Julian B. Carter
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040399
- eISBN:
- 9780252098819
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040399.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter interrogates how “whiteness” shaped the ways in which the early chroniclers of gay and lesbian history considered the relationship between race and sex. It looks at several core features ...
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This chapter interrogates how “whiteness” shaped the ways in which the early chroniclers of gay and lesbian history considered the relationship between race and sex. It looks at several core features of the U.S. gay and lesbian past as it was constructed in historical writing between 1976, when the first book in the field came out, and 1989, when the first anthology was released. These publications mark the period of the field's initial formation and thus frame inquiry into basic assumptions and strategies that shaped the field at that important moment. Here the chapter argues that many of these early historians examined the experiences of people of color but often failed to see how their “whiteness” shaped their investigation of the past.Less
This chapter interrogates how “whiteness” shaped the ways in which the early chroniclers of gay and lesbian history considered the relationship between race and sex. It looks at several core features of the U.S. gay and lesbian past as it was constructed in historical writing between 1976, when the first book in the field came out, and 1989, when the first anthology was released. These publications mark the period of the field's initial formation and thus frame inquiry into basic assumptions and strategies that shaped the field at that important moment. Here the chapter argues that many of these early historians examined the experiences of people of color but often failed to see how their “whiteness” shaped their investigation of the past.
Allan Berube
John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834794
- eISBN:
- 9781469603117
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807877982_berube
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube, a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda ...
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This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube, a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, Berube also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. The editors of this book, who were close colleagues and friends of Berube, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing. The book provides a retrospective on Berube's life and work while documenting the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, the essays attest to the power of history to mobilize individuals and communities to create social change.Less
This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube, a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, Berube also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. The editors of this book, who were close colleagues and friends of Berube, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing. The book provides a retrospective on Berube's life and work while documenting the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, the essays attest to the power of history to mobilize individuals and communities to create social change.
Daniel Rivers
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781469636269
- eISBN:
- 9781469636276
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469636269.003.0013
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
This essay looks at the worldview of gay male communalists across the United States in the mid-1970s as seen in the rural gay magazine Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the critical years from 1973 to ...
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This essay looks at the worldview of gay male communalists across the United States in the mid-1970s as seen in the rural gay magazine Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the critical years from 1973 to 1976 as well as in other extant archival sources related to gay communalism. As a clearinghouse for gay men involved in radical, back-to-the-land ventures, RFD provides a complex view of the creation of a largely white, gay male counterculture spirituality that fused the sexual politics of early gay liberationists with ecofeminist, animist, New Age understandings of sexuality, the natural world, and spirit. Gay men who were or who wanted to live in communal spaces nationwide sent letters and stories into RFD, which was published in a variety of gay male communal spaces during these years.Less
This essay looks at the worldview of gay male communalists across the United States in the mid-1970s as seen in the rural gay magazine Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the critical years from 1973 to 1976 as well as in other extant archival sources related to gay communalism. As a clearinghouse for gay men involved in radical, back-to-the-land ventures, RFD provides a complex view of the creation of a largely white, gay male counterculture spirituality that fused the sexual politics of early gay liberationists with ecofeminist, animist, New Age understandings of sexuality, the natural world, and spirit. Gay men who were or who wanted to live in communal spaces nationwide sent letters and stories into RFD, which was published in a variety of gay male communal spaces during these years.
Eric Weisbard
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226896168
- eISBN:
- 9780226194370
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226194370.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
England’s Elton John had US Top 40 hits for thirty straight years, from 1970 to 1999. Putting John in the Britpop godfather role often occupied by David Bowie substitutes a mainstream with secretly ...
