and revised for a second edition in 2023, is a volume in a Routledge book series on U.S. social movements. The book was written primarily for classroom use and public education purposes. It provides a…

City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2000 (and later published with a new preface in a second edition by Temple University Press), is the first book-length study of lesbian and gay history in a major U.S. city,…

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…

Sapphistries tells the stories of women (and female-bodied individuals who might not have identified as women) who have desired, loved, and had sex with women from the beginning of time to the present and all around the globe. Leila Rupp draws on an extensive body of literature to fashion a…

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…

Eight gay men wrote their autobiographies in French between 1845 and 1905: some of them reflected on their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; others provided brief impressions of their loves and desires. A few of them dramatized their lives following contemporary theatrical and fictional models,…

Most America’s know the story of Senator Joseph McCarthy and how he set off a “red scare” when he famously charged in 1950 that the US State Department and other government agencies had been infiltrated by communist agents. But few Americans know that McCarthy also charged that the government had…

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…

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…

“It Didn’t Start with Stonewall.” That’s the key message of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, a history of gay and lesbian activism in the decades before the Stonewall uprising of 1969. John D’Emilio covers the work of little-known organizations like the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of…

Queering the Redneck Riviera recovers the forgotten and erased history of gay men and lesbians in North Florida, a region often overlooked in the story of the LGBTQ experience in the United States. Jerry Watkins reveals both the challenges these men and women faced in the years following World War…

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial…

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 1992 Lambda Literary…