B o o k Rev i ew

THEORETICAL POLITICS, LOCAL COMMUNITIES

The Making of U.S. LGBT Historiography
Marc Stein

Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 19401970 John DEmilio Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. x + 257 pp. 2nd edition: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xvi + 269 pp. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis New York: Routledge, 1993. xvii + 434 pp. Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in Americas First Gay and Lesbian Town Esther Newton Boston: Beacon, 1993. xiii + 378 pp. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 18901940 George Chauncey New York: Basic, 1994. xi + 478 pp. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History John Howard Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xxiii + 395 pp.

GLQ, Vol. GLQ 11:4 1, pp. 000000 997 Paul EeNam Park Hagland pp. 605625 Duke University Press Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press

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City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 19451972 Marc Stein Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xv + 457 pp. 2nd edition: Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. xv + 461 pp. Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacic Northwest Peter Boag Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiv + 321 pp. Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 Nan Alamilla Boyd Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xii + 321 pp.

More than twenty years have passed since John DEmilio turned his PhD
dissertation into Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, the rst scholarly monograph in what is now generally called U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history. DEmilio was not working in isolation in the 1970s and 1980s; researchers inside and outside U.S. college and university history departments shaped the elds development.1 DEmilios 1982 dissertation was not the rst of its kind: Salvatore Licata produced Gay Power: A History of the American Gay Movement, 19081974 in 1978, and Ramn Gutirrez nished Marriage, Sex, and the Family: Social Change in Colonial New Mexico, 16901846 in 1980. Outside the discipline of history, Toby Marottas Politics of Homosexuality, which was based on his 1978 dissertation and covers some of the same ground as DEmilios book, was published in 1981. From outside the university, Jonathan Ned Katzs Gay American History (1976) featured not only an extraordinary collection of primary documents but also inuential interpretive commentary.2 Nevertheless, DEmilios book, more than any other, established the framework in which most U.S. LGBT historians have operated for more than two decades. Working in the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall riots, DEmilio challenged the myth that homosexual life before Stonewall was marked invariably by silence, invisibility, and isolation (1).3 This view was popular not only in straight society but also among post-Stonewall gay liberationists and lesbian feminists, whose generational hubris discouraged respectful recognition of predecessors. Inuenced by the new social history, which focused on ordinary people, everyday life, and the worlds of workers, women, and ethnoracial minorities, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities concentrated on the homosexual emancipation movement of

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the 1950s and 1960s, but it established a broader framework that emphasized the existence of same-sex sexual desires and acts across U.S. history, the emergence of homosexual identities and communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the development of organized LGBT activism after World War II. In an often-cited passage, which conceptualized relationships between politics and communities, DEmilio wrote: The [homosexual emancipation] movement constitutes a phase, albeit a decisive one, of a much longer historical process through which a group of men and women came into existence as a self-conscious, cohesive minority. Before a movement could take shape, that process had to be far enough along so that at least some gay women and men could perceive themselves as members of an oppressed minority, sharing an identity that subjected them to systematic injustice (45). To explain the emergence of what he meaningfully called a homosexual class (11), DEmilio developed a form of Marxist feminist social constructionism that highlighted the effects of industrialization and urbanization on household economies, family dynamics, and relations between the sexes.4 Of central importance was the rise of homosexual consciousness, a critical term in the 1970s for feminists, who valued consciousness-raising, and for those inuenced by E. P. Thompson, whose title The Making of the English Working Class provided a template for DEmilios subtitle, The Making of a Homosexual Minority.5 As for LGBT activism, DEmilio argued that mass mobilization during World War II led to a nationwide coming out experience (24), and the subsequent Cold War campaigns against homosexuals inspired the creation of the Mattachine Society, One, and the Daughters of Bilitis. DEmilios periodization emphasized the movements leftist origins in the early 1950s, its subsequent retreat to respectability (75), and then its turn to militancy in the mid-1960s, when, inuenced by other protest movements, East Coast activists adopted civil rights strategies (149) and the movement and the subculture converge[d] in San Francisco (176). This, argued DEmilio, set the stage for Stonewall and the transformative mass movement of the 1970s. Since 1983 U.S. LGBT historical scholarship (meaning scholarship that shares the disciplines interest in the dynamics of continuity and change) has developed in multiple directions, but much of it has taken the form of local studies that respond to DEmilios national narrative. For those familiar with historical scholarship on other subjects, this pattern, which allows for a national narrative to be tested, rejected, qualied, and developed, is not surprising. Local history has been particularly appealing for those interested in resisting the hegemony of the nation-state, those connected with community-based history projects, and those

