Gay Liberation Research Articles

From ‘bisexual’ to ‘queer’: the radical sexuality of Paul Goodman

This article explores the nature of Paul Goodman’s sexuality within his historical context, arguing that his radical queerness influenced his social and political radicalism in important ways. His unrepentant homosexuality allowed him to identify as a social rebel, and it also broadened his understanding of the human condition. His visibility as a self-identified ‘queer’ provided a model for the early 1970s American gay liberation movement. Goodman’s conservative attitudes about gender, however, also encouraged the sexism found in many 1960s American social movements.

The erotics of conduct

ABSTRACTThis article uses a selection of 1970s and 1980s sex manuals to explore Anglo-American gay culture in the years immediately before and after the emergence of HIV/AIDS. Arguing that these texts represent a neglected historical archive, the essay demonstrates that the model of gay liberation that they espouse is caught between individualistic and collective versions of sexual identity, and that this split can best be understood in relation to the wider genre of the conduct book. Noting that sex manuals are inevitably connected to questions of citizenship and imagined selfhood, the article uses a side-by-side reading of The Joy of Sex and The Joy of Gay Sex to show that both texts are structured by demeaning assumptions about class, race, and gender identity. The discussion foregrounds Alan Sinfield’s work, especially his questioning of the egalitarian model of gay identity and his attention to queer reading practices. This in turn leads to a consideration of how anti-relational queer theory might be part of a longer tradition of gay conduct writing; this part of the essay revisits and extends an existing debate between Sinfield and Leo Bersani.

Cycles of Sameness and Difference in LGBT Social Movements

Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing similarities to the heterosexual mainstream and celebrating differences. We contrast earlier movement cycles mobilized around difference with efforts to legalize same-sex marriage. Our review highlights the turning points that led to shifts in protest cycles, and we trace the consequences for movement outcomes. Scholarship will advance if researchers recognize the path-dependent nature of social movements and that sameness and difference are not oppositional, static, or discrete choices. We conclude by recommending directions for future research.

Acts of homonationalism: Mapping Africa in the Swedish media

Gay-friendliness and gender equality have been taken as signs of modern Western superiority over other cultural spheres and geographical spaces, particularly those of the Muslim world. In a similar manner, the promotion and defense of gay rights has become the crucible of othering discourses in relation to Africa. Across different cultural and national spaces, the meanings of citizenship, nationalism, modernity, colonialism and sovereignty are being negotiated in debates about anti-homosexuality on the continent. The focus of this article is the politics of mapping anti-homosexuality legislation in Africa in Swedish daily newspapers . Drawing on the work of Jasbir Puar and other feminist and queer scholars theorizing race and sexuality in relation to processes of nation-building, the authors analyze the mapping of the regulation of homosexuality in Africa as an instance of imaginative geographies. They investigate how journalistic rhetoric about homophobia on the African continent in Swedish daily newspapers relies on a politics of homonationalism and sexual exceptionalism in ‘gay liberation’ discourses.

Sex, Shame and West German Gay Liberation

This article contributes to a reassessment of gay liberation by focusing on how matters of sex and desire featured in the gay press and the gay movement in 1970s West Germany. Gay liberation has often been viewed through an affirmative lens, contrasted favourably with the supposed shame-filled conformism of the postwar homophile movement. I problematize this perspective by analysing ambivalence about homosexual desire and gay (male) sexual practice, both in the pages of the commercial gay press and in gay activist publications. Using case studies of intergenerational desire—or ‘paedophilia’—and sado-masochism, I question the extent to which the 1970s saw a transition towards the ideal of mutual, reciprocal relationships. In so doing, I argue that historians of homosexual politics should not only analyse questions of ideology and strategy but also sex, desire and ambivalence about self and society. Concluding through a consideration of the interrelationship between ‘pride’ and ‘shame’, this article shows that gay liberation was anything but a mere hedonistic interlude.

Situating Sexuality in Social Reproduction

The years since the rise of gay liberation in 1969 have seen remarkable changes in the realm of sexuality. Lesbians and gay men have won important rights and attained a cultural visibility that would have been impossible to imagine even thirty years ago. Yet these rights are limited, and apply only to specific sections of those who face exclusion, discrimination or violence on the basis of their queerness in the realm of gender and/or sexuality.

