This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times--from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism--helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality. In locating the rise of black gay identities in historical context, Kevin Mumford explores how activists, performers, and writers rebutted negative stereotypes and refused sexual objectification. Examining the lives of both famous and little-known black gay activists--from James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin to Joseph Beam and Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald--Mumford analyzes the ways in which movements for social change both inspired and marginalized black gay men. - Goodreads
A ragtag group of women protesting behind a police line in the rain. A face in a crowd holding a sign that says, 'Hi Mom, Guess What!' at a gay rights rally. Two lovers kissing under a tree. These indelible images are among the thousands housed in the New York Public Library's archive of photographs of 1960s and '70s LGBTQ history from photojournalists Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies. Lahusen is a pioneering photojournalist who captured pivotal moments in the LGBTQ civil rights movement. Davies, in turn, is one of the most important photojournalists who documented gay, lesbian, and trans liberation, as well as civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements. This powerful collection--which captures the energy, humor, and humanity of the groundbreaking protests that surrounded the Stonewall Riots--celebrates the diversity of this rights movement, both in the subjects of the photos and by presenting Lahusen and Davies' distinctive work and perspectives in conversation with each other. A preface, captions, and part introductions from curator Jason Baumann provide illuminating historical context. - Jacket flap
Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion? Heath Fogg Davis offers an impassioned call to rethink the usefulness of dividing the world into not just Male and Female categories but even additional categories of Transgender and gender fluid. Davis, himself a transgender man, explores the underlying gender-enforcing policies and customs in American life that have led to transgender bathroom bills, college admissions controversies, and more, arguing that it is necessary for our society to take real steps to challenge the assumption that gender matters. - Publisher
Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes--such as the circumspect and resilient "final girl," body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet--spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world.
It Came from the Closet features twenty-five essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. - Publisher
From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American consumer culture. In 'Work!' Elspeth H. Brown traces the history of modeling from the advent of photographic modeling in the early twentieth century to the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s. Brown outlines how the modeling industry sanitized and commercialized models' sex appeal in order to elicit and channel desire into buying goods. She shows how this new form of sexuality-whether exhibited in the Ziegfeld Follies girls' performance of Anglo-Saxon femininity or in African American models' portrayal of black glamour in the 1960s-became a central element in consumer capitalism and a practice that has always been shaped by queer sensibilities. By outlining the paradox that queerness lies at the center of capitalist heteronormativity and telling the largely unknown story of queer models and photographers, Brown offers an out of the ordinary history of twentieth-century American culture and capitalism. - Publisher
A beautifully illustrated children's book about the fight for queer rights. Around one o'clock in the morning on June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York, sparking days of intense rioting. What happened at Stonewall sent shockwaves around the world, and became a defining moment for the LGBTQ+ community. From the impassioned speeches of bold activists Karl Ulrichs and Audre Lorde to the birth of Pride and queer pop culture, Rainbow Revolutions - a middle grade children's book - charts the dramatic rise of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and celebrates the courageous individuals who stood up and demanded recognition. With bold and beautiful illustrations by pop artist Eve Lloyd Knight - Publisher.
A detailed historical look at the surprising ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity. Long known for the friendly company of its "warm brothers" (German slang for men who love other men), Berlin, even before the turn of the twentieth-century, was a place where educators, activists, and medical professionals could explore and begin to educate both themselves and Europe about new and emerging sexual identities. From Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German activist described by some as the world's first openly gay man, to the world of Berlin's vast homosexual subcultures-tolerated and monitored by the police commissioner through the "Department of Homosexuals and Blackmailers"--To a major sex scandal that enraptured the daily newspapers and shook the court of Emperor William II, and on through some of the world's first sex reassignment surgeries, Beachy deftly guides the reader through past events and developments that continue to shape and influence the way we think of sexuality to this day. Gay Berlin is certain to be considered a foundational study - Publisher
Explores the lives of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, two ordinary middle-class women who serve as a window on historical constructs of marriage, gender, and sexuality in late 18th-century and early 19th-century America. Both were born in Massachusetts, but in different towns, 11 years apart. Charity's attachment to women was so blatant that after she turned 20, her father told her to leave the house. She worked as a schoolteacher, but was forced to leave jobs several times because of hurtful gossip about her relationships with other women. In early 1807, Charity moved to Vermont to stay with a friend, and there she met Sylvia. The two fell in love, set up housekeeping, and considered themselves married. Gradually, their family members and the residents of Weybridge did as well. Charity and Sylvia became integral to the community, attending church, running their tailor shop, and contributing to charitable endeavors. Most of all, Charity and Sylvia remained passionately committed to each other and refused to hide their relationship. An important work of history that resonates with one of today's most public debates. - Publisher
In 1969, a series of riots over police action at The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village changed the landscape of the homosexual in society, literally overnight. These riots are widely acknowledged as the 'first shot' that ushered in a previously unimagined era of openness, political action, and massive social change. Coming during a time when lesbians and gays were routinely closeted and in fear of losing their jobs, their apartments, their families and even their freedom, these riots - barely covered in the media at the time - were the spark that led to a new militancy and openness in the gay political movement. David Carter provides an in-depth account of those riots as well as a complete background of the bar, the area in which the riots occurred, and the social, political, and legal climate that led up to those events. Based on over a decade of research, hundreds of interviews, and an exhaustive search of public and private records, Stonewall is the story of one of modern history's most singular events. - Publisher