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England’s Elton John had US Top 40 hits for thirty straight years, from 1970 to 1999. Putting John in the Britpop godfather role often occupied by David Bowie substitutes a mainstream with secretly gay elements for art students performing gayness as a theatrics of disaffection; female listeners for male ones; and a working class consumerism that blurred the definition of middle class for a middle class consumerism that blurred the definition of working class. John idolized American music, particularly African American music, and he self-consciously chose to be less rock than Top 40. A first closeted, then openly gay man, he maneuvered fantastic consumerism to position himself outside demography and convention. The identification he felt for Top 40 reflected the format’s gateway role for non-countercultural social change secured through commodification. Top 40 meant youth in America, but it meant America itself in John’s postwar England, and to follow his career is to see how it evolved to represent Americanization, British Invasion, and ultimately globalization. Top 40 needs to be understood as a format of outsiders opting in, where rock prized opting out.Less
England’s Elton John had US Top 40 hits for thirty straight years, from 1970 to 1999. Putting John in the Britpop godfather role often occupied by David Bowie substitutes a mainstream with secretly gay elements for art students performing gayness as a theatrics of disaffection; female listeners for male ones; and a working class consumerism that blurred the definition of middle class for a middle class consumerism that blurred the definition of working class. John idolized American music, particularly African American music, and he self-consciously chose to be less rock than Top 40. A first closeted, then openly gay man, he maneuvered fantastic consumerism to position himself outside demography and convention. The identification he felt for Top 40 reflected the format’s gateway role for non-countercultural social change secured through commodification. Top 40 meant youth in America, but it meant America itself in John’s postwar England, and to follow his career is to see how it evolved to represent Americanization, British Invasion, and ultimately globalization. Top 40 needs to be understood as a format of outsiders opting in, where rock prized opting out.
Allan Bérubé
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834794
- eISBN:
- 9781469603117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807877982_berube.4
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This essay presents a revised version of an illustrated lecture that Berube first presented in San Francisco in June 1979. Inspired by the section in Jonathan Ned Katz's Gay American History titled ...
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This essay presents a revised version of an illustrated lecture that Berube first presented in San Francisco in June 1979. Inspired by the section in Jonathan Ned Katz's Gay American History titled “Passing Women”—which revealed a long tradition of women who dressed, lived, and worked as men; Berube searched through San Francisco newspapers for local evidence of the phenomenon. He places his stories in the context of the newly emerging field of U.S. women's history and sets them as well in the local setting of San Francisco. Although very much constructed as a discovery of hidden lesbian lives, the showings of “Lesbian Masquerade” also inspired some of the first explorations of transgender history. The essay was originally published in Gay Community News, a Boston-based politically progressive newspaper with a national circulation. Like much of the community press in the post-Stonewall era, Gay Community News not only reported news but served as an outlet for early writing in gay and lesbian history.Less
This essay presents a revised version of an illustrated lecture that Berube first presented in San Francisco in June 1979. Inspired by the section in Jonathan Ned Katz's Gay American History titled “Passing Women”—which revealed a long tradition of women who dressed, lived, and worked as men; Berube searched through San Francisco newspapers for local evidence of the phenomenon. He places his stories in the context of the newly emerging field of U.S. women's history and sets them as well in the local setting of San Francisco. Although very much constructed as a discovery of hidden lesbian lives, the showings of “Lesbian Masquerade” also inspired some of the first explorations of transgender history. The essay was originally published in Gay Community News, a Boston-based politically progressive newspaper with a national circulation. Like much of the community press in the post-Stonewall era, Gay Community News not only reported news but served as an outlet for early writing in gay and lesbian history.
Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer L. Morgan (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040399
- eISBN:
- 9780252098819
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040399.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This book investigates the ways in which race and sex intersect, overlap, and inform each other in United States history. The book includes thought-provoking articles that explore how to view the ...
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This book investigates the ways in which race and sex intersect, overlap, and inform each other in United States history. The book includes thought-provoking articles that explore how to view the American past through the lens of race and sexuality studies. Chapters range from the prerevolutionary era to today to grapple with an array of captivating issues: how descriptions of bodies shaped colonial Americans' understandings of race and sex; same-sex sexual desire and violence within slavery; whiteness in gay and lesbian history; college women's agitation against heterosexual norms in the 1940s and 1950s; the ways society used sexualized bodies to sculpt ideas of race and racial beauty; how Mexican silent film icon Ramon Navarro masked his homosexuality with his racial identity; and sexual representation in mid-twentieth-century black print pop culture. The result is both an enlightening foray into ignored areas and an elucidation of new perspectives that challenge us to reevaluate what we “know” of our own history. The book looks at how racial subjugation feeds sexual normativity as well as how sexual and racial subjects enact liberating claims that can fall short of liberation even as they bring into being imaginative ideas about social, political, and cultural change.Less
This book investigates the ways in which race and sex intersect, overlap, and inform each other in United States history. The book includes thought-provoking articles that explore how to view the American past through the lens of race and sexuality studies. Chapters range from the prerevolutionary era to today to grapple with an array of captivating issues: how descriptions of bodies shaped colonial Americans' understandings of race and sex; same-sex sexual desire and violence within slavery; whiteness in gay and lesbian history; college women's agitation against heterosexual norms in the 1940s and 1950s; the ways society used sexualized bodies to sculpt ideas of race and racial beauty; how Mexican silent film icon Ramon Navarro masked his homosexuality with his racial identity; and sexual representation in mid-twentieth-century black print pop culture. The result is both an enlightening foray into ignored areas and an elucidation of new perspectives that challenge us to reevaluate what we “know” of our own history. The book looks at how racial subjugation feeds sexual normativity as well as how sexual and racial subjects enact liberating claims that can fall short of liberation even as they bring into being imaginative ideas about social, political, and cultural change.
