History Books - Page 12

The Friend

Alan Bray

Amazon Price: $20.25 List Price: $22.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University Of Chicago Press Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $11.25

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the chapel of Christ's College, Cambridge, some twenty years ago, historian Alan Bray made an astonishing discovery: a tomb shared by two men, John Finch and Thomas Baines. The monument featured eloquent imagery dedicated to their friendship: portraits of the two friends linked by a knotted cloth. And Bray would soon learn that Finch commonly described his friendship with Baines as a connubium or marriage.

There was a time, as made clear by this monument, when the English church not only revered such relations between men, but also blessed them. Taking this remarkable idea as its cue, The Friend explores the long and storied relationship between friendship and the traditional family of the church in England. This magisterial work extends from the year 1000, when Europe acquired a shape that became its enduring form, and pursues its account up to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spanning a vast array of fascinating examples, which range from memorial plaques and burial brasses to religious rites and theological imagery to classic works of philosophy and English literature, Bray shows how public uses of private affection were very common in premodern times. He debunks the now-familiar readings of friendship by historians of sexuality who project homoerotic desires onto their subjects when there were none. And perhaps most notably, he evaluates how the ethics of friendship have evolved over the centuries, from traditional emphases on loyalty to the Kantian idea of moral benevolence to the more private and sexualized idea of friendship that emerged during the modern era.

Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, The Friend is a book rich in suggestive propositions as well as eye-opening details. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of England and the importance of friendship in everyday life.

History Today’s Book of the Year, 2004
 
“Bray’s loving coupledom is something with a proper historical backbone, with substance and form, something you can trace over time, visible and archeologicable. . . . Bray made a great contribution in helping to bring this long history to light.”— James Davidson, London Review of Books  

Homosexuality and American Psychiatry

Ronald Bayer

Amazon Price: $30.55 List Price: $33.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Princeton University Press Amazon Marketplace: 37 new & used starting at $6.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

How homosexuality was cured! 5 out of 5 stars.
21 of 22 people found this review helpful.

This is an important book for anyone interested in how the diagnosis of homosexuality was dropped by the American Psychiatric Association in 1993. The author of this book gives a reasonable history of the events leading up to that decision and through interviews with psychiatrists who both supported and opposed the decision, illustrates the political nature of using medical diagnoses to determine what constitutes normal and abnormal behavior.

Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love

Will Roscoe

List Price: $16.95 By: Suspect Thoughts Press Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $2.10

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love won the 2004 Lambda Literary Award for Spirituality/Religion. Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love is a passionate exploration of the history of Western religion as seen through the queer eye of one of the most widely acclaimed authors in gay spirituality. Drawing on recently discovered ancient sources, Will Roscoe offers a striking new view of Jesus as a charismatic mystic, whose teachings on love and the kingdom of heaven were complemented by a secret rite that served to impart the experience of entering heaven. After meticulously reconstructing this rite, Roscoe seeks its ultimate origins--an odyssey that eventually leads him to the margins of the inhabited world, where the ancient practices of shamanism survive to today. Whether discussing early Christianity, Plato's Symposium, the rites of shamans, or the myths of ancient Mesopotamia, Roscoe uncovers fresh insights at every turn. He builds a persuasive argument that mysticism and gay love are powerfully connected, and that this connection forms a hidden tradition in the history of Western religion.

San Francisco's Castro (CA) (Images of America)

Strange De Jim

Amazon Price: $15.99 List Price: $19.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Arcadia Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 21 new & used starting at $6.29

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History

Editorial Review:

Nestled in the Eureka Valley area, the Castro is arguably the most well-known of San Francisco's neighborhoods, having been the epicenter of the gay rights movement since the 1970s. This new collection of photographs shows the areaís growth from a smattering of Victorian houses built for working-class families in the 1870s to the flood of young gay men who settled in the neighborhood during the 1970s. This influx transformed the area and led to the rise of Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to a major public office. This book also chronicles the 1978 assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, the subsequent riots, and the effects of AIDS on the community in the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately, these stirring images bear witness to the resilience of the Castro today. ÝÝ

Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s

Neil Miller

Amazon Price: $11.21 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Alyson Books Amazon Marketplace: 26 new & used starting at $4.70

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great story of Past Paranoia Gone Wrong 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Despite its rather sensational title, "Sex-Crime Panic" tells a cautionary story about paranoia gone wrong during the 1950's, surprisingly relevant today.

Neil Miller has discovered an amazing story of the deaths of two Sioux City children, and the mania that overtook the town to find their killers. Well written, documented, and told from multiple perspectives, you are placed right in the middle of the hysteria for duration of the book.Two children are brutally killed, and in response to the public outcry, Iowa state and local officials attempt to round up "the sexual deviants", which the majority of those being homosexuals.

