The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe edited by Kenneth Borris and George S. Rousseau (Routledge, 2007). The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe investigates early modern scientific accounts of same-sex desires and the shapes they assumed in everyday life. It explores the significance of those representations and interpretations from around 1450 to 1750, long before the term homosexuality was coined and accrued its current range of cultural meanings. This collection establishes that efforts to produce scientific explanations for same-sex desires and sexual behaviours are not a modern invention, but have long been characteristic of European thought. The sciences of antiquity had posited various types of same-sexual affinities rooted in singular natures. These concepts were renewed, elaborated, and reassessed from the late medieval scientific revival to the early Enlightenment. The deviance of such persons seemed outwardly inscribed upon their bodies, documented in treatises and case studies. It was attributed to diverse inborn causes such as distinctive anatomies or physiologies, and embryological, astrological, or temperamental factors. Available from Amazon UK or Amazon.com. Detailed review by Hal Gladfelder, and author's response
Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance by A. B. Christa Schwarz (Indiana University Press, 2003). Also available from Amazon.com. Studies of black gay writers Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Richard Bruce Nugent
Deep Gossip by Henry Abelove (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Henry Abelove, literary critic, historian and pioneer in queer studies, offers interdisciplinary views on the connections between politics, culture, and sexuality. Deep Gossip addresses the willful misreading of Freud's views on homosexuality among American psychoanalysts; reconsiders sexual practice during England's eighteenth century; assesses the contemporary relevance of Thoreau's Walden, particularly to queer politics; and traces the emergence of a queer critique of previous approaches to lesbian and gay history. Also available from Amazon.com
Other Objects of Desire: Collectors and Collecting Queerly ed. Michael Camille and Adrian Rifkin (Blackwell Publishers, 2001). A study of gay and lesbian collectors, including Jean, Duc de Berry, Christina of Sweden, Frederick the Great, Warhol and Mapplethorpe. Also available from Amazon.com
American Homo: Community and Perversity by Jeffrey Escoffier (University of California Press, 1998), the emergence of a gay and lesbian political identity and community over the past four decades. Also available from Amazon.com
Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren & the Lewes House Brotherhood by David Sox (London: Fourth Estate, 1991). Bryn Mawr review.
Warren almost single-handedly established the collections of the Boston Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. As well as art, Warren collected young men, establishing in Lewes a brotherhood devoted to the revival of classical ideals.
Born to Be Gay: a History of Homosexuality by William Naphy (Tempus, 2004). Dramatically highlights the positive attitudes of bygone generations and cultures, as opposed to nineteenth-century views of the 'disease' of homosexuality.
Camp Excess and Queer Histories of Oz: A review of Robert Reynolds’ From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual and David Coad’s Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities. Publisher's advertisement for Coad's Gender Trouble Down Under
Centenary of the Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901, edited by Robert McKee Irwin, Edward McCaughan, Michelle Nasser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). On November 17, 1901, Mexico City police raided a private party and arrested 41 men, half of whom were dressed as women. This clandestine transvestite ball scandalized Mexico City and is still part of the city's popular culture
Champion
by Walter Kundzicz and Reed Massengill (ed.) (Goliath Books, 2004) Illustrations from Champion Studios, male physique photography of the 1950s and 1960s.
Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, by Will Roscoe. Excerpts and reviews at Amazon.com
Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories by Brett Beemyn (ed.) (Routledge, new edition 1997). Anthology of 11 essays that detail the formation of specific queer communities across a wide historical and geographic span including Buffalo, New York, in the 1940s; Washington, D.C. in the 1950s; and Philadelphia in the early 1970s; Detroit and Birmingham. From Library Journal: Butch lesbians in Buffalo, high-class lesbians in Cherry Grove, gay auto workers in Flint, and all sorts of gay folk in San Francisco and New York are all found in this collection of essays examining the development of myriad gay communities in the country. Doubts that there were sizable gay communities before Stonewall will now be put to rest.
A Dutch Castaway on Ascension Island in 1725 by Alex Ritsema (2006). On 5 May 1725 a Dutch ship’s officer, Leendert Hasenbosch, was set ashore on the desert island of Ascension in the South Atlantic Ocean, as a punishment for sodomy. He tried to survive on turtles and birds but found very little water on the barren island. He wrote a diary, until his death about six months later. In January 1726 British mariners found his tent, diary and other things and brought the diary to England. In 1728 a first English version of the diary of the Dutch castaway was published. In 1730 another English edition appeared, dramatised and embellished with many homophobic passages. In 1978 Peter Agnos (a pseudonym) published The Queer Dutchman, which used the unauthentic 1730 version and then faked many alleged documents and details about the story. The full true story, with complete text of the first authentic English translation of the journal, and detailed study of the documents, plus information about other 18th-century Dutchmen banished to desert islands for sodomy, has now been told in Alex Ritsema's A Dutch Castaway on Ascension Island in 1725. The 148-page book is self-published but of high quality, inexpensive, well illustrated, and immensely interesting.
Thomas
Eakins: The Absolute Male by John Esten (Universe, 2002). Drawings, paintings, and photos of Eakins's male nudes, from collections around the world; 50
illustrations.
Encolpe et Giton: A new French translation of Petronius's Satyricon, emphasizing the pederastic romance of the two main characters. A brief overview at the author's site, plus extracts (all in French)
Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam (Duke University Press, 1998). Female Masculinity covers a host of cross-identifications: tomboys, butches, masculine heterosexual women, nineteenth century tribades and sapphists, inverts, transgenders, stone butches and soft butches, drag kings, cyber butches, athletes, women with beards. Interview.
