Early Gay Research Articles

The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing

The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing

Edmund White’s Post Gay Autobiographies

ABSTRACT This essay explores the achievement of the gay American author Edmund White’s numerous autobiographies and memoirs. After surveying the formal and thematic variety of White’s individual life writings, it then questions why nearly all of them were written after the explosion of gay life writing that took place in the United States beginning in the 1970s, that is, after the periods of greatest struggle for homosexual emancipation and the fight against AIDS. The essay argues that White’s non-fiction memoirs subtly re-configure the nature of the genre itself. Rather than explaining the narrator’s sexual difference to an audience not entirely aware of homosexuality (as did much early gay life writing) or struggling to find a voice in a homophobic society (one of the great themes of White’s autobiographical fictions), White’s non-fictional autobiographies establish a self-assured voice that presumes the world can be usefully examined and explained by the individual gay subject. They situate the gay speaker at the centre rather than on the margins of American and Western culture. Using the form to understand the world from a gay perspective, White merges sociological analysis with traditional forms of life writing to create something new in the American gay canon.

‘about gays by gays’: the politics of representation in early Australian gay film culture, 1971–1982

ABSTRACTFollowing major film censorship reform in 1971 gay and lesbian Australians were, for the first time, able to see and tell their stories on screen. This change coincided with internationally revolutionary moments of gay and lesbian activism, which were largely centred around the notion of visibility. The new representational opportunities that gay and lesbian film offered quickly became tied to the political imperatives of the Australian iteration of this activist movement. A film sensibility also soon developed that was both particularly queer and particularly Australian. This article explores the extent to which the question of film audience became politicised in Australia following censorship reform in 1971, until the early 1980s, and the implications this had for gay and lesbian representation in film. It fills a gap in the scholarship on the film communities of this period, by interrogating the role gay and lesbian filmmaking groups played in creating a national gay and lesbian cinema culture, and raises questions about how the political and social are expressed through filmmaking within marginalised communities. By exploring the experience of two gay and lesbian filmmaking groups, it will show the ways in which questions of audience and representation influenced the political and aesthetic style of early Australian gay and lesbian film culture.

Gay Midlife Men’s Intergenerational and Interpersonal (Non)Accommodation in the Negotiation of HIV Infection Risk: Implications for Sexual Vitality, Generational Distinctiveness, and Self-Preservation

ABSTRACTThis study utilizes interview data and a communication accommodation framework to explore how early midlife gay men negotiate HIV infection risk vis-à-vis a younger gay male sexual culture that has evolved in terms of its regard for dangers associated with HIV infection. Analysis of face-to-face interviews with 33 gay men (aged 40–53) in four U.S. cities revealed a model of gay intergenerational sexual (non)accommodation. The model includes forms of communicative convergence and nonaccommodating behavior that serve some men’s achievement or continuation of sexual vitality and/or positive generational distinctiveness. Similarities and extensions to communication accommodation theory are discussed, as are the model’s implications for understanding some gay men’s management of sexual health at midlife.