Caught by sting operations and rattted out by friends, tried and convicted under false pretenses, these men were shipped across state to a "mental ward" to live as "prisoners". The lives of these men were forever altered by the experience, and many lived to shame themselves into forgetting everything.

Because of this secrecy, Neil Miller was forced to rely on whatever information he could muster from some of the men who were still living, and the people associated with the cases. Therefore, information related to the killing of the children, and the subsequent manhunt is extensive. Information relating to what happened to the men inside the mental ward was somewhat lacking. Understandly so, Miller goes on towards the end of the book stating that several men, still living, absolutely refused to talk about what occured. Their shame is something they've carried around with them for their lives; a shame, unjustly given to them.

For anyone today who believes our government is incapable of getting out of control, or anyone who wants to read about an event in gay history few people know about, I heartily recommend this book.

Editorial Review:

Following the brutal murders of two children in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1954, police, in an attempt to quell public hysteria, arrested 20 men whom the authorities never claimed had anything to do with the crimes. Labeled as sexual psychopaths the men were sentenced to a mental institution until cured. A gripping story of murder and antigay hysteria award-winning journalist Neil Miller's carefully researched account shows how the paranoia of the McCarthy era destroyed the lives of gay men in the American heartland.

Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback

Susan Stryker

List Price: $19.95 By: Chronicle Books Amazon Marketplace: 28 new & used starting at $6.85

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Literature & Fiction -> Fiction -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Literature & Fiction -> Fiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A fine coverage of paperback passions 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Susan Stryker has written a succinct account of this corner of American paperback publishing during the middle of the last century. The four areas she covers are lesbian, bisexual, transgender and gay with each chapter having the relevant book covers (150 in all) nicely placed so they are near the appropriate text.

She covers the two sides of the pulp fiction market, the big mainstream publishers, who issued literature in a mass market format and so had to present Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Somerset Maugham, Truman Capote, Radclyffe Hall, James Baldwin and others with suggestive images (the predictable shapely female with the half unbuttoned blouse) and come-on cover lines to generate sales, I bet they would have loved to change the titles to something more racy though. The other side was the very cheaply produced (but expensively priced) paperback that had no literary pretence and was produced for the 'one hand reader'. Plenty of these latter covers are shown and the designs are as predictable as the words inside but when you see them presented, sometimes four to a page, their overwhelming blandness becomes fascinating, however there are some that look as if a designer has been able to produce something creative with art and typography.

So many of the lowbrow and no-brow paperbacks are parodies of the genre, 'Hot Pants Homo' by Percy Fenster, 'The Man They Called My Wife' by Stark Cole' or 'Take My Tool' by Vivian LeMans, all with the appropriate tacky graphics and blurbs. Overall an interesting book (and well designed, too) about a slice of pop culture publishing that sold copies in the millions. Another book, also well designed, covering the same subject is Jaye Zimet's 'Strange Sisters' (ISBN 0140284028) with two hundred covers of lesbian pulp fiction. Both books will be appreciated by graphic designers and pop culture fans.

Editorial Review:

From homicidal homos to locked-up lesbians, and almost every sexually dangerous combination in between, Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback is the first complete expose of queer sexuality in mid-twentieth century paperbacks. Compellingly written by historian Susan Stryker, Queer Pulp gives a complete overview of the cultural, political, and economic factors involved in the boom of queer paperbacks. With chapters covering gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexually oriented books, a lively overview of the genres, and loads of scorching paperback covers, Queer Pulp reveals the complicated and fascinating history of alternative sexual literature and book publishing. Featuring the work of well-known authors such as W. Somerset Maugham and Truman Capote to the low-brow and no-brow scribes who worked under several names, Queer Pulp is the entertaining and informative introduction to these lost, salacious literary genres.

Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Studies in the History of Sexuality)

Michael Rocke

Amazon Price: $36.00 List Price: $40.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $20.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"This is a superb work of scholarship, impossible to overpraise.... It marks a milestone in the 20-year rise of gay and lesbian studies."--Martin Duberman, The Advocate
The men of Renaissance Florence were so renowned for sodomy that "Florenzer" in German meant "sodomite." In the late fifteenth century, as many as one in two Florentine men had come to the attention of the authorities for sodomy by the time they were thirty. In 1432 The Office of the Night was created specifically to police sodomy in Florence. Indeed, nearly all Florentine males probably had some kind of same-sex experience as a part of their "normal" sexual life.
Seventy years of denunciations, interrogations, and sentencings left an extraordinarily detailed record, which author Michael Rocke has used in his vivid depiction of this vibrant sexual culture in a world where these same-sex acts were not the deviant transgressions of a small minority, but an integral part of a normal masculine identity. Rocke roots this sexual activity in the broader context of Renaissance Florence, with its social networks of families, juvenile gangs, neighbors, patronage, workshops, and confraternities, and its busy political life from the early years of the Republic through the period of Lorenzo de' Medici, Savonarola, and the beginning of Medici princely rule. His richly detailed book paints a fascinating picture of Renaissance Florence and calls into question our modern conceptions of gender and sexual identity.

