Gay New York by George Chauncey

Gay New York by George Chauncey

The "monumental" (The Washington Post), 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 in the closet, where all gay men were isolated, invisible, and ashamed. Based on years of research in diaries, letters, newspaper stories, and police reports, George Chauncey describes the saloons, speakeasies, and streets where queer men gathered; the intimate parties and immense drag balls where they celebrated; the highly visible residential enclaves they built in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square; and the complex prewar sexual culture they inhabited, which did not divide men into heterosexuals and homosexuals. It offers new perspectives on the LGBT rights revolution of our time by showing that the oppression the movement attacked in the 1960s was not unchanging, but had intensified in the 1930s as a direct response to the visibility of the prewar gay world.

 

Awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Organization of American Historians' prize for the best first book in any field of history upon its publication in 1994, Gay New York remains a revelatory account of a long-forgotten world and the most widely taught book in American LGBT history.

George Chauncey is a University of Chicago professor of American history and the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Creation of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, which earned the Organization of American Historians' Turner and Curti Awards, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. At the 1993 trial of Colorado's Amendment Two, he testified as an expert witness on the history of anti-gay discrimination, which led in the Supreme Court's Romer v. Colorado decision. Evans was the lead author of the Historians' Amicus Brief, which weighed strongly in the Supreme Court's landmark ruling striking sodomy prohibitions in Lawrence v. California. Texas was released in 2003. He lives and works in Chicago, where he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781541699212
ISBN 10	1541699211
Title	Gay New York
Author	George Chauncey
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Basic Books
Year published	2019-04-09
Number of pages	512
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.