Reviews

• Prepare to Be Blown Away!

  This is the closest we may ever get to a reliable history of the gay liberation movement and, despite its intimidating bulk, this book reads like a really good novel. What shocked me was how few activists accomplished SO MUCH in decades when just to show your face in public as being gay was not merely risky, but downright dangerous. What courage is depicted in these pages! My jaw dropped at the images portrayed of smallish groups of activists who marched, protested, and enlisted lawyers to help achieve equal rights or other victories that we in our present era are still enjoying the benefits of. Honey, thee people took the battle right into the courtrooms of America! Also, it was quite obvious that, despite bickering or sour feelings between gay men and lesbians, they did ultimately work together back then. My only quibbles with this book are minor. As a man who was at the epicenter of the AIDS crisis and experienced it both in my employment as a hospital-based social worker and on a personal level in the '80s and '90s. I did not sense any intention to gloss over this shattering and sorrow-soaked disaster for gay men but it felt like the writer wanted to focus more on the contributions of lesbians. I always knew lesbians were there to help out during that crisis and I appreciate learning how involved they were in fighting for equal rights, etc. I realize there are many other books that focus on the specific subject of AIDS and AIDS activism so the writer had to choose how extensively to cover the AIDS years ( an at least 15 year nightmare for gay men before there were any medications that worked for anyone). By the end of the book I felt I had been educated as to the contributions of lesbians to the battle for equal rights under the law. I found the use of the word "handsome" to depict lesbians a bit old school but true to the reserved nature of this book. Sadly, most who are part of the current generation of gay men and lesbians do not seem to feel any need to inform themselves of how they came to enjoy the freedoms and rights they have today. Well, here's your chance to learn what really happened! And it's not a slog either...The courage depicted in these pages will have you confounded and shaking your head in amazement. There weren't a lot of them, but the individual activist movers and shakers depicted in this book were genuine heroes in our community. I am a fairly well informed gay men and a reader but I had never heard several of the names of people in this book who made a real difference. (Thank you Frank Kameny and others whose names I had never heard!) Also, I was somewhat unaware of specifically what Clinton and Obama did for gay people despite how it could affect their careers. This book makes it clear that there was a MAGA element in past decades just as there is now, and the conservatives and religious evangelicals were extremely determined to keep gays in the oppressed minority cage just as they still are today. Read this book. Treasure this book. It is an awesome account. Should be mandatory reading for every gay man and lesbian in America. I can't imagine much work this author had to do to put this together but I thank her for her commitment and painstaking research. She too is an activist in her way just by writing this fabulous book.

• Very knowledgable book

  This book is really great becuase it has many perspectives and important parts of LGBTQ history. Although I have not finished reading this book as it is 800 pages long, it has really made me realize all the hardship that the LGBTQ community has gone through. This is a really good book if you want to learn about the queer perspective of history, specifically the US queer history. ;

• Great Overview of Gay American History Since the 1950s.

  I heard Lillian Faderman speak at the Cleveland City Club giving a very interesting overview of gay American history. I immediately checked out her book but was put off by it length of over 800 pages; I thought it might be too dense in less interesting detail. Once I started reading, this was not a problem at all. The book held my interest all the way through. The value for me was getting the pig picture of how all the different gay groups evolved and how their different approaches were complementary to achieve progress in attaining the goals of the gay movement. The tension between organizations who wanted to promote gays as distinct subculture versus assimilationist groups and ideas seemed to result in successful strategies in the long haul.. The book was also good in portraying how many brave individuals stepped forward at great personal expense to move the slow process toward justice. I liked the author’s emphasis on the role lesbians all throughout the history of the movement. I think this may have been short changed in a lot of previous accounts. She echoed Chuck Renslow’s analysis that although Lesbian groups pretty much broke diplomatic relations with gay male groups in the early 80s, they stepped in with lots of help to AIDS organizations even though few lesbians actually got the disease. I appreciated her chapter on how in the late 90s Hawaii did all the legal groundwork to start the domestic partnership / Marriage process, but I was amazed she treated the history of Gay Marriage only tangentially. I would think the events leading Mass. to be the first state with marriage equality would have rated a summary in her book — but I could find nothing on this. She may have weighted events and groups in LA and the west coast more heavily than other areas. With such a thorough, scholarly account Faderman had to limit her topic. She chose to treat the gay movement in the US from the 1950s through the present. So she had to leave out interesting topics of the movement in other countries and earlier important data such as the the work of Magnus Hirschfeld and the German homophile magazines in the early 20th Century. In all this book is very well written and comprehensive. It is amazing how much progress gay rights has achieved in the last 60 years. Faderman's book gives us a great perspective in how this all came about.

• Worth to purchase for school.

  Required reading for school. Super informative and interesting.

• Four Stars

  I don't usually read non-fiction, but it is engaging as well as informative.

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