The Stonewall Inn was a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village. At a little after one a.m. on the morning of June 28, 1969, the police carried out a routine raid on the bar. But it turned out not to be routine at all. Instead of cowering - the usual reaction to a police raid - the patrons inside Stonewall and the crowd that gathered outside the bar fought back against the police. The five days of rioting that followed changed forever the face of lesbian and gay life. In the years since 1969, the Stonewall riots have become the central symbolic event of the modern gay movement. Renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman now tells for the first time the full story of what happened at Stonewall, recreating in vivid detail those heady, sweltering nights in June 1969 and revealing a wealth of previously unknown material.^

The fight for gay and lesbian civil rights -- the years of injustice, the early battles, the defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers -- is an important civil rights issue of the present day. In this book, Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling. The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.

The influence of gays and lesbians on language, literature, theater, poetry, dance, music, and the arts is unmeasurable. In the era before AIDS, gay and lesbian culture had a defining, if unrecognized, influence on American life, an influence that is only now being acknowledged. This reissue of the classic anthology, Lavender Culture , serves as a provocative, dynamic, and wide-ranging reminder of American gay and lesbian culture in the days before the status of gay people received widespread attention in the media, religion, and politics, before Newsweek saw it fit to feature a cover story on LESBIANS, and before gays and lesbians took center stage in America's cultural landscape. Here we find the young, assertive voices of such activists, authors, and artists as Rita Mae Brown, Barbara Grier, John Stoltenberg, Julia Penelope, Andrea Dworkin, Andrew Kopkind, Jane Rule, Arthur Bell, Charlotte Bunche, and dozens more. Including essays on such diverse subjects as gay bath houses, the gay male image in classical ballet, images of gays in rock music, Judy Garland, lesbian humor, sports and machismo, the growing business of women's music, and the Cleveland bar scene in the 1940s, Lavender Culture, with new introductory essays by the editors and Cindy Patton, offers a panoply of gay and lesbian life, tracing the current influence and visibility of gay and lesbian culture back to its origins.

"Harvey Milk--eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck--was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk's assassination at the age of forty-eight made him the most famous gay man in modern history; twenty years later Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the twentieth century. Before finding his calling as a politician, however, Harvey variously tried being a schoolteacher, a securities analyst on Wall Street, a supporter of Barry Goldwater, a Broadway theater assistant, a bead-wearing hippie, the operator of a camera store and organizer of the local business community in San Francisco. He rejected Judaism as a religion, but he was deeply influenced by the cultural values of his Jewish upbringing and his understanding of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. His early influences and his many personal and professional experiences finally came together when he decided to run for elective office as the forceful champion of gays, racial minorities, women, working people, the disabled, and senior citizens. In his last five years, he focused all of his tremendous energy on becoming a successful public figure with a distinct political voice."--Dust jacket.

"Harvey Milk was one of the first openly and politically gay public officials in the United States, and his remarkable activism put him at the very heart of a pivotal civil rights movement reshaping America in the 1970s. An Archive of Hope is Milk in his own words, bringing together in one volume a substantial collection of his speeches, columns, editorials, political campaign materials, open letters, and press releases, culled from public archives, newspapers, and personal collections. The volume opens with a foreword from Milk's friend, political advisor, and speech writer Frank Robinson, who remembers the man who 'started as a Goldwater Republican and ended his life as the last of the store front politicians' who aimed to 'give 'em hope' in his speeches. An illuminating introduction traces GLBTQ politics in San Francisco, situates Milk within that context, and elaborates the significance of his discourse and memories both to 1970s-era gay rights efforts and contemporary GLBTQ worldmaking"--Publisher description

The exhortation to “Go West!” has always sparked the American imagination. But for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people, the City of Angels provided a special home and gave rise to one of the most influential gay cultures in the world. Drawing on rare archives and photographs as well as more than three hundred interviews, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons chart L.A.'s unique gay history, from the first missionary encounters with Native American cross-gendered “two spirits” to cross-dressing frontier women in search of their fortunes; from the bohemian freedom of early Hollywood to the explosion of gay life during World War II to the underground radicalism set off by the 1950s blacklist; and from the 1960s gay liberation movement to the creation of gay marketing in the 1990s.

The past fifty years have seen significant shifts in attitudes toward LGBTQ people and wider acceptance of them in the United States and the West. Yet the extent of this progress, argues Martin Duberman, has been more broad and conservative than deep and transformative. One of the most renowned historians of the American left and LGBTQ movement, as well as a pioneering social-justice activist, Duberman reviews the fifty years since Stonewall with an immediacy and rigor that informs and energizes. He revisits the early gay movement and its progressive vision for society, and puts the left on notice as failing time and again to embrace the queer potential for social transformation. Acknowledging the elimination of some of the most discriminatory policies that plagued earlier generations, he takes note of the cost--the sidelining of radical goals on the way to achieving more normative inclusion. Illuminating the fault lines both within and beyond the movements of the past and today, this critical book is also hopeful: Duberman urges us to learn from this history to fight for a truly inclusive and expansive society. --back cover.

"Martha Shelley didn't start out in life wanting to become a gay activist, or an activist of any kind. The daughter of Jewish refugees and undocumented immigrants in New York City, she grew up during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, was inspired by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements that followed, and struggled with coming out as a lesbian at a time when being gay made her a criminal. Shelley rose to become a public speaker for the New York chapter of the lesbian rights group the Daughters of Bilitis, organized the first gay march in response to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, and then cofounded the Gay Liberation Front. She coproduced the newspaper Come Out!, worked on the women's takeover of the RAT Subterranean News, and took a central role in the Lavender Menace action to confront homophobia in the women's movement. Martha Shelley's story is a feminist and lesbian document that gives context and adds necessary humanity to the historical record"--Dust jacket flap.

Allan Spear had a long and distinguished career as a historian and as a Minnesota state senator. Perhaps best known for coming out as openly gay during his first term in the Minnesota Senate-becoming one of the first elected officials in the nation to do so-Spear was also a leader of Eugene McCarthy's run for the presidency, an organizer against the war in Vietnam, and a key proponent for the establishment of the African-American studies department at the University of Minnesota. Spear's memoirs are fascinating and moving: in early chapters on his childhood and college years, he writes with great introspection about his growing self-awareness of being gay. Later he writes about his development as an intellectual, particularly as a white man fighting to win legitimacy for the study of African-American history and culture. During his time at the University of Minnesota, Spear became deeply involved with the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) and the antiwar movement. At the same time, Spear became increasingly active in the emerging gay rights movement and began the process of coming out to his friends and colleagues. After a failed run for the Minnesota House in 1968, Spear was elected to the Minnesota Senate in 1972 and served as Senate president from 1993-2000. In 1993, he was instrumental in the passage of the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which protected LGBT people from discrimination in housing, education, and employment-an achievement he considered one of the finest of his career. A skilled parliamentarian, he remained a progressive leader in the legislature until his retirement in 2000. Spear passed away on October 11, 2008, leaving his memoir slightly incomplete. A stirring afterword by John Milton completes the story of Spear's life, chronicling the recognition of his accomplishments as a politician and activist during his final years.