Placing Newton Arvin in Queer History

Placing Newton Arvin in Queer History

Introduction: There Is Something about Richard Dyer

Introduction:There Is Something about Richard Dyer Lisa Henderson (bio) To Cinema Studies Friends and Comrades: I write to introduce you to a collection of epistolary essays on the work of Richard Dyer, prepared on the occasion of his retirement from King's College London. Few scholars have considered as many topics in cinema and media studies as Dyer, or with as much depth and love—love for film and its history, for audiences of all stripes, for the endeavor of cinema scholarship, and for colleagues and their work. Dyer's published scholarship has ranged from light entertainment and the history of stardom to film song, serial killers and seriality, and especially pathbreaking and sustained work as a founding author (in English) of gay film studies. Throughout, he reveals the rich mix of affect, form, and world, whether in the slippery and overwhelming power of whiteness, the delicacy of male genitalia in porn (a genre typically condemned as indelicate), the expressive complexity of pastiche, or the vaporous whimsy of an eye line. His oeuvre and presence have enriched our field for forty years. This collection of letters, some of them addressed to Dyer, all of them about him, his presence in the field, and his work, emerges from a 2016 Queer Caucus panel at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Atlanta. That occasion was not the first time SCMS had recognized Dyer; he received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award in 2007. But the retirement of a broadly read and beloved colleague brings with it new forms of recognition, new feelings and reflections, and renewed solidarities. Our Atlanta panel sought to crystallize that evolution since 2007, and this collection—epistolary, [End Page 148] classic, fanciful, personal, and lived—is our archive. We thank the Queer Caucus and our Atlanta cosponsors.1 Victor Fan and I asked contributors to condense their comments in the form of a letter, to preserve the embodied feeling of the occasion and speak to how Dyer has touched our own scholarship, training, and teaching, sometimes up close, other times from a distance. Some of us, like B. Ruby Rich and Thomas Waugh, fought and taught with Dyer in the trenches of early gay and lesbian film studies, gripping their copies of Gays and Film or Dyer's Jump Cut essay "Homosexuality and Film Noir" as queer talismans that might help "connect our life and work," to quote Rich (in this collection).2 Even at a distance, across generations, nationalities, genders, and race, reading Dyer felt close, as Miriam Petty writes of her encounter with Dyer's work on black stardom and whiteness as a graduate student in Atlanta in the early 2000s. Petty's recent monograph Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood is exemplary evidence of that solidarity and inspiration.3 In her letter, Petty notes Dyer's attunement to representations of race in films in which race was not the dominant theme. In his reply, Dyer uses everyone's letters to think about how queerness enters his work whether or not he's writing about queerness. Intersectional attunement surfaces in Petty's contribution, Dyer's reply, and the collection overall. Louis D. Bayman and Ryan Powell share the honor of having formally been Dyer's advisees as doctoral students at King's in the 2000s. Both write now as appreciative peers. Dyer hears (and credits) insight wherever it comes from, on campus or off, and counts on his students-turned-colleagues to keep him current on the expanding range of directions in which they, or we, take his work. It is a sustained circuit of expertise and regard in the commons of cinema scholarship. For Bayman, a recent graduate assistant for Dyer's course on serial-killer films, that commons turns out to be a bloody basement, expertly appreciated! For Powell, it is a contemporary expansion of Dyer's classic analysis of the image of the homosexual as a sad young man. As readers of this collection will notice, there is a premium on affection in that commons, one that most authors here attribute at least partly to the felt character of Dyer's work, his mode of address...

‘Homosexuals Are Revolting’ – Gay & Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland 1970s – 1990s

The current historiography on the early gay and lesbian liberation movement in Ireland 1970s-1990s has resulted in a narrative which has focused solely on the battle to decriminalise sexual activity between males. In turn, this has presented a picture of a movement comprised of one individual, David Norris, and one goal, decriminalisation. This narrative is predominantly an urban one, which excludes the activities of provincial activists, and most notably lesbian women. In this paper, I move away from viewing David Norris’ legal battle as the only form of resistance to Ireland’s sexual mores. Instead, I explore the other, often forgotten, forms of resistance carried out by Ireland’s gay and lesbian citizens; such as their attempts to create public spaces for gay and lesbian individuals; the appearance of homosexuals in the media to try dispel the negative stereotypes of homosexuality, and finally, their organisation of public demonstrations to declare pride in their identity and demand their place in Irish society. By doing so, these actions facilitated a public dialogue around homosexuality, which ultimately helped change the negative assumptions surrounding homosexuality and renegotiated Ireland’s sexual mores.

Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights

Reforming Sodom describes how liberal Protestantism in mid-twentieth-century America tried to contribute to a therapeutic perspective on same sex-behavior and identity. However, while some liberal Protestant clergy provided support for early gay activism, a larger (and ironic) consequence of their efforts was to aid the antigay discourse of the emerging conservative evangelical religious movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Central to Heather R. White's account is the mid-1940s revision of the King James's English Bible into the more modern Revised Standard Version (rsv). While the older version contained nouns referring to men who were “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind,” the rsv replaced such ambiguous language with the term homosexual. It was the first time that the word appeared in a modern English Bible. This new openness revealed both the efforts by some liberal Protestant clergy to become influential allies and advocates of the emerging gay-identity movement and how some gay activists looked to religion as inspiration for their activism. She examines how the 1969 Stonewall Riots and their subsequent commemoration had elements of religious ritual.

“Почему мы такие люди?”: Раннесоветские гомосексуалы от первого лица: новые источники по истории гомосексуальных идентичностей в России

The article by Irina Roldugina introduces the publication of a series of unique archival documents – letters by homosexual men and women, written in the mid-1920s to medical experts. Signed and anonymous, these letters present a unique window on the subjectivity of the early Soviet gay community, unmediated by any intermediaries and thus not subject to legal, medical, or political censorship. Although the letters were penned by under-educated people of lower social background, their authors very persistently and eloquently elaborated their distinctive self-perception and contemplated their group identity and place within the Soviet society. They addressed medical experts as consultants rather than ultimate arbiters and authorities, in the mode of dialogue or even polemic. Roldugina expects many more personal documents of this sort to be unearthed in archives in the near future, with the effect of turning around the common wisdom about the dynamics of gender relations and politics in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s. The very absence of firsthand narratives by Soviet homosexuals in historical studies is attributed to the methodological priorities of scholars studying early Soviet politics that regulated sexuality and gender. Until recently, they have focused mostly on the analysis of hegemonic discourses of experts. This approach has offered an easy explanation for the radical “right turn” in gender politics in the early 1930s as a direct result of the demise of experts’ professional autonomy. By shifting attention to the self-expression of Soviet gays and lesbians, it becomes possible not just to restore their agency but also to reassess the history of Stalinist population control policies.

Coming out narratives of older gay men living in New Zealand.

Explore the coming out narratives in a group of older gay men. A narrative gerontological approach was employed to explore the coming out narratives of older gay men. Semi-structured digitally recorded individual interviews were undertaken with 12 gay men aged between 65 and 81 years who lived in the community. Data were analysed using a narrative data analytic process. Three collective narratives related to the coming out of older gay men were identified: 'early gay experiences', 'trying not to be gay' and 'acceptance'. Older gay men come from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. However, they all grew up in an era where same-sex attraction was a criminal offence. The path to accepting being a gay man was individualised and stressful for these participants. Consequently health and social service providers need to support the ongoing development of resilience and provide a person-centred approach to care that promotes wellbeing.

Americanism, Un-Americanism, and the Gay Rights Movement

The issue of “un-Americanism” was present at the creation of the gay rights movement. Indeed the movement emerged, at least in part, as a response to wide-ranging discriminatory policies and practices that were implemented by the federal government during the Cold War. Faced with claims that they constituted an existential threat to the United States, activists in the early gay rights movement worked hard to affirm their patriotism and appealed frequently to the nation's founding ideals of liberty and equality. At times, they also characterized those who discriminated against them as “un-American.” Fifty years later, debates about “Americanism” and “un-Americanism” have been centre stage in the battle to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell and to secure gay marriage rights. With conservative politicians, commentators and activists claiming that demands for gay marriage threaten the foundation of American civilization, the gay rights movement and its supporters have responded in kind. The increased willingness of gay rights activists to lay the charge of “un-American” is, at one level, a logical extension of the appeal to Americanism that has long been central to the movement's rhetorical and symbolic approach. But it also reflects both the greater empowerment of today's LGBT community compared with their McCarthy-era predecessors and the divisiveness of contemporary American political culture.