Detailed critique (pdf file)
The Friend by Alan Bray (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Bray has discovered church memorials and graves from the 14th to 19th centuries for same-sex couples, whose relationships have been blessed by the church as "connubium" or a form of marriage. Publisher's description. Review. Long and detailed review by James Davidson.
From the Closet to the Screen: Women at the Gateways Club, by Jill Gardiner (Rivers Oram Press/Pandora List, 2002). In the 1960s heyday the Gateways Club, which opened in the 1930s, was internationally known as "the" lesbian club to visit in London. A social history of lesbian lives, loves and mores from a cloistered secret in the 1950s and 1960s to a battleground between feminists and traditionalists in the 1970s.
Gay Old Girls by Zsa Zsa Gershick. Interviews with older lesbians in the US. Interesting readers' reviews at Amazon.co.uk and excerpts and detailed reviews at Amazon.com
Gay Power: An American Revolution by David Eisenbach (Carroll & Graf, 2006). Gay Power chronicles the tumultuous first wave of the modern gay rights movement. From the first-ever gay student group launched at Columbia University in 1965 to the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activist Alliance, and other vanguard organizations that emerged from the Stonewall riots. Description and excerpt
The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan. Lesbians during the golden age of Hollywood, with biographies of Mercedes de Acosta, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo
Greek Homosexuality by Kenneth James Dover. The classic study of homosexual relations in ancient Greece
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey. Excellent collection of 30 articles on gay and lesbian history. Available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality by Dominique Fernandez (Prestel, 2002). Illustrated with works by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Canova, Lucien Freud, and Robert Mapplethorpe, among others, covering Ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance and Baroque movements, Chinese and Japanese erotica, the nineteenth century, the official art of Fascism, and finally the modern world of art. Synopsis at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West by Ruth Vanita (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Love’s Rite is the first book to examine same-sex weddings and same-sex couple suicides in India over the last two decades, discussing these phenomena in the context of the international debate on gay marriage, and in the context of past and present Indian and Euro-American cultural representations of same-sex union, from fourteenth-century narratives about co-wives who miraculously produce a child together to nineteenth-century depictions of ritualized unions between women. Love’s Rite brings a fresh perspective to the gay marriage debate, suggesting that same-sex marriage dwells not at the margins of society but at the heart of culture.
Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-Century England, by Jay Losey and William D. Brewer (eds), (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). Includes essays on William Godwin, Byron, Shelley, Disraeli, Beckford, Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Kingsley. Extracts available on Google Book Search
Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 by Sean Brady (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). This book is part of a new generation of historical research that challenges prevailing arguments for the medical and legal construction of male homosexual identities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain.
The
Modern History of Sexuality, ed. Matt Houlbrook and Harry Cocks (University of Liverpool; Birkbeck College, University of London, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Review
Mother Clap's Molly House by Rictor Norton. This pioneering historical study is the first comprehensive chronicle of the English gay community at its 18th-century roots, sporting for the first time a distinctive subculture with its "molly houses," "sodomites' walks," "maiden names" and gay slang. Rictor Norton's research into trial records and contemporary documents establishes a vital cornerstone for the reconstruction of gay history. Challenging in its demonstration that the molly subculture was primarily a working-class community of blacksmiths, milkmen, publicans and shopkeepers, Mother Clap's Molly House also records the exuberant lives of personalities such as Charles Hitchin the "thief-taker," the dramatists Samuel Foote and Isaac Bickerstaffe, William Beckford of Fonthill, and Rev. John Church, prosecuted for his blessing of gay marriages. All these are set against a backdrop of persecution, blackmail and the pillory. Also available from Amazon.Com. Review on Speak Its Name blog
Musicology and Difference and Queering the Pitch; interesting review essay and these and other books about detecting gender and sexual orientation in music, with comments on Tchaikovsky, Benjamin Britten, Handel, Schubert and other composers suggested to have been homosexual. Available from Amazon.co.uk
A Natural History of Homosexuality by Francis Mark Mondimore. Long review of a psychiatrist's synthesis of recent research in biology, history, psychology and politics concerning homosexuality. Detailed synopsis at Amazon.co.uk
Pelo Vaso Traseiro: Sodomy and Sodomites in Luso-Brazilian History edited by Harold Johnson (Fenestra Books, 2007). Collection of thirteen articles on the history of homosexuality in the Portuguese-speaking world. Includes an article by Harold Johnson "outing" Prince Henry the Navigator as a closet gay, and several articles by Luis Mott. Also available from Amazon.com
Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, by Josiah Blackmore (ed.) and Gregory S. Hutcheson (ed.). Available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Queering the Pitch and Musicology and Difference; interesting review essay on these and other books about detecting gender and sexual orientation in music, with comments on Tchaikovsky, Benjamin Britten, Handel, Schubert and other composers suggested to have been homosexual. Available from Amazon.com
Queering the Renaissance – Review of Queering the Renaissance (available from Amazon.com) and Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (available from Amazon.com), both by Jonathan Goldberg
RIMBAUD, Arthur Long review of two biographies of the 19th-century French poet by Graham Robb and Jean-Luc Steinmetz. Readers' reviews at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing edited by Ian McCormick;
Contents with selected quotations. Available from Amazon.com
Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, by Nan Alamilla Boyd (University of California Press, 2005). Traces the history of gay men and lesbians in San Francisco from the turn of the century, when queer bars emerged in San Francisco's tourist districts, to 1965, when a raid on a drag ball changed the course of queer history.
