I’ve been on a LGBT history binge, here’s my reviews of what I’m been reading:
“The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture” by Daniel Harris – A very bitchy (and I use that word intentionally) book that simultaneously acidly critiques aspects of gay culture and sentimentalizes the “outsider” aspects of gay culture. It would’ve been nicer if the author has copped to this ambivalence in the introduction rather than the final page, since the swings initially come off as if the author just hates everything. But it’s got some great insights, and also offers some interesting looks at gay life outside the major metropolitan areas. For example, Harris discusses the “hobbyist” magazines that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s whose ostensible purpose was to connect people who shared common hobbies, but which quickly became thinly-veiled gay personal ads. Ads from the hinterlands by gay men seeking to meet someone, anyone, who lived locally are all too reminiscent of the posts I still see today on mailing list by deeply closeted crossdressers hoping to meet in person someone like themselves. (NY Times review here.)
“Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America” by Lillian Faderman – Very well written and comprehensive history (up through 1991).
But a couple things left a bad taste my mouth: Faderman repeated insistence that some people seen as butches might in fact be trans men. To be fair, she was obviously reacting against the “invert” theory of the late 1800s that proposed [I]all[/I] lesbians “men trapped in women’s bodies,” and against the way masculinity was used to discredit lesbians and feminists. But she seems to want to ignore away evidence that some women living as men seemed to be doing so because they saw themselves as men. Plus both of her two actual references to “transsexuals” come complete with scare quotes—while Faderman is a little oblique, it seems like she was of the mindset that if trans people just freed themselves from gender stereotypes they wouldn’t need to transition. Finally, she misrepresents the [URL=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Stone”“]Sandy Stone[/URL] incident. Correctly stating that it caused a huge controversy when the women’s recording collective refused to fire Stone in the face of transphobic attacks by lesbian-feminists—Stone was specifically targeted in Janice Raymond’s “Transsexual Empire”—but neglecting to mention that the company later caved in to the demands and fired Stone.
“Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco” to 1965 by Nan Alamilla Boyd – A bit on the academic side, but worth wading through the formal prose. Interestingly Boyd begins her book with a chapter on trans and gay male culture—and in fact argues that drag show nightclubs—featuring both drag queens and drag kings, and tolerated because of the tourist dollars they helped bring to the city—provided the city’s first publicly visible queer cultures and communities. Unlike New York, San Francisco was a “wide open town” in a variety of ways—from local politicians ignoring or downplaying morality issues, to the lack of entrenched political machines, to the lack of the Mafia; all of which caused San Francisco’s queer to differ greatly from New York’s. (Here’s a review by the San Francisco Chronicle.)
“Gay L.A.” by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons. L.A. finally gets its due as the overlooked birthplace of many mainstays of today’s gay and lesbian institutions. This time around the scare quotes are gone and trans people do crop up now and then. But disappointingly, only three or four pages out of the 464 pages specifically looked at trans history. It came out in 2006, so Virgina Prince’s biography (as one was Vern and Bonnie Burroughs’ “Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender,” both of which included a fair bit of trans history in L.A.) was available had the author’s cared to read it. (An example of how not only is history written by the victors, but how it’s written by those with the best meeting minutes.) It’s disappointing because early in the book the authors explicitly say they intend to do a comprehensive LGBT history—and that they used “gay” in their title because historically it had been used as an encompassing term that included LGB and T people. Like San Francisco, was also a “wide open town” in its own way compared to New York—with the film industry being a being a haven for all sorts of alternative behavior (as long as done discretely), fewer social hierarchies (since almost everyone was a relative newcomer) and an extremely diverse population.
“Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940” by George Chauncey – Revelatory on how—at least within selected subcultures in New York City, concepts of sexual orientation and gender were far [I]more[/I] flexible than they are today. Aside from oral histories, Chauncey relies heavily on the reports filed by investigators of various “morals committee,” which gives an unusually detailed look at the lives of gay men in public places. (The book doesn’t look at lesbians and lesbian culture at all.)
“The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America” by Charles Kaiser – Good for a general overview of gay and lesbian life in NYC from World War II through the early 1990s, mixing historical analysis with oral histories. But while Kaiser tries to include a spectrum of voices, it feel like it focused heavily on the lives of the gay/lesbian rich and famous.