A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman

A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, by Andrew Hartman. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015. 342 pp. $30.00 US (cloth), $19.00 US (paper). What were the culture wars? Andrew Hartman provides a fairly bounded definition of this amorphous phenomenon, which is not the least accomplishment of this thorough study. His first chapter depicts the challenge to posed by the liberating trends of the 1960s and the new (meaning the United States) they spawned. next two chapters introduce the intellectual reaction of neo-conservatives and the popular resistance spearheaded by the Christian Right. following six chapters cover the culture wars per se, largely in the 1980s and 1990s. They examine the conflicts over racial issues and theories; feminism and gay rights; the media and pornography; and public schools; postmodernism in the academy; and interpretations of American history. A brief conclusion declares that the culture wars over these issues ended with the twenty-first century or perhaps were transcended. Hartman calls the 1960s a watershed decade. initial challenge to normative America came from the New Left, radicalized by the struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, this challenge had morphed into the identity movements, principally Black power and feminism, but also advocacy for gay rights, Chicanos, and Native Americans. Unlike radical confrontations of the sixties, these movements constituted ongoing organized efforts to alter the status quo, and were soon rooted in federal regulations, university practices, and popular media. An intellectual reaction among former liberals, soon dubbed neoconservatives, opposed the New Left assault on traditional values and institutions. Evangelical Christians had more tangible grievances against secular humanism in public education, the feminist challenge to the family, and gay liberation, among other things. Their impassioned resistance made partisans like the Reverend Jerry Falwell into media favorites. These developments foreshadowed the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. progressive Left was the proactive agent in the subsequent clashes; while these initiatives were opposed on the Right with both intellectual arguments and attempts to mobilize public opinion. Hartman's material ranges from television shows to Supreme Court decisions, but he succeeds in keeping the intellectual content in the foreground. In this respect, the volume provides a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of these decades. chapter on The Color Line, for example, begins with the transition from advocacy for colourblind policies to affirmative action and the controversies it spawned. chapter further analyzes critical race theory and its allegations of institutional racism, biological theories of racial difference and the Bell Curve, culture of poverty explanations of economic deprivation, and the implications for welfare. Spike Lee's movie, Do the Right Thing, dramatized some of these latter issues, provoking conflicting views. …

Masked Man Challenged Psychiatrists’ Views on Homosexuality

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Association NewsFull AccessMasked Man Challenged Psychiatrists’ Views on HomosexualityAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:28 Apr 2016https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2016.5a22AbstractA psychiatrist stigmatized because of his sexual orientation could protest only anonymously at APA’s 1972 Annual Meeting.“Any attempt to formulate a succinct, comprehensive overview of what happened in Washington last month at APA’s Annual Meeting is doomed,” began Psychiatric News’ June 2, 1971, coverage of what became one of APA’s most significant turning points.The report was brief: “Only a single disruption occurred ... when members of the Gay Liberation and the Radical Caucus seized the microphone. ...” during an otherwise uneventful business meeting.Among those who grabbed the mic was Franklin Kameny, Ph.D., an astronomer who had been fired from a federal government job after his homosexuality became known. Kameny took the occasion to attack APA and psychiatry in general for its “oppression of homosexuals.” At the time, homosexuality was defined as an illness in DSM, influenced both by psychoanalytic theory and general social prejudice.Gay advocates Barbara Gittings and Franklin Kameny, Ph.D., sit beside the masked “H. Anonymous, M.D.”, who years later revealed himself as John Fryer, M.D. Maryland psychiatrist Kent Robinson, M.D., speaks at the podium.Kay Tobin/The New York Public LibraryThis interruption was not well reported in the general press because at the same time some 7,500 anti-Vietnam War protesters were being arrested across town.Kameny expanded his views on psychiatry’s position on homosexuality in a long letter to the editor of Psychiatric News published in the July 7, 1971, issue.“Basically, we object to the negative attitudes of psychiatry toward homosexuality,” he wrote. “More specifically, we object to the sickness theory of homosexuality tenaciously held with utter disregard for the disastrous consequences of this theory to the homosexual, based as it is on poor science.”A more dramatic challenge to the status quo came a year later when the 1972 APA Annual Meeting in Dallas hosted a panel with gay advocates titled “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe of Homosexuals—A Dialogue.” There, a man wearing a rubber Halloween mask and a bushy wig slipped into the room and was introduced as “H. Anonymous, M.D.”“I am a homosexual,” he said. “I am a psychiatrist.”John Fryer, M.D., is honored by APA through presenting an annual award to an individual who has contributed to improving the mental health of sexual minorities. “The masked psychiatrist spoke of his difficulties in keeping his sexual orientation secret because of the bias and rejection he would encounter,” reported Psychiatric News. “‘My greatest loss,’ he said, ‘is my honest humanity. How incredible that we homosexual psychiatrists cannot be honest in a profession that calls itself compassionate and helping.’”Another panel member, APA Vice President (and later APA President) Judd Marmor, M.D., agreed with other speakers that psychiatry was biased against homosexuality.“I must concede that psychiatry is prejudiced as has been charged,” he said. “Psychiatric mores reflect the predominant social mores of the culture.”In a follow-up letter to the editor of Psychiatric News, Marmor argued by comparison that no one would suggest that strongly held religious convictions be considered to be mental illnesses.“In a democratic society we recognize the rights of such individuals to have widely divergent religious preferences, as long as they do not attempt to force their beliefs on others who do not share them,” he wrote. “Our attitudes toward divergent sexual preferences, however, are quite different, obviously because moral values—couched in ‘medical’ and ‘scientific’ rationalizations—are involved.”Even though APA removed homosexuality from its manual of psychiatric illnesses in 1973, “Dr. Anonymous” did not reveal himself until 22 years later. He was John Fryer, M.D. (1938-2003), who was forced to leave his psychiatry residency at the University of Pennsylvania when it was discovered that he was gay. He eventually became a professor of psychiatry at Temple University. APA remembers the masked pioneer of gay rights in its annual John Fryer Award, which honors a person who has contributed to improving the mental health of sexual minorities. ■For a contemporary discussion of homosexuality and its relation to psychiatry, see “A Symposium: Should Homosexuality Be in the APA Nomenclature?” from the November 1973 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, can be accessed here. ISSUES NewArchived

