Product Description: Baby, You Are My Religion argues that American butch-femme bar culture of the mid-20th Century should be interpreted as a sacred space for its community. Before Stonewall―when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill―these bars were the only place where many could have any community at all...read more

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today. Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control--immigration, the military, and welfare--and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. She begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the state first stumbled upon evidence of sex and gender nonconformity, revealing how homosexuality was policed indirectly through the exclusion of sexually "degenerate" immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating poverty, violence, and vice. Canaday argues that the state's gradual awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and through the postwar period as policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality to define who could enter the country, serve in the military, and collect state benefits. Midcentury repression was not a sudden response to newly visible gay subcultures, Canaday demonstrates, but the culmination of a much longer and slower process of state-building during which the state came to know and to care about homosexuality across many decades. Social, political, and legal history at their most compelling, The Straight State explores how regulation transformed the regulated: in drawing boundaries around national citizenship, the state helped to define the very meaning of homosexuality in America.

Product Description: A collection of essays considering the history and historiography of the queer identities that developed in the United States in the midst of widespread upheaval and change. The essays shed light on the difficulties of writing history when documentary evidence is sparse or coded...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

An illustrated history, complete with photographs, documents, and other archival material, captures the lesbian and gay struggle for equal rights in the U.S. throughout the past one hundred years. 20,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

An analytical history of a half-century of gay sex and love in America ranges from World War II to the present, discussing the repression of the 1950s, the Stonewall uprising and its influence, the hedonistic world of the 1970s, and the physical and emotional devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Reprint.