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The gay revolution : the story of the struggle

2015

Format:	Book
Author:	Faderman, Lillian.
Title:	The gay revolution : the story of the struggle / Lillian Faderman.
Edition:	First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
Publisher, Date:	New York : Simon & Schuster, 2015. ©2015
Description:	xx, 794 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
Summary:	The fight for gay and lesbian civil rights -- the years of injustice, the early battles, the defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers -- is an important civil rights issue of the present day. In this book, Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling. The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.
Subjects:	Gay rights -- United States -- History. Gay liberation movement -- United States -- History. Gays -- United States -- History. Homophobia -- United States -- History.
Genre:	History.
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 641-767) and index. Stonewall Honor Book in Nonfiction, 2016
Contents:	A brief history of changing terminology -- Lawbreakers and loonies -- America hunts for witches -- No army of lovers: Toward a homosexual-free military -- America protects its youngsters -- Mattachine -- The daughters -- Jousts with the Four Horsemen -- Slivers of space and justice -- Throwing down the gauntlet -- The homosexual American citizen takes the government to court -- The riots -- Say it proud, and loud: New gay politics -- Less talk and more action: The Gay Activists Alliance -- A parallel revolution: Lesbian feminists -- Dressing for dinner -- How gays and lesbians stopped being crazies -- The culture war in earnest -- Enter, Anita -- How to lose a battle -- Grappling with defeat -- Learning how to win -- Of martyrs and marches -- The plague -- Family values -- New gays and lesbians versus the old military -- Don't ask, don't tell, don't serve -- "Get 'Don't ask, don't tell' done!" -- How lesbians and gays stopped being sex criminals -- "The first law in American history that begins the job of protecting LGBT people" -- A forty-year war: The struggle for workplace protection -- "The status that everyone understands as the ultimate expression of love and commitment" -- Getting it right, and wrong, in the West -- The evolution of a president and the country.
LCCN:	2015007285
ISBN:	9781451694116 (hardback) 1451694113 (hardback) (ebook) (ebook)
OCLC:	894746792
System Availability:	4
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# Local items:	1
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New York Times Review

KILLING A KING: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, by Dan Ephron. (Norton, $16.95.) The 1995 murder of Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, also dealt a fatal blow to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process with which he was identified. Ephron, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek, details the violent episode and its lasting influence on the moribund prospects for peace today. THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING: A Novella and Three Stories, by Colum McCann. (Random House, $16.) The stories in this collection often unfold in agonizing scenarios, with glimmers of empathy throughout. The title novella centers on an elderly New York judge before he is fatally assaulted; the police investigation of his death raises questions about the limits of surveillance and perspective in unearthing the truth. THE GAY REVOLUTION: The Story of the Struggle, by Lillian Faderman. (Simon & Schuster, $20.) The author, a noted scholar of lesbian history, offers a balanced biography of the gay rights movement from the 1950s through the present day: protests in the 1960s; the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness; the AIDS epidemic; and the push for marriage equality. THE DUST THAT FALLS FROM DREAMS, by Louis de Bernières. (Vintage, $16.95.) This novel follows a wealthy English family, the McCoshes, and their neighbors starting in the early 20 th century. As their lives are upended by World War I, the story explores "timeless conflicts of love and loyalty, conflicts that can be rendered even more consequential when they intersect with large-scale political and historical events," as our reviewer, Randy Boyagoda, wrote. AMERICA'S BANK: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve, by Roger Lowenstein. (Penguin, $18.) The United States had no effective central banking system until the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913. Lowenstein tells the story of the politicians and public figures who secured the bill's passage through compromise and brilliant politicking, and of the disputes and crises endangering it. INFINITE HOME, by Kathleen Alcott. (Riverhead, $16.) The misfit tenants including an agoraphobe and an embittered comedian - of a deteriorating Brooklyn brownstone come together after their home is imperiled by their aging landlady's son. The threat leads this makeshift family across the country, from a California commune to middle-American motel rooms to a natural wonder in the Smoky Mountains, as they offer one another love and support. WITCHES OF AMERICA, by Alex Mar. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) Pairing a journalistic inquiry with a personal spiritual quest, the author reports on the country's various occult societies. As our reviewer, Merritt Tierce, put it: "If anything connects the various communities and traditions Mar writes about, it's this primacy of the individual soul and choice, which is, of course, the holy fabric of Americanness."

Library Journal Review

One of queer history's founding scholars, Faderman (Gay L.A.), has written a sweeping and moving narrative that chronicles the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) citizenship rights from World War II to the turn of the milennium. In ten thematic, roughly chronological sections, the author offers readers familiar names and events masterfully woven to show how a scrappy postwar homophile movement grew into the politically conscious and politically diverse community we have today. Across nearly 70 years of political organizing, an abiding tension emerges between assimilationists and sexual radicals: those who want to be seen as "normal" and those who argue that "gay is good" and culturally distinct from a heteronormative way of life. As Faderm an shows, this intramovement tension remains evident today. If this work has a weakness it is a by-product of Faderman's laudable ambition: big-picture narratives inevitably shortchange individual stories. Nonurban, nonpoliticized queer experiences also continue to be underexplored. Still, this volume will deservedly become a standard in the field. VERDICT Well suited to undergraduate courses in LGBTQ history, this book is highly recommended for readers interested in the 20th-century politics of sexual identity and the history of social justice activism. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Faderman (Naked in the Promised Land), a scholar of lesbian history and literature, renders the slow transformation of culture into a sweeping narrative of the American struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights. She digs deep into media and legislative archives to construct a comprehensive narrative, beginning in the 1950s with the scapegoating of homosexuals under "vag-lewds" law and the first formulation of homosexuals as a minority group, and continuing to the current and recent legal fights around the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), hate crime legislation, and marriage equality. Faderman depicts the struggle as a conflict between "suits and streets," offering balanced coverage of both meticulous lobbying from the government, military, and professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association, and the rapid changes wrought by historical radicalizations such as the Stonewall riots, the Harvey Milk riots, and the aggressive medical activism of ACT UP. First-person accounts from over 100 interviews conducted as original research for the book punctuate this extraordinary story. Faderman's immense cultural history will give today's LGBTQ activists both a profound appreciation of their forebears and the motivation to carry the struggle forward. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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