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inuenced by microhistory, ethnography, geography, and public history. According to the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History (an af liated society of the American Historical Association), of the roughly fty PhD dissertations produced since DEmilios on U.S. LGBT historical topics, about half can be classied as subnational in focus.6 Local LGBT history has been marked by some of the common problems of local history. Microhistorical details may fascinate those who know the region, but bore others. Local boosterism and competitive rivalries have led to hyperbolic claims about which were the queerest places and which the most challenging for queers (and, by extension, queer researchers). Moreover, professional pressures to demonstrate national signicance have encouraged premature pronouncements about the typical, atypical, or prototypical aspects of local phenomena. Nevertheless, for twenty years local history has been the elds dominant genre.7 This essay reviews several works (including my own) in three waves of local historical scholarship, arguing that DEmilios framework has held up remarkably well.8

Buffalo, Cherry Grove, and New York City, 19931994

Three early local studies, each examining a region of New York state, concentrated on community consciousness and cultural resistance in contexts that mostly did not include LGBT political groups. These works developed DEmilios framework by picking up on trends seen in working-class, womens, and black history, which had moved through stages focusing on oppression, then organized movement resistance, and later everyday resistance, with intersections of class, sex/gender, and ethnicity/race receiving increased attention over time. Like much historical scholarship produced in this period, these books also integrated elements of the new social history, the new cultural history (which emphasized Geertzian thick description, Foucauldian discourse analysis, Bakhtinian language criticism, and elite and popular cultural studies), and the new political history (which examined power in multiple forms and spheres). Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Daviss book on Buffalo lesbian history, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, responded to DEmilios work in several respects. Like DEmilio, Kennedy and Davis were reacting against a popular myth; in their case, the myth was that pre-Stonewall working-class butches and femmes were pathetic imitators of heterosexuality (2) who had succumbed to oppression. Challenging this view, they argued that butches and femmes, especially in bars and house parties, forged a culture for survival and resistance (1) from the 1930s to the 1960s. Kennedy and Davis took this to be one of the signs

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of a movement in its pre-political stage (2), attributing the concept of prepolitical resistance to the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. According to Kennedy and Davis, these strong and forceful participants in the growth of gay and lesbian consciousness and pride were empowered feminists and necessary predecessors of the gay and lesbian liberation movements (2). They speculated that, except for ethnoracial differences, the local culture was probably similar to that of other thriving, middle-sized U.S. industrial cities (10), but their claims about the signicance of working-class lesbian resistance extended beyond such places. In dialogue with DEmilio, Kennedy and Davis noted that the small national homophile movement emphasized accommodationism (273) and held itself separate from the large gay and lesbian communities that centered in bars and house parties (2). Observing that DEmilios work suggests, but does not itself explore, that bar communities were equally important predecessors (2), they examined one such community as it took shape in the early twentieth century, grew during World War II, and became more deant after the war. Like DEmilio, Kennedy and Davis described worlds marked by class, sex/gender, and ethnoracial diversity, focused on sexual communities, and highlighted agents of social change. But they provided more in-depth discussion of semiautonomous workingclass, middle-class, white, and black communities; devoted more attention to sex, passion, and intimate relationships; and gave more credit to multiracial workingclass bar patrons than to mostly middle-class and white homophile activists. Kennedy and Davis embraced social constructionism, but they focused on the transition from a dominant gender inversion model, which viewed butches as unlike straight women and femmes as like them, to a dominant homosexual object choice model, which identied both butches and femmes as lesbian (326). Like DEmilio, they historicized the construction of community consciousness, but Kennedy and Davis concluded on a partially deconstructive note, looking forward to a movement that both defends gay rights in a homophobic society on the basis of the assumption of a xed gay identity, and envisions a society where sexuality is not polarized into xed homo/hetero identities (387). In short, Kennedy and Davis departed from DEmilio in some ways but joined him in searching for the antecedents of post-Stonewall mass mobilization, identifying World War II and Stonewall as turning points, viewing consciousness as critical, and attributing importance to relationships between politics and communities. They, too, recognized that not everyone who engaged in same-sex sex identied as lesbian or gay, saw themselves as part of a sexual community, resisted anti-LGBT oppression, or participated in organized LGBT movements. But they, like DEmilio, were interested in dynamics of change, focused on resist-