Abelove’s Historical Vision: Gentle Warnings Against Moralism, Colonialism, and an Apolitical Identity Politics

ABSTRACTHenry Abelove’s insightful and carefully researched book, Deep Gossip (2003), creatively opens up many important topics for exploration. I address 3 of these topics: Abelove’s appreciation of Freud’s refusal to moralize about homosexuality, the crucial difference between moralism and a hermeneutic vision of moral understandings, and Abelove’s discussion of the historical shift from gay liberation to a more recent postmodern identity politics and with it the loss of a more explicitly political anticolonialism. Compulsory heterosexuality can be understood as a key element that holds in place current arrangements of gender and the military-industrial-educational-surveillance state, which is currently justified by and in step with neoliberal economic theory and subjectivity, colonial wars of occupation, and the use of at-a-distance airpower.

“In People’s Faces for Lesbian and Gay Rights”: Stories of Activism in Madison, Wisconsin, 1970 to 1990

During the 1970s and 1980s, activists pushed Madison, Wisconsin, to the forefront of the national movement for gay rights. While midwestern participation in gay liberation has not been well documented or explored, the following article traces the role of local Madison organizers in this wider struggle for equality through the use of oral history. Using interviews from a collection of oral histories from the local LGBT community, this article chronicles the activism and political organizing that led to the early election of out officials, the nation's first statewide gay rights law, and campus protests over the ban on homosexuals serving in the military

Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In

Part of the TV Milestones Series, Ken Feil's little book (5” x 7”) on this iconic variety show is packed full of useful information, especially in regards to the series's place in the pantheon of late 60s/early 70s television comedy, including The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (CBS, 1968–1969) and The Flip Wilson Show (NBC, 1970–1974), which were its main competitors during the five years of its broadcast life. Feil insists that Laugh-in (NBC, 1968–1973) made significant contributions in the areas of video-editing, political satire (and how to be so ambiguous and ambivalent so as to avoid too much scrutiny and/or censorship), and ensemble comedy.We viewers may remember that Laugh-in was characterized by a preponderance of rapidly edited segments, which Feil aptly describes as “abrupt and questionably tasteful glimpses of countercultural figures: sexual swingers (women and men), stoned hippies, empowered African Americans, feminists and flamboyant nellie men” (3). Within and among these “glimpses,” the show reflected upon and reacted to the day's most controversial events, including Vietnam, racial discrimination, birth control, gay and female liberation, among others. The fast editing, what Feil calls avant-garde editing in Marshall McLuhanist style, gave (and gives) the show its pop-culture credibility. In fact, Feil mentions writer Joan Barthel's suggestion that the show exhibited borderline taste. In other words, it fell somewhere between high and low culture. Time magazine termed this condition reverse sophistication, in which younger audiences could enjoy the show's subtle subversion of the network's usual conservative ideology. Laugh-in was able to achieve this through its use of irony, camp, and hip ambivalence.Chapter 1 investigates the show's ambiguous commentary on taste. The viewer had to figure out whether or not the show was supporting or lambasting “the tastelessness and vulgarity of various countercultures and avant-gardes, the broader youth culture, and even members of the Establishment” (27). Chapter 2 decodes the word camp and the ways in which the term could be used to describe the show's modus operandi. Camp, being that which is affiliated with the vulgar, perverse, or malfunctioning, found its way into the show through the tried and true performance strategy known as the put-on. This strategy, in which the dominant or accepted is parodied in such a way that the parodied thing or person is not clearly identified, proved the perfect tool for allowing Laugh-in to remain ambiguous and, therefore, nonthreatening. Feil reports, in fact, that this ambiguity allowed the hipster youth and older establishment squares to sit side by side on the davenport and enjoy the show together in a phenomenon that effectively bridged the generation gap like no other show at the time.In chapter 3, Feil investigates Laugh-in's use of the strategy of the open secret in order to succeed in its exploitation of both high and low culture. The show's open secret was that it utilized taboos of taste, social behavior, and identity in its cultural references that were both openly suggested and rife with double entendres. Audiences could thereby partake of the counterculture without committing to it or becoming even slightly involved in it.Exploring Laugh-in's identity politics in his final chapter, Feil begins with the show's African American contingent. Through its frequent employment of celebrities such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Flip Wilson in sketches, as well as regulars like Chelsea Brown and Johnny Brown, the show was able to present “an integrationist attitude of sameness” and yet also allay fears of the white bourgeois regarding Black power groups (88). These African American performers, Keil asserts, “punctuated the program's hipness by reflecting diversity, distinguishing their blackness, satirizing racism, and (ostensibly) mocking derogatory stereotypes” (88). Likewise for both the feminist and gay elements of the show. While Feil suggests that Laugh-in did nothing to show support for gay liberation or feminists, its exposure of stereotypes, such as Alan Sues's “unself-consciously queeny man” or Lily Tomlin's sexually predatory feminist, was a first for television, an exposure that amounted to some important first steps toward acceptance and understanding (107).Ken Feil's book is a well-researched study in which he provides both critical and artifactual support for his claims. Clearly Feil's investigation of the comedy-variety series Laugh-in demonstrates the show's particular brilliance in addressing disparate audiences on contentious subjects at a time when America was seemingly unable to do the same on its own streets. In addition, the show must, with this book, be considered foundational in the canon of television sketch comedy, for without it, how can we attempt to analyze shows like today's Portlandia (IFC, 2011–) or Little Britain (BBC, 2000–2006)?

Towards a new specialization in health librarianship: LGBTQ health

In 1964, Canadian gay activist Jim Egan and Maclean’s journalist Sidney Katz decided to kick-start a revolution [1]. Katz’s two-part article “The Homosexual Next Door: A Sober Appraisal of a New Social Phenomenon,” published by Maclean’s in February and March of that year [2, 3], was the first positive portrayal of homosexuality to appear in the Canadian mass media [4]. Katz had worked closely with Egan on the milestone article, later recognised as lending critical mass to the nascent Canadian gay liberation movement. In the same year, Canada’s first homophile organisation Association for Social Knowledge (ASK) was founded [5], and the gay community magazines Two and Gay were launched in Toronto [6]. There are various comprehensive accounts of the history of the struggle for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning) equality in Canada [7, 8], and the pages of JCHLA/JABSC are not the place to provide a further one. Indeed, readers of this article might be asking themselves what connection there is between Canadian gay activism and Canadian health librarianship. Our answer: because of a history of stigma and discrimination that may discourage them from accessing library services, LGBTQ health information seekers frequently have different information-seeking behaviours from their heterosexual peers. This includes LGBTQ health professionals [9, 10]. In our view, it is impossible to understand these differences in information-seeking behaviour, or to respond appropriately, without understanding the corresponding history of discrimination that many LGBTQ people have experienced. The current context for LGBTQ people, with dramatic improvements in civil rights and in public opinion, would be unimaginable to an LGBTQ person from 1964. However, many challenges remain such as ongoing workplace discrimination [11] and barriers to healthcare [12]. Here, we argue that the time has come for medical librarianship to engage more fully with the area of LGBTQ health and with potential LGBTQ users through visible demonstrations of support, the development of specialized training, and through the broadening of the evidence base for this area of our profession.

Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: Representing the Dyke Dynamo

In the preface to her influential book, Lesbian images, writer for The Body Politic and person in the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada (LGLC) data set, Canadian author Jane Rule stresses the importance of not reducing human experience in order to understand it. Lesbian Images, her collective biography, or prosopography, of lesbian writers therefore offers a view of the complexity of life, presenting as many answers as there are voices to speak… for no one can comfortably dismiss all those who find a place in these (1975 vi). The Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project (LGLC) is using prosopography to respond to Rule's call to document the complexity of gay and lesbian lives. While prosopography has traditionally been used to uncover the averages, the norms, and the likely lives of people about whom historians have little information (for example, Roman slaves or Anglo-Saxon peasants), LGLC is taking up prosopography, not to fill in gaps or to reduce liberationists to a few statistical averages, but to develop new knowledge about how the ideas at the heart of the liberation movement, and the communities that espoused them, shaped Canadian culture. Dans la preface de son ouvrage influent, Lesbian Images , l'auteure canadienne Jane Rule, redactrice pour The Body Politic et l'une des personnes dans l'ensemble des donnees du projet Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada (LGLC), souligne l'importance de ne pas reduire l'experience humaine afin de mieux la comprendre. Lesbian Images , sa biographie collective ou prosopographie d'ecrivaines lesbiennes, offre par consequent une perspective de la complexite de la vie, presentant « autant de reponses qu'il y a de voix qui parlent…car personne ne peut confortablement rejeter toutes les personnes qui trouvent une place dans ces pages » ( 1975 vi ). Le projet Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada (LGLC) utilise la prosopographie pour repondre a l'appel de Rule de documenter la complexite de la vie des gais et lesbiennes. Bien que la prosopographie soit traditionnellement utilisee pour decouvrir les moyennes, les normes et les vies plausibles des gens a propos desquels les historiens ont peu d'information (par exemple, les esclaves romains et les paysans anglo-saxons), le LGLC se sert de la prosopographie non pas pour combler les lacunes ou reduire les liberationnistes a quelques moyennes statistiques, mais pour developper de nouvelles connaissances au sujet de la facon dont les idees qui sont au cœur du mouvement de liberation, et des collectivites qui les ont epousees, ont faconne la culture canadienne.

Queer Rhetoric in Situ

Queer theory often poses normativity as a primary exigency and target for queer resistance, which can result in anticipatory and ahistorical readings. A methodology of “queer rhetoric in situ” intervenes in this propensity by examining the contingent, historically specific relations among locally enforced norms, rhetors, acts, and multiple audiences. Queerness and normativity should be understood as shifting, fractured valences, rather than two cohesive opposing forces attached to perceived forms of sexual orientation, families, or activisms. A rhetorical case study of the Gay Liberation Monument’s controversial and delayed instantiation in New York’s Greenwich Village illustrates the stakes of this methodological shift.

The Church and Gay Liberation: The Case of John McNeill

After authoring the groundbreaking 1976 book The Church and the Homosexual , John McNeill immediately became the most notable figure in late twentieth-century U.S. Catholicism when it came to the pastoral and moral challenges related to homosexuality. Subsequently silenced by church authorities and ultimately expelled from the Society of Jesus after publicly criticizing the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1986 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” McNeill’s story helps to shed light on the history of two post-1945 phenomena: first, Catholic theologians’ and church officials’ increasing interest in the issue of same-sex sexual relations; and second, an emerging narrative, promoted by the gay liberationist movement, which portrayed the church as an oppressor of gay men and lesbian women.