Q & A: Queer in Asian America

Amazon Price: $33.25 List Price: $39.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Temple University Press Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $19.84

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

What does it mean to be queer and Asian-American at the turn of the century? The writers, activists, essayists, and artists who contribute to this volume consider how Asian-American racial identity and queer sexuality interconnect in mutually shaping and complicating ways. Their collective aim (in the words of the editors) is to articulate a new conception of Asian-American racial identity, its heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity-concepts that have after all underpinned the Asian-American moniker from its very inception. "Q & A" approaches matters of identity from a variety of points of view and academic disciplines in order to explore the multiple crossings of race and ethnicity with sexuality and gender.Drawing together the work of visual artists, fiction writers, community organizers, scholars, and participants in roundtable discussions, the collection gathers an array of voices and experiences that represent the emerging communities of a queer Asian-America. Collectively, these contributors contend that Asian-American studies needs to be more attentive to issues of sexuality and that queer studies needs to be more attentive to other aspects of difference, especially race and ethnicity. Vigorously rejecting the notion that a symmetrical relationship between race and homosexuality would weaken lesbian/gay and queer movements, the editors refuse to believe that a desirably queer world is one in which we remain perpetual aliens-queer houseguests-in a queer nation. David L. Eng is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Alice Y. Hom is a doctoral candidate in history at Claremont Graduate University.

Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where Black Meets Queer (Series Q)

Kathryn Stockton

Amazon Price: $20.65 List Price: $22.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Duke University Press Amazon Marketplace: 14 new & used starting at $13.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Literature & Fiction -> Fiction -> General
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Literature & Fiction -> Fiction -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Shame, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame, has often been a meeting place for the signs “black” and “queer” and for black and queer people—overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and why is it central to camp?

Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers rarely, if ever, read together in a single study—James Baldwin, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Genet, Toni Morrison, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eldridge Cleaver, Todd Haynes, Norman Mailer, Leslie Feinberg, David Fincher, and Quentin Tarantino—and reads them with and against major theorists, including Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Leo Bersani. Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms “black” and “queer”; rather, seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other. Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these terms: the stigmatized “skin” of some queers’ clothes, the description of blacks as an “economic bottom,” the visual force of interracial homosexual rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison’s Beloved) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness.

Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Politics, History, and Culture)

Leela Gandhi

Amazon Price: $20.65 List Price: $22.95 Usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks By: Duke University Press Amazon Marketplace: 17 new & used starting at $18.75

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> History
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> Civil Rights
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> Nonfiction -> General

Editorial Review:

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” So E. M. Forster famously observed in his Two Cheers for Democracy. Forster’s epigrammatic manifesto, where the idea of the “friend” stands as a metaphor for dissident cross-cultural collaboration, holds the key, Leela Gandhi argues in Affective Communities, to the hitherto neglected history of western anti-imperialism. Focusing on individuals and groups who renounced the privileges of imperialism to elect affinity with victims of their own expansionist cultures, she uncovers the utopian-socialist critiques of empire that emerged in Europe, specifically in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Gandhi reveals for the first time how those associated with marginalized lifestyles, subcultures, and traditions—including homosexuality, vegetarianism, animal rights, spiritualism, and aestheticism—united against imperialism and forged strong bonds with colonized subjects and cultures.

Gandhi weaves together the stories of a number of South Asian and European friendships that flourished between 1878 and 1914, tracing the complex historical networks connecting figures like the English socialist and homosexual reformer Edward Carpenter and the young Indian barrister M. K. Gandhi, or the Jewish French mystic Mirra Alfassa and the Cambridge-educated Indian yogi and extremist Sri Aurobindo. In a global milieu where the battle lines of empire are reemerging in newer and more pernicious configurations, Affective Communities challenges homogeneous portrayals of “the West” and its role in relation to anticolonial struggles. Drawing on Derrida’s theory of friendship, Gandhi puts forth a powerful new model of the political: one that finds in friendship a crucial resource for anti-imperialism and transnational collaboration.