Save Our Children: Overcoming the Narrative that Gays and Lesbians are Harmful to Children

This paper will address why the courts were a better avenue to begin the fight for marriage equality because of the strong and widely-held that gay people are somehow harmful to children, an argument that has regularly been used during the state initiative process banning marriage rights for same-sex couples. The paper will detail a theory called the paradigm, developed by Professor Walter Fisher, that helps explain why gay rights opponents were successful in the political process while gay rights proponents were more successful in the courts.Fisher’s paradigm presumes that all humans are storytellers and communicate mostly through stories. People evaluate the stories they hear based on their own experiences, views of morality, and values. Fisher labels this evaluative process narrative rationality. He believes that only experts have the skills and abilities to use logic and reason, so most lay people make judgments based on culture, biography, and life experiences. Walter Fisher’s paradigm provides insight on how a that gay people are harmful to children was developed in the early gay rights battles and was subsequently strengthened through the HIV/AIDS crisis, the rise of the Moral Majority, the Catholic Church molestation scandal, and the debate about the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay members.To show how the paradigm operates in practice, the paper examines California’s Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage. The paper compares how the voters and courts treated arguments about Proposition 8 differently. Because voters generally base their decisions on their own values and experiences instead of reason and logic, gay rights opponents successfully used the that same-sex marriage will harm children during the initiative campaign even though no reliable evidence supported their claim. Meanwhile, gay right proponents successfully debunked this using an extensive trial in federal court, a place where the predominate method of evaluating arguments is through logic and reason.The paper concludes with a discussion on how same-sex marriages have changed American culture. With more states providing for marriage equality, same-sex couples have become more visible in society. By being more visible, same-sex couples are helping to develop a new about gay people that is much more positive and runs counter to the decades-old that gay people are harmful to children. In fact, people are now seeing the harm that same-sex marriage bans have on children with same-sex parents, a point made by Justice Kennedy in his recent opinion holding the federal Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

Soldiers, Rebels and Drifters: Gay Representations in Israeli Cinema by Nir Cohen (review)

Reviewed by: Soldiers, Rebels and Drifters: Gay Representations in Israeli Cinema by Nir Cohen Yaron Peleg Soldiers, Rebels and Drifters: Gay Representations in Israeli Cinema Nir Cohen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. 254 pp. Nir Cohen’s recent study on Gay Israeli cinema is a welcome addition to the fairly scant number of studies in English available today about one of the most visible and exciting world cinemas. With four nominations for Oscar in the last decade alone, and impressive wins in various major festivals around the world, Israeli cinema in the last ten years has made impressive strides. The impact Israeli films have made worldwide is a sign of the maturation, diversity, and sophistication of the cinematic idiom which recent Israeli films exhibit so well. Cohen’s study is another indication of these qualities, for although in some ways it is an ambitious and sweeping study like the ones that preceded it by Ella Shohat or Yosefa Loshitzky, for instance, its narrower focus on gay cinema makes it more nuanced, as befits the cinema it analyzes in particular and recent Israeli cinema in general. Cohen divides his book into five chapters that follow the development of gay cinema in Israel chronologically, beginning with an introductory chapter about the relationship between urban life and gayness. The two following chapters are dedicated, not surprisingly, to the films of directors Amos Gutman and Eitan Fox, whom Cohen calls the founding fathers of Israeli gay cinema, despite their very differing artistic agendas and styles. The last two chapters deal, respectively, with nonfiction films about gays and with a chart about future directions gay cinema in Israel might be going. And while each of these chapters, as well as the trajectory they chart, can be almost predictable or obvious to anyone who is familiar with the relatively small body of Israeli films, Cohen manages to add new insights into every one of his chapters and provides a comprehensive study that still has new things to say. [End Page 125] Soldiers is based on what has become by now a widely accepted premise about Zionist culture, which Cohen defines as the “Zionist/Muscle Jew/ruralism/militarism” ideology, and his abbreviated reference to it may reveal his impatience with it. Indeed, Cohen’s book dispels this ideological trajectory by looking at those films that most obviously repudiate it, namely, gay films. Consequently, the first chapter looks at the attention Tel-Aviv receives in early gay films as a decadent urban space that functions as an alternative to an otherwise wholesome Zionism and as a shelter and haven for gays as literal and metaphorical misfits. The second chapter, about the first founding father of Israeli gay cinema, director Amos Gutman, is perhaps one of the best and most comprehensive accounts and analyses of the director’s career to date. Cohen justifies the subversive quality of Gutman’s films with a keen cinematic consideration that innovates and adds a new depth to them. He goes beyond obvious thematic readings of these gay films as antihegemonic to look at Gutman’s use of various techniques, among them the focus on interior spaces, dysfunctional and fatherless families, and the use of melodrama to express his anti masculine/heroic/Zionist agenda. Chapter 3 looks at the films of director Eitan Fox, the other founding father of Israeli gay cinema, albeit a very different one from Gutman. Fox’s films have attracted more critical attention than those of Gutman, probably because they conform better to bourgeois political and artistic conventions in Israel and elsewhere. Fox’s films are certainly less militant about gayness in their insistance on conforming their gay characters to the national consensus. It is no wonder that two of his most successful films, Yossi & Jagger and Walk on Water, take pains to show their heroes as patriotic soldiers in the first one, and as a gay-loving Mossad agent in the second. By conflating the personal (=gay) with the national (=military, paramilitary) the films manage to make gays an accepted part of the national family at the expense of a more critical approach to Israeli society in general and the Israeli gay community in particular. Cohen’s most...

