TABLE OF CONTENTS: Who was Sappho? How gay was the Renaissance? When were the first sodomy laws passed in America? Were there any gay heroes in the American Revolution? Were "passing" women lesbians? Who was Walt Whitman? Who was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs? How did San Francisco become so gay? Was Susan B. Anthony a lesbian? Who were the "berdaches"? Who was Katharine Lee Bates? What was the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee? What were Oscar Wilde's trials about? What is the history of gay bathhouses? When did American gays, lesbians, and others first start calling themselves "queer"? Who was E.M. Forster? Who were Havelock Ellis and Edith Lees Ellis? How gay was the Harlem Renaissance? Who were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas? Who was Willa Cather? What was the Leopold and Loeb case? Who was Natalie Barney? What was the first gay rights organization in America? Who was Janet Flanner? What was the "Padlock" Bill? What was The Well of Loneliness? Who was Babe Didrikson Zaharias? Was Eleanor Roosevelt a lesbian? What was The Children's Hour? What happened to gays and lesbians during the Holocaust? Who were some of the lesbians in Hollywood's golden age? What is the origin of the phrase "a friend of Dorothy's"? Who were Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead? What were the army drag shows during World War II? What were "blue discharges"? When did the American gay and lesbian press begin? How gay were Tennessee Williams's plays? What was the Kinsey Report? What were the lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s? What were physique magazines? Who was Christine Jorgensen? What was the Mattachine Society? How did McCarthyism affect gays and lesbians? Who were the Daughters of Bilitis? Who was Rudi Gernreich? Who was James Baldwin? What was the Boise Sex Scandal? What was Evelyn Hooker's research about? What was the Wolfenden Report? Who was Lorraine Hansberry? What was the Supreme Court's first pro-gay ruling? What have gays and lesbians experienced in revolutionary Cuba? Who was Bayard Rustin? What was NACHO? What is the origin of the annual gay and les

Identity Papers argues that contemporary Jewish American literature revises our understanding of Jewishness and Jewish difference. Moving beyond the reductive labeling of texts and authors as “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough,” and focusing instead on narratives that portray Jewish regeneration through feminist Orthodoxy, queerness, off-whiteness, and intermarriage, Helene Meyers resists a lachrymose view of contemporary Jewish American life. She argues that such gendered, sexed, and raced debates about Jewish identity become opportunities rather than crises, signs of creative potential rather than symptoms of assimilation and deracination. Thus, feminist debates within Orthodoxy are allied to Jewish continuity by Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Tova Mirvis; the geography of Jewish identity is racialized by Alfred Uhry, Tony Kushner, and Philip Roth; and the works of Jyl Lynn Felman, Judith Katz, Lev Raphael, and Michael Lowenthal queer the Jewish family as they reveal homophobia to be an abomination. Even as Identity Papers expands Jewish literary horizons and offers much-needed alternatives to the culture wars between liberal and traditional Jews, it argues that Jewish difference productively troubles dominant narratives of feminist, queer, and whiteness studies. Meyers demonstrates that the evolving Jewish American literary renaissance is anything but provincial; rather, it is engaged with categories of difference central to contemporary academic discourses and our national life.

One of the founders of the scientific study of sex, Magnus Hirschfeld, M.D. (1868-1935), led the field in objective examinations of homosexuality, transvestism, and gender identity. The Homosexuality of Men and Women was designed to provide a unified, comprehensive description of homosexuality which would rid heterosexuals of homophobic prejudice and allow gays and lesbians to accept themselves and stop feeling isolated. This encyclopedic study opens with a definition and a detailed biological diagnosis of orientation, including the childhood and adolescent phases. Hirschfeld addresses the physical, mental, and emotional life, while explaining the differences between friendship and same-sex love; genuine and false homosexuality; and the inborn nature of homosexuality and bisexuality. He also disputes the theory that homosexuality is treatable. In the second half of the book, Hirschfeld looks at sociology: community life, bonding, roles in society, history, persecution, victimization, and the law. His documentation of gays in the military and the "new technology" of his day-such as the telephone and airplanes and their affect on the lives of homosexuals-offers farsighted observations that strongly parallel today's national debates and new developments.