City Travel Guides > Books > History

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.Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: George Chauncey

May 18, 1995
George Chauncey has written an engaging and informative book that provides entry into another American era's conceptualizations of what we today think of as homosexuality.

Gay New York takes great pains to debunk what Chauncey terms "the three myths" of isolation (gay men led solitary lives prior to Stonewall), invisibility (the gay world was difficult for isolated men to find) and internalization (gay men were self-loathing and universally accepted their denigration by the dominant culture). In addition to gay men's diaries, the book provides a glimpse into a bygone world through personal interviews, meticulous documentation by police investigators and arrest reports, sensationalistic newspaper accounts of police raids, cartoon ... Read More:
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.Lieutenant Nun
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: Catalina de Erauso, Michele Stepto, Catalina De Erauso, Gabri Stepto

June 30, 1997
Celebrated in Spanish legends and folklore as the marvelous Lieutenant Nun, Catalina de Erauso was born to a prosperous Basque family in 1585 and sent to a convent at age 4. Destined to become a nun, there she remained until age 15. Days before she was to take her final vows, she escaped, taking only needle, thread, scissors and a few coins.

Despite her previously sheltered existence, de Erauso plunged into her new, wordly life as a man with unusual gusto, as described in her memoir, Lieutenant Nun.

Written some 20 years after her flight, when she correctly deemed confession of her ruse and her still virginal state might save her from the rope or an even more ignominious fate, the memoir describes at breathtaking pace a life of soldiering, ... Read More:
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.The Transgender Reader
City Travel Guides > Books > History
from: Routledge

May 26, 2006
It's huge (essential research for papers) but insanely expensive! (I guess if ya can afford SRS, what's a measly hundred bucks, eh. From "Biology = destiny" to "$ = destiny.")

Very cool to have the "canonical" source stuff excerpted in one place but ... well, there's a huge postmodernist stamp all over this volume that minimizes human experience in favor of clever word selection.

Trans is NOT academic anymore than it is psychiatric! The experts have already had their say! In my opinion, this should have featured more autobiographical materials, for balance.

(And, hey, why doesn't anyone look into the intersection of flower-power-"is-that-a-boy-or-girl?" Sixties culture with trans expression during and since then? Is that task up ... Read More:
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.Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (Between Men--Between Women)
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: Lillian Faderman

June 01, 1992
While this book is an asset in learning about lesbian history it is seriously lacking in connecting ideas and seperating fact from oppinion. While some points are made well there are some that are so far off that they devalue what ever point the author was trying to make.
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.Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: John Boswell

November 01, 2005
I read the 1981 edition of the 1980 book. With 448 pages the book appears to be exhaustive. However, subtract the bibliography etc. and the 67 p appendixes of quoted and/or translated historic documents and we are left with 338 pages. These in turn have to get halved, because of the extensive footnotes, leaving some 170 regular text pages - a rather thin book, actually.

As was the science book standard at the time, the author shows off his education with copious use of Latin, Old Greek and occasional modern foreign languages in the footnotes, not always translating them, in the case of Old Greek not even transscribing it into the Latin alphabet. Considering that some pages may consist of just seven regular text lines and 43 lines in small print of footnotes, this ... Read More:
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.Capote: A Biography
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: Gerald Clarke

October 01, 2005
This has to be the second worst book that I've read in along time. His flings and the details that the writer goes into aren't always that interesting. The writer does name names and some are a shock and make you think. However, saying that the book could of been pared down at least 75 pages by omitting some details of his love life I didn't care to know.
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.Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: George Chauncey

December 12, 2005
Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality written by George Chauncey describes the history that has set the stage for the debate over gay marriage today. The book begins with a history of gay and lesbian individuals in the US and their struggle to enter and gain acceptance in the public sphere. Up until the 1930s during the great depression gay and lesbians were not viewed with such critique and demonization. During the great depression there was a push for traditional families when men lost their jobs and no longer had the same role in their family and found homosexuals to be a threat. Continued discriminatory practices continued in the following decades and gay clubs and restaurants were closed and individuals presumed to be homosexual were jailed. During the 1950's ... Read More:
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.Gay Art: A Historic Collection
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: Felix Lance Falkon, Thomas Waugh

October 01, 2006
Highly recommended to all art lovers. The themes and layouts are well done.

One complaint - at least a few of the artworks could have been printed in colour to enhance the visual appeal of the book.

Otherwise a worthy selection of erotic gay art !
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.Homosexuality and Civilization
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: Louis Crompton

October 31, 2006
I read the original hard cover edition of 2003. It has 640 pages, some 100 color pictures and some 450 regular text pages.

It covers Greece, Judea, the Roman Empire, Western Europe (mainly Italy, Spain [Christian and Muslim], France, England, the Netherlands and Prussia [historic part of Germany]), as well as China and Japan. That seems to be Crompton's (or the publisher's) definition of civilization. Considering that once the biggest cities were located in (sub-Saharan) Africa, that there were urban societies in the pre-Columbian Americas and that civilization's early roots are located in countries such as Babylon, Persia and Egypt, virtually all of which with known homosexualities, this book is not as exhaustive as its page number suggests. Did I mention EASTERN Europe? Maybe it's just ... Read More:
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.Transgender Warriors : Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman
City Travel Guides > Books > History
by: Leslie Feinberg

June 30, 1997
Love or hate hir, Feinberg, like Joan Baez, raises the flag with the broadest possible coloring. Since when was subtlety required of agitprop? Sure, the Lady Skimmington citation is utopian; on the other hand, Feinberg (unlike almost every feminist) actually gets Engels, so right on. Streamlined, overdetermined? All the better, I say. Hey, Baez's greatest artistic moment was announcing (on the Johnny Carson Show!) her withholding of taxes to protest Vietnam; her LPs were secondary. That's the spirit in which I took this book. In the Top 5 of TG texts.

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