Racism against the abnormal? The twentieth century Gay Games, biopower and the emergence of homonational sport

This paper focuses on the first two decades (1982–1998) of the Gay Games, in which an important story unfolds about normalisation and how that contributes (paradoxically) to further racism and sexual oppression. Following McWhorter’s (2009) important analysis of Foucault’s ‘racism against the abnormal’, I suggest the Gay Games have worked hard to distance themselves from the ‘abnormal’ from their very inception. The paper discusses how the early Gay Games are a homonormative leisure formation seeking mainstream acceptance through such examples as: the development of a commodified and conventional sporting spectacle; the individualising and privatising impulses to the AIDS crisis; the granting of a US immigration waiver in 1994; and the consumption of exoticised and racialised bodies in 1998. Moving beyond the celebration of lesbian and gay affirmation, I argue that the push for normalisation at the games produces them as a biopolitical technology of whiteness, class privilege and racism. The paper concludes by suggesting that the homonormative discourses of the twentieth century Gay Games functioned as a condition of possibility for the twenty-first century Gay Games to be mobilised homonationally, that is, as a form of post-9/11 (homo)sexualised racism that semiotically contributes to sustaining a global ‘war on terror’ (Puar, 2007).

Peace Profile: Roger Casement

The life, work, and writings of Roger Casement, an early twentieth-century British Foreign Service officer, activist, and gay man, comprise a substantial repository of knowledge for activists and t...