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ing agents who contributed to change, and valorized moments when cultural resistance and political activism meshed (373), which in Buffalo did not occur until the late 1960s. Esther Newtons book Cherry Grove, Fire Island, which examined a resort town forty-ve miles east of New York City, worked within a similar paradigm. Newton singled out her subject as Americas rst gay and lesbian town (iii), the worlds only geography controlled by gay men and women (3), and the gay worlds mecca (9). Cradle of many gay fashions and institutions, creative hotbed of camp theatricality, and a fabled paradise of sexual licence (9), the Grove exerted disproportionate inuence on the image or paradigm of what it meant to be gay (11). Newtons study began in the 1930s, when LGBT people associated with the New York theater world began to vacation in the Grove; traced the transformative effects of a hurricane in 1938 and World War II in the 1940s; explored repression and resistance in the 1950s; examined diversication, commercialization, and politicization in the 1960s; discussed gay liberation, lesbian feminism, and LGBT capitalism, tourism, and leisure in the 1970s; and concluded with AIDS in the 1980s. Challenging the myth that pre-Stonewall homosexuals were pitiable victims, Newton argued that Grovers played a major part in forging the more dynamic and complete identity that would later be associated with gay liberation (3940). Unlike gay city neighborhoods, the Groves character was based on protective isolation, but the town was like an oasis in the desertthe dream of what was to come (111). Of critical importance was the towns contribution to gay nationalism, the notion that sexual orientation constituted a broad and compelling common identity more important than the categories of class, race, ethnicity, and gender (142). Much of the book examined gay sexism, white racism, and conservative class politics, but whether discussing campy theatrical productions or group sex in public, Newton emphasized the construction and deconstruction of community bonds. She was more critical of her subjects than Kennedy and Davis were of theirs, and while she agreed that the paradigm of homosexuality has been undergoing a slow shift from gender inversion to object choice, she noted that the third sex model is tenacious (145). But Newton agreed with DEmilio and with Kennedy and Davis on the signicance of community consciousness. Although she acknowledged that the boundary between gay and straight is arbitrary and permeable, she insisted that for persecuted minorities, identity politics have their time, place, and necessity (10). Like DEmilio and like Kennedy and Davis, Newton expressed admiration for agents of change who resisted oppression. For her, that meant LGBT people

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who claimed space, developed the queer economy, deployed the gender theatrics (75) of camp and drag, and used organizational vehicles such as the Arts Project, the Property Owners Association, and the Ad Hoc Committee to Save Cherry Grove for positive purposes. But Newton also argued that for any resort to become politically active works against a fundamental dichotomy in industrial life between leisure time and work time (237). Contrasting the camp/theatrical sensibility of the Grove with the egalitarian/authentic sensibility of the LGBT movement (85), she devoted more attention to the former. Nevertheless, when discussing police raids in the 1960s, Newton emphasized the Mattachine Societys successful intervention and criticized Grovers, who could not mobilize to protect their civil rights and sexual preferences, partly because of internal divisions, partly because of shame and guilt, and mostly because the Groves special character . . . was not publicly acknowledged (193). In her discussion of post-Stonewall developments, Newton was critical of Grove political ambivalence, arguing that gay liberations fundamental premise, that gay people must openly declare their sexual preference, was a direct challenge not only to the dominant society but also to the old gay survival methods (237). She concluded by declaring that gay culture in both its camp and egalitarian aspects must and will be recognized (299), which was a variation on DEmilios discussion of what he termed the subculture and the movement. One year after Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold and Cherry Grove, Fire Island were published, George Chaunceys Gay New York made clear in its subtitle, Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 18901940, that it followed DEmilio in working within a Thompsonian tradition in which the gay world was made and was made in cities. Key terms in the subtitle referenced the prehistory of corresponding terms in DEmilios title, lling in DEmilios broad historical sketch by identifying the roots of the postWorld War II sexual system in the preWorld War II gender system, the roots of politics in culture, and the roots of the homosexual minority in the gay male world. Chauncey labeled the views he was challenging the myths of isolation, invisibility, and internalization (2). DEmilio had emphasized the aws of these myths in relation to the 1950s and 1960s; Chauncey discussed their failings in relation to the preceding period, when a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world took shape in New York (1). Here gay men constructed spheres of relative cultural autonomy (2), especially in enclaves in the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square. Chauncey highlighted three features of the gay world: its most visible elements were working-class (with distinct ethnoracial components); it was undergoing a transition from a world

