Customer Reviews

Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century

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Get out your magnifying glass, folks! The print in this book is VERY tiny. But packed in its 500+ pages is a wealth of information about who was gay, may have been gay, is assumed to have been gay, etc. etc. The latter categories, while interesting to have been included, certainly raise a few questions for the reader (John Singer Sargent? Henry James? St. Paul? Jesus? - these are obviously only surmises). It's true, of course. that in earlier centuries those who knew "the love that dare not speak its name" often did not openly speak about it!

Thumbing through this book, one immediately thinks of scores of homosexual men and women throughout history who are not included here. As the Introduction states, however, " ... there are an infinite number of entries that one might include, but only a finite number of pages." The focus here is primarily on the Western World, with British, Italian, French, American, and German gay (or thought to be gay) men and women predominating. The editors, Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, both at the University of Sydney, Australia, have solicited entries from scholars throughout the world. Each biographical entry includes a brief, but very useful, bibliography. An interesting, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately very enjoyable "Who's Who" about who was. Recommended.