Book Review

Modern American Queer History is an anthology intended as a 'bold effort' to reconfigure the field of gay and lesbian history. Perhaps that lofty goal is not really the right measure by which to judge this fine, if somewhat uneven, set of essays.

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At its best, this collection offers a more complicated portrayal of the middle of the century, the years between the depression of the 1930s and the social and political revolutions of the 1960s. The history of those years had been, since the early days of the field, dominated by stories of intense repression against gays and lesbians whose capacity for political organization was hemmed in both by homophobia and by early homophile efforts toward assimilation. Essays based on chapters from longer monographs by Estelle Freedman, John D'Emilio, Marc Stein, and John Howard provide welcomed nuance to the previous tale of waiting for the riots at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 or for the gay activism thereupon 'unleashed.' Those essays, rooted as they are in biography and oral history, chart the many different ways individuals moved into a gay-centered life during the mid-century sexual nadir and survived the homophobic dominant culture without succumbing to self-hatred or political paralysis. Activism in the post-World War II and Cold War years took place in local settings and toward specific goals rather than for more broadly defined and nationally staged sexual civil rights.

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