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divided into fairies and men on the basis of gender persona to one divided into homosexuals and heterosexuals on the basis of sexual object-choice (358); and it was becoming more rigidly segregated from the straight world (9). In terms comparable to Newtons, Chauncey wrote that the countrys gay capital had disproportionate inuence on national culture (28). Careful to note that New York was not necessarily typical because of its size and complexity, Chauncey speculated that it may have been prototypical (29). On the surface, Chaunceys periodization differed from DEmilios insofar as he argued that gay life in New York was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders, and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the rst (9). For Chauncey, positive changes occurred during World War I and the 1920s and negative ones during the 1930s, when the end of Prohibition and the enduring Great Depression contributed to a conservative backlash and exclusion of homosexuality from the public sphere (331). Chaunceys claim about the centurys second third will presumably be developed in his forthcoming second volume; this evaluation differs from the more positive assessments of changes during the 1930s (and beyond) in Buffalo and Cherry Grove, which could reect substantive disagreements, local variations, or sex differences. But Chaunceys argument about World War I paralleled DEmilios about World War II. And he presented their positions as reconcilable, endorsing the argument that World War II was transformative but pointing out that the evidence that a generation of men constructed gay identities and communities during the war does not in itself demonstrate that the war generation was the rst generation to do so (11). For Chauncey as for his predecessors, the growth of communal identity was key. The rise of gay consciousness in the 1930s and 1940s, he argued, reected the decline of an earlier system in which the terms fairy, queer, and trade distinguished various types of homosexually active men: effeminate homosexuals, more conventional homosexuals, and masculine heterosexuals, and the rise of a new system in which the term gay tended to group all these types together (21).9 Paralleling Kennedy and Daviss discussion of femmes, though referencing an earlier period, Chauncey argued that masculine men who engaged in same-sex sex typically identied themselves as normal in one era but gay in the next. Here, too, periodization differences could reect substantive disagreements, local variations, or sex differences. Like Newton, Chauncey emphasized that elements of the older system did not disappear but highlighted the transition from one dominant model to another. Chauncey also joined his predecessors in identifying agents of social change and emphasizing the politics of gay culture (269). Like Kennedy and Davis, he

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criticized scholars who construe resistance in the narrowest of termsas the organization of formal political groups (5). Invoking the anthropologist James Scotts work on the tactics of the weak, he argued that everyday resistance was remarkably successful in the generations before a more formal gay political movement developed (5). Many resistance strategies focused on avoidance and survival, but when discussing cultural politics and social change, Chauncey highlighted the actions of drag queens, fairies, and pansies; the efforts of gay bars that challenged their prohibition in the courts; and the roles of those who organized groups to advocate the homosexual cause (5). The latter referred to the establishment in the 1930s of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, which Chauncey presented as pointing the way to the future. On the critical issue of gay consciousness, Chauncey indicated that middle-class white men led the way. The paradoxical suggestion was that the less resistant (men who were more discreet, private, and masculine than fairies) contributed more to the rise of a consolidated gay identity, and this change, the precondition for gay history, was not necessarily positive.