Christopher Reed
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474401692
- eISBN:
- 9781474422123
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401692.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Originally published in 1991, this essay explores the way citations of homosexuality as an (even as the) definitive aspect of the Bloomsbury Group were used by ideologically divergent critics in ...
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Originally published in 1991, this essay explores the way citations of homosexuality as an (even as the) definitive aspect of the Bloomsbury Group were used by ideologically divergent critics in strikingly similar ways. Neo-conservative, Marxist, and feminist critics, united in little else, were similar in using homosexuality to totalize the meaning of Bloomsbury as the manifestation of what they were against. Homosexuality, in these arguments, signified, respectively, left-wing degeneracy, bourgeois privilege, and patriarchal power. Reed makes sense of this paradox by arguing that, for all of these critics, the spectre of the feminized man served as a powerful image of disorder, the ultimate taboo. Totalizing Bloomsbury as homosexuality, and homosexuality as male effeminacy, these critics fell into errors of both fact and logic. In a new introduction, Reed shows how many of these errors continue to be replayed in Bloomsbury criticism of the 2010s.Less
Originally published in 1991, this essay explores the way citations of homosexuality as an (even as the) definitive aspect of the Bloomsbury Group were used by ideologically divergent critics in strikingly similar ways. Neo-conservative, Marxist, and feminist critics, united in little else, were similar in using homosexuality to totalize the meaning of Bloomsbury as the manifestation of what they were against. Homosexuality, in these arguments, signified, respectively, left-wing degeneracy, bourgeois privilege, and patriarchal power. Reed makes sense of this paradox by arguing that, for all of these critics, the spectre of the feminized man served as a powerful image of disorder, the ultimate taboo. Totalizing Bloomsbury as homosexuality, and homosexuality as male effeminacy, these critics fell into errors of both fact and logic. In a new introduction, Reed shows how many of these errors continue to be replayed in Bloomsbury criticism of the 2010s.
Chris Waters
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199660513
- eISBN:
- 9780191799730
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199660513.003.0013
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Archaeology: Classical
This chapter considers the various meanings attached to the sexual life of Oscar Wilde in the 1950s. Now a queer icon, Wilde enjoys a prominent place in the pantheon of gay heroes. Such was not the ...
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This chapter considers the various meanings attached to the sexual life of Oscar Wilde in the 1950s. Now a queer icon, Wilde enjoys a prominent place in the pantheon of gay heroes. Such was not the case in the 1950s. In that decade, consumed with what was termed the ‘problem’ of homosexuality, Wilde’s life was rewritten in terms of contemporary understandings of that ‘problem’. He became a prism through which homosexuality was understood in the decade that marked the centenary of his birth and was dominated by psychoanalytic narratives of psychosexual development. This chapter examines how knowledge of Wilde was produced by biographers, homophile activists, doctors, and psychiatrists in the 1950s and explores the implications of the Wilde that was articulated for the emerging homophile movement; it asks what ideological investments were at work in the varied attempts to produce the truth of Wilde’s sexuality in the 1950s.Less
This chapter considers the various meanings attached to the sexual life of Oscar Wilde in the 1950s. Now a queer icon, Wilde enjoys a prominent place in the pantheon of gay heroes. Such was not the case in the 1950s. In that decade, consumed with what was termed the ‘problem’ of homosexuality, Wilde’s life was rewritten in terms of contemporary understandings of that ‘problem’. He became a prism through which homosexuality was understood in the decade that marked the centenary of his birth and was dominated by psychoanalytic narratives of psychosexual development. This chapter examines how knowledge of Wilde was produced by biographers, homophile activists, doctors, and psychiatrists in the 1950s and explores the implications of the Wilde that was articulated for the emerging homophile movement; it asks what ideological investments were at work in the varied attempts to produce the truth of Wilde’s sexuality in the 1950s.