A Scarlet Pansy Goes To War: Subversion, Schlock, and an Early Gay Classic

The first honest and really complete story of of those men. What THE WELL OF LONELINESS did for the man-woman, this most unusual tale does for the woman-man - only that the latter is a so much more wayward and more fascinating creature. This is how an early gay classic was blurbed in advertisements and dust jacket flap by Samuel Roth, its first publisher, in 1933. A Scarlet Pansy, by Robert (possibly a pseudonym), is a skillful and mature American novel, sensationseeking packaging and all. Part of Ch. 19 is anthologized in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature (1998), which also reproduces the book's frontispiece. The subtlety of Scully's observations are those of one well acquainted with modernist writing styles. Hugh Hagius makes a strong case for the author being the poet, short story writer, and chronicler of the European literary scene in the 1920s, Robert McAlmon, who knew and published writers such as Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Information newly found in the papers of Samuel Roth helps evaluate Hagius' claim.1 That archive also reveals Roth's distribution tactics for the book. That a book like A Scarlet Pansy could be displayed and sold openly to the gay underground in 1933 as well as a general reading public for titillating and prurient novels is especially remarkable. A Scarlet Pansy's narrator is highly approving of the protagonist, Fay Etrange, although he is not fooled by a world frivolous on the surface, but essentially compromised. He has a frame story to tell and begins with Fay dying in the arms of her lover on a World War I battlefield. For once, and due only to the chaos of the Great War, Fay could openly express desire and its spiritual outcome, devotion. The narrator then goes back to Fay's life story, starting with her childhood as a strong and brilliant boy in Kuntzville (pun?), in the hills of Pennsylvania (Kutztown is in Pennsylvania Dutch country). She eventually became a physician especially skilled in obstetrics. Turn-of-thecentury Kuntzville is a place of almost primordial innocence compared with the capitals of America and Europe where the adult Fay displays her hermaphroditic beauty. The feminine pronoun is always used to identify her, and her male friends. The book takes place in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. In New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Berlin, and Paris, Fay, a brilliant cross-dresser, camps it up with a brittle, silver-faceted artificiality, herself an artifact into which is ingested all the wit and fashion of the idle, wealthy, and sophisticated aristocracy. Fay exists in a world that equals in sensuous pleasures the high-hat, black-tie society of many period romance novels. Scully deftly implies that the novel's gay protagonists perform queerness, mimicking and thus belittling the values of those that exclude them, as Queer Theorists have analyzed (Zeikowitz).2 Fay and her friends are endearing, and capable of all the clever dissolution that straight Society's bright young people have mastered. However, the gay set never assume its members are normal or that their inclinations are other than to enjoy themselves (for Fay and her friends, even medical school is a breeze). suggests that they are no more capable of confronting a painful self-analysis than their straight counterparts in the chic restaurants, orgiastic parties, famous bars and theaters, or elegant cruise boats where they rub shoulders (and more) with the aristocracy of two continents. Fay's life is a carnival, and the names of her friends are those of a dazzling side show: Billy Pickup, a playboy; Henry Voyeur and Percy Chichi, philosophical observers; Teddy Wemys Cocke, one of Fay's lovers; Bobby Dike, a collar and tie woman; the La Butsch family of highliving party animals. They are not ashamed of being gay, transvestite, or lesbian and are as proud of their hedonism as they are of their freedom of expression. …

Ask and Tell: Gay and Lesbian Veterans Speak Out. By Steve Estes. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv, 280 pp. $29.95, isbn 978-0-8078-3115-1.)

An old slogan from the early gay rights movement claimed, “we are everywhere.” In Ask and Tell, Steve Estes provides proof of that statement through his comprehensive look at the experiences of gay men and lesbians in the military—from the meeting at the Oder River of American and Russian forces in World War II (“they were hugging and kissing us. Of course I loved that” [p. 12]) to the first West Point recruits after the passage of “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” (derided as “Clinton's Queen Berets” [p. 125]) to participation in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. A collection of oral histories, Ask and Tell is an outgrowth of the author's involvement with the Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. Perhaps because all interview subjects are named and on the record, there is a heavy emphasis on the experience of white officers. Although fairly inclusive in terms of class, sex, and age, Estes's only African American interviewee is a straight-identified member of President Bill Clinton's commission on gays in the military. Estes does a better job with issues of gender, highlighting the complicated relationship between the integration of women and sexual minorities into the military, since all military women were initially perceived as “whores or dykes.” He provides an instructive appendix with examples of how the interviews were edited for publication, an interesting tool for those who teach oral history.

Global Communities and Hybrid Cultures: Early Gay and Lesbian Electoral Activism in Brazil and Mexico

