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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.

This chapter describes the work of Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), the leaders of which argued that Black gay men suffered from low self-esteem due to both racism and homophobia, which made them more likely to put themselves at risk for HIV through drugs and unprotected sex. As a remedy, GMAD offered up affirming images of Black gay men, often looking to the past to do so. Discussion topics frequently included homosexuality and queer identity in African and African American history, including Egyptian and Yoruba culture, the Harlem Renaissance, and the life of gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. At other times, the group highlighted literary and artistic work by luminaries in the Black gay renaissance, such as Joseph Beam, Essex Hemphill, and Marlon Riggs. The group also sought to claim a place for Black gay men within Afrocentric ideology, at one point collaborating with the Black Leadership Commission on AIDS to produce an AIDS education and prevention program based on Kwanzaa principles. GMAD leaders argued that these interventions helped equip members with the self-esteem necessary to protect themselves from HIV by practicing safer sex.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.