Laura Doan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226001586
- eISBN:
- 9780226001753
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226001753.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This chapter turns to the problem of sexual identity, which has facilitated the retrieval of a lesbian and gay past even as it elides the variations, deviations, and complications of actual lives of ...
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This chapter turns to the problem of sexual identity, which has facilitated the retrieval of a lesbian and gay past even as it elides the variations, deviations, and complications of actual lives of individuals who resist that fixity or who were unaccustomed to sexual self-reflexivity. Situating the “great scandal” surrounding the dismissal of the Hon. Violet Douglas-Pennant as commandant of the Women’s Royal Air Force in a recuperative mode of lesbian history satisfies the need for a knowable sexual subject, yet yielding to the explanatory force of a queer identity also makes it difficult to decipher how a woman like Douglas-Pennant saw herself or how others saw her in 1918.Less
This chapter turns to the problem of sexual identity, which has facilitated the retrieval of a lesbian and gay past even as it elides the variations, deviations, and complications of actual lives of individuals who resist that fixity or who were unaccustomed to sexual self-reflexivity. Situating the “great scandal” surrounding the dismissal of the Hon. Violet Douglas-Pennant as commandant of the Women’s Royal Air Force in a recuperative mode of lesbian history satisfies the need for a knowable sexual subject, yet yielding to the explanatory force of a queer identity also makes it difficult to decipher how a woman like Douglas-Pennant saw herself or how others saw her in 1918.
Brent Phillips
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780813147215
- eISBN:
- 9780813151502
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813147215.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
During his lifetime, Charles “Chuck” Walters enjoyed a reputation as one of the foremost director-choreographers of Hollywood motion pictures. From his earliest directorial triumphs, Good News, ...
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During his lifetime, Charles “Chuck” Walters enjoyed a reputation as one of the foremost director-choreographers of Hollywood motion pictures. From his earliest directorial triumphs, Good News, Easter Parade, and The Barkleys of Broadway, to his victorious Lili, High Society, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, musicals directed by Walters seamlessly fuse movement, storytelling, and song. He was one of Broadway’s most prominent dancers in the 1930s, creating featured roles in Rodgers and Hart’s I Married an Angel and Cole Porter’s Jubilee and Du Barry Was a Lady. He supplied choreography for entertainment on Broadway (Let’s Face It, St. Louis Woman) and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood (Meet Me in St. Louis, Girl Crazy). Especially renowned for the manner in which he showcased his stars, Walters skilfully guided Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, Cary Grant, Shirley MacLaine, Lucille Ball, Esther Williams, Grace Kelly, and Joan Crawford. He enjoyed a unique rapport with Judy Garland, creating some of her most indelible stage and screen performances. Personally, Walters was one of the few “uncloseted” gay film directors to excel in studio-era Hollywood, living openly with his partner, a top industry talent agent. This detailed study is long overdue. Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance corrects both the historical oversight and reassesses the career of this Academy Award nominated film director, whose boyhood dream of dance led to a firmly — and now finally — acknowledged position as a major contributor to American popular culture.Less
During his lifetime, Charles “Chuck” Walters enjoyed a reputation as one of the foremost director-choreographers of Hollywood motion pictures. From his earliest directorial triumphs, Good News, Easter Parade, and The Barkleys of Broadway, to his victorious Lili, High Society, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown, musicals directed by Walters seamlessly fuse movement, storytelling, and song. He was one of Broadway’s most prominent dancers in the 1930s, creating featured roles in Rodgers and Hart’s I Married an Angel and Cole Porter’s Jubilee and Du Barry Was a Lady. He supplied choreography for entertainment on Broadway (Let’s Face It, St. Louis Woman) and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood (Meet Me in St. Louis, Girl Crazy). Especially renowned for the manner in which he showcased his stars, Walters skilfully guided Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, Cary Grant, Shirley MacLaine, Lucille Ball, Esther Williams, Grace Kelly, and Joan Crawford. He enjoyed a unique rapport with Judy Garland, creating some of her most indelible stage and screen performances. Personally, Walters was one of the few “uncloseted” gay film directors to excel in studio-era Hollywood, living openly with his partner, a top industry talent agent. This detailed study is long overdue. Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance corrects both the historical oversight and reassesses the career of this Academy Award nominated film director, whose boyhood dream of dance led to a firmly — and now finally — acknowledged position as a major contributor to American popular culture.