Scholars have recast debates on globalization by emphasizing both national actors' selective appropriation of transnational practices and their reinvention in national settings. Drawing on Nestor Garcia Canclini's concepts of communities and hybrid cultures, I explore these debates by comparing gay and lesbian activists' first experiments in electoral activism in Mexico and Brazil, both occurring in 1982. The different electoral strategies that prevailed in each country drew on the transnational arena in different ways. To explain these differences, I consider the relative strength of competing sectors within heterogeneous social movement fields and their variable participation in competing global communities. The relative influence of these sectors and thus the relative salience of specific transnational practices, in turn, reflected each movement's embeddedness in broader opposition movements to authoritarian regimes. Finally, I argue that these practices should be read contextually, with attention given to their transformation and limitations in national settings. Varios academicos han abordado los debates acerca de la globalizacion enfatizando tanto la apropriacion selectiva de practicas transnacionales por actores nacionales como la reinvencion de estas practicas en marcos nacionales. En base a los conceptos de y culturas hibridas acunados por Nestor Garcia Canclini, exploro estos debates comparando los primeros experimentos de activismo electoral realizados por homosexuales y lesbianas en Mexico y Brasil, ocurridos en el ano 1982. Las diferentes estrategias electorales que fueron utilizadas en cada pais devinieron de la arena transnacional de distintos modos. Para explicar estas diferencias, considero la fuerza relativa de diversos sectores compitiendo dentro de campos de activismo heterogeneos y su participacion en comunidades globales rivales. La relativa influencia de estos sectores y por tanto la relativa importancia de practicas transnacionales especificas, a su vez, reflejaron la participacion de cada movimiento en movimientos mas amplios movilizando contra regimenes autoritarios. Finalmente, argumento que estas practicas deben ser comprendidas en su contexto, prestando atencion a sus transformaciones y limitaciones en los respectivos marcos nacionales.

Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology (review)

Reviewed by: Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology Barry D. Adam Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology. By John F. Galliher, Wayne H. Brekhus, and David P. Keys. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Pp. 144. $60.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Laud Humphreys was a sociologist, an Episcopal clergyman, and an early gay activist. He is best known for his doctoral dissertation, published as Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places in 1970, and is now scarcely remembered for one of the defining works of gay liberation, his 1972 book, Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation. Humphreys was a bundle of contradictions, a fighter caught up in the New Left struggles of his era, an outgoing and engaging personality, and an alcoholic who died relatively young at the age of fifty-eight. [End Page 499] The book, written by three sociologists, is especially concerned with Humphreys' place in the history of the discipline but does not sufficiently apply the tools of sociological analysis to appreciate fully the tumultuous times that so profoundly marked the changes in his life. Humphreys came from the same generation as such fellow intellectuals as Paul Goodman, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, and Martin Duberman. He turned forty the year that Tearoom Trade first appeared, older than the young radicals that were to become the Stonewall generation. Like many members of a generation that grew up in the early postwar era characterized by McCarthyism, the cold war, and the idealization of suburbia, they found their homosexual feelings governed by the closet. In the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the cultural presumptions of American society faced challenges by an array of civil rights, antiwar, feminist, and gay liberation movements, many women and men fundamentally reassessed their lives and aspirations. Humphreys, who was born in Oklahoma, married, and became a priest, later left the clergy for academe, came out, and moved to Los Angeles. In all this he embodies his times. This treatment of his life, surprisingly, gives us little sense of the social forces buffeting his personal development, missing how his striking individuality was always very much a part of the social change going on around him. Humphreys made his name with Tearoom Trade, a book that can still be read as the definitive document on how men's restroom sex happens. It is a study that shocked the university that eventually granted him his degree, upset sociologists, and even disturbed gay activists of the day for exposing an "underside" of sex among men. Over time the book has been codified in methodology textbooks as an iconic problem in research ethics for having observed and reported on the "secret" goings-on of a stratum of men without having provided "informed consent" for participation in the research. Indeed, in the decades that have elapsed since Tearoom Trade one wonders if research of this type could be done again, as institutional review boards have grown into bureaucracies imposing a vision of "ethics" that all but precludes documentation of the male sexual underground. The authors of this book carefully scrutinize Humphreys' record in carrying out the study, asking whether it was authentic (concluding that it was and providing a photocopy of his research notes in an appendix) and whether Humphreys was the dispassionate observer he portrays himself as being. On this point they conclude: "While Humphreys certainly had to present himself to the discipline as a neutral observer, his involvement may have been more than he was able to report" (29). Certainly, in terms of Humphreys' biography it is not hard to see that restroom sex was very likely his entrée into sex with men at a time when he was still married and a clergyman. The authors also found that as early as 1968 "the father of a male student sent a letter to the administration [of the university where Humphreys taught] complaining that Laud was attempting to seduce his son" (66). [End Page 500] Even before Tearoom Trade Humphreys was a man with a mission, willing to take risks for his beliefs. In the 1960s he was a firebrand preacher for the poor and...

AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures , and: La Littérature et le sida: archéologie des représentations d'une maladie (review)

Book Reviews Jean-Pierre Boulé. HIV Stories: The Archeology of AIDS Writing in France, 1985-1988. Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 184. With the advent of new treatments, critical work on the literature of AIDS has become scarce. In recent years, international attention has been largely redirected toward developing countries where AIDS rages on beyond the most pessimistic estimates, while a veil of silence has once again fallen upon Western countries where the epidemic is far from over, and from which most AIDS literature , whether fictional or testimonial in form, had originated. Jean-Pierre Boulé's new book, HIV Stories, focuses on the first decade of the epidemic in France where near complete silence about AIDS for years unleashed a public health disaster unparalleled in Europe at the time. It is from this period of so-called dédramatisation that Boulé unearths mostly forgotten texts and gives us a useful warning about what the consequences of our current silence could be. Not surprisingly, and although his theoretical approach is plural and adapted to each text, Boulé is most effective when he analyzes his corpus in the light of the cultural and political context of the period. The first part of the book is devoted to three fictionalized texts whose authors and publishers are revealed to be complicit with dominant exclusionary discourses of the time. Analyzing what he calls the "just punishment" narrative structuring some early AIDS writing, Boulé shows how the French literary establishment and traditions have contributed to the stigmatization of people with AIDS, particularly independent women and gay men whose non-normative sexuality is seen as the cause of their disease. In the second part, the book turns toward testimonial texts by Michel Simonin, Jean-Paul Aran, and Alain Emmanuel Dreuilhe, all three gay men and all three largely neglected today, but who have paved the way for such writers as Hervé Guibert and Cyril Collard, whose work was met with great enthusiasm a few years later. Why were these early gay witnesses ignored? Again the literary establishment , with the active complicity of the media and a seldom acknowledged Catholic tradition, managed to frame these first-person stories within the mode of confession (in the Foucauldian sense) and neutralize them as self-incrimination. It wasn't until the creation of ACT UP-Paris allowed the expression of a collective, combative gay voice that AIDS counterdiscourses started to emerge, and the epidemic was finally confronted with some degree of effectiveness. Sharply focused and often movingly written (particularly when recounting the injustices Simonin had to face), Boulé's study demonstrates the urgent need to periodize and historicize the epidemic. He takes us back to a time that only seems distant today because it uneasily reminds us that discrimination, hatred, and stupidity are not always the sorry prerogative of the fanatic fringe. Indeed, less than fifteen years ago, they were the norm. I hope this book will be translated and read in France, a country so utterly convinced of its inherent enlightenment that it can never face up to its not-so-glorious, not-so-distant past without tearing itself apart. David Caron University of Michigan David Caron. AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Pp. χ + 204. $19.95 soft cover. Stéphane Spoiden. La Littérature et le sida: archéologie des représentations d'une maladie. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2001. Pp. 232. € 16.50. Par les généalogies qu'ils élisent, David Caron et Stéphane Spoiden agencent des regards complémentaires sur les enjeux dont la littérature du sida a été et est toujours le théâtre en France. 98 Fall 2003 Book Reviews En optant pour La Débâcle de Zola et Le Journal du voleur de Genet, Caron démontre brillamment comment la métaphore de la dégénérescence dont l'homosexuel va devenir la figure emblématique a culturellement institué les paradigmes autour desquels les négociations sociales et politiques des identités sexuelles vont se jouer tout au long du XXe siècle. Si cette anxiété identitaire héritée du XIXe siècle joue...