From Publishers Weekly
Bachelor lawyer Abraham Lincoln shared a bed with Illinois storekeeper Joshua Speed for three years starting in 1839. Because of its portrayal of a lesbian "Boston marriage," Henry James's The Bostonians was omitted from the 26-volume Scribner edition of his works published 1907-1917. The facts recounted in this chronicle of gay and lesbian history from Walt Whitman to the movie Philadelphia range from the trivial to the interesting to the revelatory, with chapter-length narratives on the Harlem Renaissance and Paris in the 1920s; the Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall trials; the romantic relationships between Eleanor Roosevelt and reporter Lorena Hickok; homosexual entanglements among the Bloomsbury set; and Native American men who dressed and lived as women. Miller (Out in America) uses a conventional textbook style that at times infuriates with the simplicity of its tone. Although he uses fairly well-known primary source material, his excerpts are intriguing: A moving passage from Marvin Leibman's Coming Out Conservative illustrates his experience with discrimination in the military during WWII; Gide's autobiography recaptures his impression of meeting Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas at 25. This overview shows how some recent advances merely reprise gains made and lost in the past; while some past activities outdid anything in the present. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Miller applies his sturdy journalist's prose to the task of producing a popular history of gay men and lesbians since the coining of the word
homosexuality in an anonymous German pamphlet in 1869. Drawing on the large library of self-consciously gay scholarship amassed since the 1969 birth of gay liberation, Miller treats each major topic as it arises in the historical record. Many of the resulting 31 chapters include, besides the main narrative, excerpts from writings and sidebars on figures or developments germane to the chapter subjects. Although Miller covers recent developments in other parts of the world quite well, this is, because of the way gay history has unfolded during the past 125 years, an account of events primarily in the West--indeed, mostly in the U.S. Reflecting, perhaps, the secular and leftist biases rampant among gay writers and activists, Miller overlooks two major developments--the growth of gay religious groups and the burgeoning of political conservatism among gay male intellectuals--but he's no radical toady, and what he does cover he presents fairly and very accessibly.
Ray Olson
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