APA Members Speak Out During Vietnam War

APA Members Speak Out During Vietnam War

Worlding Sexualities under Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to a Queer Afropolitanism

This essay examines gay journalism as gay liberation literature to model a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies towards a historical examination of North-South interactions in theorizing sexual rights activism. The primary archive used is Link/Skakel, the official newsletter of the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), which soon became a mainstream gay newspaper called Exit. I first describe debates around the term Afropolitanism to describe how the development of a gay and lesbian subculture in Johannesburg was influenced by models of gay consumerism and activism in the North. Next, I examine the controversial legal reforms initiated by GASA without challenging racial discrimination and segregation, reflecting a consumption based identity politics. The direction of comparison from North-South and the exclusivist racial and gendered assumptions were challenged by a ‘queer Afropolitanism’ connecting racial and sexual liberation, articulated first by lesbians in GASA and later, the Gays and Lesbians of Witwatersrand (GLOW). In conclusion, I indicate how the transformation of the Johannesburg based gay liberation movement reflecting sexual, racial, and geographical diversity is not reflected in its associated publications, which degenerate into tabloid style journalism.

On the Loss of Nudity in the Men's Locker Room

Our ideas of masculinity are in continuous evolution, devolution, and reformulation. Collectively we experience these shifts through the troubling, exciting, dangerous, and creative ways in which we encounter the “masculine” psyche. The reflections here are based on personal experience in the arena where masculinity is responding to itself: in the experience of primary contact when observing the bodies of other men. The observations focus on tendencies being manifest currently in the behaviors men are exhibiting in private space for men, exploring the ways men feel and do not feel comfortable being seen and seeing others. This very fundamental experience, observing and being observed, is (considered in the context of all male environments where nudity had been and might be implicit in the encounter. The men's locker room is the setting for these observations, spaces that historically have been arenas for open male association and are now increasingly becoming spaces of modesty and distancing between men. Current themes of feminism and gay liberation are also looked at as concurrent influences and factors in these collective movements.

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978–1984: A Graphic Memoir

WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 73 comics. To set themselves apart from the mainstream, and to signal a radical shift in vision, artists like R. Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman , Art Spiegelman, and others dubbed their work “comix” to indicate their X-rated, underground approach to the genre. The majority of these first-wave comix artists were men, but in the early 1970s a vibrant group of women artists emerged, mainly on the West Coast, in the pages of Wimmen’s Comix. Their subjects, too, were often X-rated and included sex, drugs, relationships, women’s liberation, gay liberation , politics, and trenchant satire of American cultural institutions. The two volumes of The Complete Wimmen’s Comix provide a rich and complete overview of the development of the Berkeley-based publishing collective from a 1970 incubator issue of “It Ain’t Me Babe: Women’s Liberation ,” which preceded the establishment of Wimmen’s Comix in 1972, through the seventeenth and final issue, in 1992. The names of familiar artists appear on many of these pages. Included are Trina Robbins, a major force behind “It Ain’t Me Babe” and creator of the first lesbian comix, and Aline Kominsky (later Kominsky -Crumb, yes, that Crumb), whose Goldie comix are autobiographical and hilarious. Alison Bechdel and Lynda Barry make brief appearances, but their inimitable styles are apparent in these early comix and presage their later successes. Also outstanding are Lee Binswanger, whose minimalist comix are both elegant and incisive; Diane Noomin, whose “Rubberware” takeoff on a Tupperware party is perfect X-rated parody; and everything by Lee Marrs, who can satirize almost any cultural phenomenon. With a rotating editorship and a mission to welcome new artists, the issues can be uneven in quality and drawing styles even while they give the reader a keen sense of the themes relevant to the historical moment, most especially women ’s liberation. Starting with Issue 7, a theme is stated on the cover—from “Outlaws ,” “Women at Work,” “International Fetish,” and “Disastrous Relationships” to the “Kvetch” issue—and the comix within loosely relate to the cover subject. No matter the theme, though, the comix within are liberated from any external or internal censorship—genitalia abound in these pages as do images of almost every imaginable kind of sexual encounter. Prudes were not invited to the women’s comix party, nor would they want to attend. Despite the unevenness and the somewhat dated, if historically accurate themes, every issue has its gems, and those are the ones that stay with the reader. The work is often hilarious and occasionally quite moving, as in the combined work of Trina Robbins and Sharon Rudahl in Issue 10 (1985), where they illustrate “The Partisan Song,” by Hirsh Glik, identified as the “poet of the Warsaw Ghetto.” The Yiddish words of the song have English translations beneath, and the Holocaust-themed illustrations are heartbreaking. This is a bold move that underscores the breadth of vision represented in these pages and the remarkable talents of these artists. These volumes invite the casual browser as well as the aficionado to marvel at the talented spirit and energy of an earlier moment in the history of Wimmen as well as comix. Rita D. Jacobs New York City Riad Sattouf. The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978– 1984: A Graphic Memoir. Trans. Sam Taylor. New York. Metropolitan Books. 2015. 153 pages. Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir may have a mouthful of title, but it’s a carefully worded one. Specifically, one would be hard-pressed to categorize this as either an autobiography—of Sattouf’s conspicuously well-remembered youth—or Alecos Papadatos, Abraham Kawa, and Annie Di Donna Democracy Bloomsbury USA A stunning follow-up to Papadatos’s Logicomix, Democracy mines similar territory of using a comics narrative to explore historical material—this time focusing on the birth of democracy in Athens. Both books excel in drawing out the “big questions”that haunt the subtext of their focus and make them painfully relevant to our time and place. Beautifully drawn, immaculately researched, and brilliantly executed. 74 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 as a...

Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption by E. Wayne Carp

Reviewed by: Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption by E. Wayne Carp Daniel Rivers Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption. By E. Wayne Carp. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 422 pp. Cloth $60.00. E. Wayne Carp chronicles the life of Jean Paton, who he convincingly portrays as the foremother of the adoption reform movement in the United States. Carp, the author of several other books on the history of adoption reform, shows Paton as a trailblazing individualist who criticized the structure of American postwar adoption and the social condemnation of “illegitimacy” while forging networks of support for adult adoptees. Carp’s book adds valuably to our understanding of how notions of the family and childhood operated and were challenged in the postwar era. Biography is an historical project with unique challenges, and Carp negotiates these adeptly. He honestly portrays Paton as a complex, contradictory figure who does not fit easily into the categories “liberal” or “conservative” and who harbored deep misgivings about the involvement of non-adopted people in the adoption reform movement. Working from an incredibly extensive collection of correspondence, as well as oral histories with Paton, her life partner June Schwantes, and adoption reformers who knew of Paton and her work, Carp shows that Paton had a lifelong distrust of social work and “experts” who purported to know what was best for adult adoptees. This led her to write and publish her groundbreaking first book, The Adopted Break Silence (1954), about the experiences of adult adoptees and to resist reform efforts that would mandate institutional involvement in adult adoptees’ search for their birth parents. [End Page 345] In telling Paton’s story for the first time, Carp effectively pushes the historical narrative of adoption reform backwards in time. Instead of the better-known 1970s story, Carp presents adoption reform as a postwar movement, spearheaded by Paton. In 1953, Jean Paton developed the first adoption registry, the Life History Study Center, as a grassroots enterprise. This history adds valuably to our understanding of the family’s role in the social turbulence of the 1950s. Historians are increasingly complicating the view of this era as one of consensus, and Carp’s discussion of Paton’s life and work reveals that the veneer of complacent domesticity in popular culture masked deep tensions over cultural definitions of kinship. In Carp’s biography, Paton emerges as an exceptional reformer who challenged the vilification of “bastardy” that had consigned children born out of wedlock to second-class citizenship and a society that saw adoption as a way of erasing this stigma and placing these children in nuclear households. Jean Paton’s long career illustrates the difficulties of reforming American adoption. Carp’s careful and complex analysis resists a simple narrative and allows these difficulties to come into focus. Above all else, Carp’s respect for his subject leads him to a nuanced accounting of Paton’s political evolution. Over time, she came to be suspicious of the very act of adoption itself and by the 1990s wanted to replace it with a form of guardianship that retained the birth parent relationship in addition to the presence of new adult caregivers. This shift was the result of Paton’s increasing belief in the superiority of the biological, genetic family and her growing conviction that the trauma adoptees experienced when separated from birthparents was unavoidable, even if it was mitigated by reunion with birthparents later in adult life. As with any work as massive as Carp’s biography of Paton, there are interesting elements that could be expanded. Jean Paton’s life as a lesbian before the advent of widespread lesbian and gay liberation movements is an important area for further research. The fact that Paton was in conversation with Barbara Grier and the Daughters of Bilitis as early as 1969 means that Paton had an unusual awareness of lesbian organizing in this early period. This left me curious about how this may have related to her work on reforming adoption and whether her personal archives might reveal more about these connections. A larger issue with the book is the relative lack of discussion of June Schwantes...