LGBTQ+ History

Updated September 19, 2022
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And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
Randy Shilts
Ebook
Upon its first publication more than twenty years ago, And the Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed...
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
Lillian Faderman
Paper Book
As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more...
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
George Chauncey
Paper Book
The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self...
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies
Vito Russo
Paper Book
Praised by the Chicago Tribune as "an impressive study" and written with incisive wit and searing perception--the definitive, highly acclaimed landmark work on the portrayal of homosexuality in film.
Transgender History (Seal Studies)
Susan Stryker
Paper Book
A timely second edition of the classic text on transgender history, with a new introduction and updated material throughout Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to...
Stonewall
Martin Bauml Duberman
Paper Book
On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, was raided by police. But instead of responding with the routine compliance the NYPD expected, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. The five days of rioting that ensued changed forever the face of gay and...
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
Martin Bauml Duberman
Paper Book
Winner of twoLambda RisingAwards This richly revealing anthology brings together for the first time the vital new scholarly studies now lifting the veil from the gay and lesbian past. Such notable researchers as John Boswell, Shari Benstock, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Jeffrey Weeks...
A Queer History of the United States
Michael Bronski
Paper Book
Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction The first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present. In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated...
Coming out under fire
Allan Bérubé
Paper Book
During World War II, as the United States called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the presence of gay Americans in the armed forces increasingly conflicted with the expanding antihomosexual policies and procedures of the military. In Coming Out Under Fire, Allan Berube...
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century
Graham Robb
Paper Book
The nineteenth century was a golden age for those people known variously as sodomites, Uranians, monosexuals, and homosexuals. Long before Stonewall and Gay Pride, there was such a thing as gay culture, and it was recognized throughout Europe and America. Graham Robb, brilliant biographer of Balzac,...
How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
David France
Paper Book
A New York Times 2016 Notable Book The definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic--from the creator of, and inspired by, the seminal documentary How to Survive a Plague. A riveting, powerful telling of the story of the...
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
Lillian Faderman
Paper Book
"This is the history of the gay and lesbian movement that we've been waiting for." --The Washington Post The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights--based on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, and members of the entire LGBT...
The Stonewall Reader
New York Public Library
Paper Book
For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it, with a foreword by Edmund White. Finalist for theRandy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, presented by The...
The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America
Eric Cervini
Paper Book
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY. INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER. New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Winner of the 2021 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. One of The Washington Post's Top 50 Nonfiction Books of 2020....
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
C. Riley Snorton
Paper Book
Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018 Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018 Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018 Winner of Lambda Literary...
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
David K. Johnson
Paper Book
The McCarthy era is generally considered the worst period of political repression in recent American history. But while the famous question, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" resonated in the halls of Congress, security officials were posing another question...
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture
Siobhan B. Somerville
Paper Book
Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was "invented" as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature,...
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
Sarah Schulman
Paper Book
Winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary LGBTQ Nonfiction Award and the 2022 NLGJA Excellence in Book Writing Award. Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbriath Award for Nonfiction, the Gotham Book Prize, and the ALA Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award. A...
A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America
Leila J. Rupp
Paper Book
With this book, Leila J. Rupp accomplishes what few scholars have even attempted: she combines a vast array of scholarship on supposedly discrete episodes in American history into an entertaining and entirely readable story of same-sex desire across the country and the centuries. ...
We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation
Matthew Riemer
Paper Book
Have pride in history.A rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, from the creators and curators of the massively popular Instagram account LGBT History. "If you think the fight for justice and equality only began in the streets outside...
Female Husbands: A Trans History
Jen Manion
Paper Book
Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First...
Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Genre and Beyond: A Film Studies Series)
Harry M. Benshoff
Paper Book
From Thomas Edison's first cinematic experiments to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, Queer Images chronicles the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer sexualities over one hundred years of American film. The most up-to-date and comprehensive book of its kind, it explores not...
Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
James Polchin
Paper Book
Edgar Award finalist, Best Fact Crime American Masters (PBS), "1 of 5 Essential Culture Reads" One of CrimeReads' "Best True Crime Books of the Year" "A fast-paced, meticulously researched, thoroughly engaging (and often infuriating) look-see into the...
The Engagement: America's Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage
Sasha Issenberg
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR . The riveting story of the conflict over same-sex marriage in the United States-the most significant civil rights breakthrough of the new millennium "Full of intimate details, battling personalities, heated court cases, public...
Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory
Qwo-Li Driskill
Paper Book
In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men's and women's roles or who mix men's and women's roles. Asegi, which translates as "strange," is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to "queer." For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a...
Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance
A. B. Christa Schwarz
Paper Book
"Heretofore scholars have not been willing?perhaps, even been unable for many reasons both academic and personal?to identify much of the Harlem Renaissance work as same-sex oriented. . . . An important book." ?Jim Elledge This groundbreaking study explores the Harlem Renaissance as a...
The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
Hugh Ryan
Paper Book
This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century. The Women's House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women's...
Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement
Wendy L. Rouse
Paper Book
Honorable Mention for the 2023 Francis Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize 2023 Judy Grahn Award-Publishing Triangle Finalist Restores queer suffragists to their rightful place in the history of the struggle for women's right to vote The women's suffrage movement, much like...

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