Mississippi and Philadelphia, 19992000

Brett Beemyns 1997 anthology Creating a Place for Ourselves marked a signicant moment in the rise of local LGBT history, bringing together older work on Buffalo, Cherry Grove, and New York and newer contributions on Mississippi; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Chicago; Detroit; Washington, DC; and Flint, Michigan.10 In the next few years John Howards book on Mississippi and mine on Philadelphia were published. Insofar as both were conceptualized before the New York studies were published, it is not surprising that they responded more to DEmilios book, in Howards case by criticizing his urban, progressive, and identity-based paradigm and in mine by challenging his characterization of the homophile movement. Both books examined places not commonly associated with signicant LGBT cultures and in this respect were more similar to Kennedy and Daviss book than to Chaunceys or Newtons. In different ways, both were inuenced by the queer turn in LGBT studies.11 Nevertheless, their conclusions suggested the need to qualify and modify (rather than reject) DEmilios narrative, a sign that this work remained the elds frame of reference. For Howards Men Like That, the myths to be challenged had been formulated by DEmilio and adopted by others: that gay identity and culture formation were linked to capitalist industrialization and urbanization and that LGBT desire, identity, community or culture, and political movement should be

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arrayed in chronological fashion, in a linear, modernist trajectory (12). Howard disputed the notion that queer cultures were quintessentially urban and that southern, rural, and small-town America was exceptionally antiqueer. Focusing on Mississippi and emphasizing circulation rather than congregation (xiv), he argued that men interested in intimate and sexual relations with other men found numerous opportunities to act on their desires (xi). In distinct but interwoven (17) black and white worlds, homosexuality and gender insubordination were acknowledged and accommodated with a . . . pretense of ignorance (xi). Arguing for a specic but not necessarily a unique queer state, Howard left open the extent to which queer genders and sexualities in Mississippi appear akin to those in other places (xix). Criticizing identity-focused studies (xiv), Howard argued that the concept of gay community, which he equated with a place-based, sustained, urban gay enclave (rather than an imagined community), did not pertain in Mississippi or apply to the shape and scope of queer life (1415). Referencing his title, he wrote that the book focused on both men like that, meaning self-identied gay males, and men who like that, meaning men who like queer sex . . . but do not necessarily identify as gay (xviii). According to Howard, the latter group probably predominated (5). In some respects, these men were similar to Chaunceys normal men before the 1930s and Kennedy and Daviss femmes in the 1930s and 1940s. But Howard challenged the Great Paradigm Shift (xvii), the notion that there was a transition from a gender system in which homosexuality was conceptualized in terms of acts to a sexual system in which homosexuality was conceptualized in terms of identities. Focusing on the period from 1945 to 1980, when the New York studies suggested that the older system was in decline, Howard emphasized that it remained in place in Mississippi, where queer sexuality continued to be understood as both acts and identities (xviii). In several ways, then, Howard challenged DEmilios national narrative. Yet the difculties of escaping that narrative were illustrated by the extent to which he offered a counternarrative framed in opposition. Moreover, Howard endorsed DEmilios arguments about World War II. In addition, although he criticized the urban paradigm, he devoted signicant attention to the spell, sway, and inuence (14) of Mississippis largest city, Jackson, and in arguing for an understanding of urban centers not only as centripetal, but also as centrifugal (14), he underscored their importance. Howard also reproduced the trajectory of desire, identity, community, and movement. Discussing his books structure, he wrote that the rst part discussed contexts and the second changes (xxi). Signicantly, the rst part focused

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on desires and acts; the second turned to identity, community, and politics (xviii). Howard actually discussed change in both, emphasizing in the rst part that queers changed Mississippi, transformed the sites they occupied, and remade themselves (36). Yet the changes highlighted in the second part, which drove his narrative forward, were produced by more traditionally dened political and cultural agents, who found themselves in increasingly politicized positions and moved onto the public stage (xvii). The imagined and real queerness of the black civil rights movement, for example, unleashed a conservative backlash in the 1960s. Cultural producers and audiences used songs, lms, novels, and art to circulate queer and antiqueer representations. LGBT activists worked through a short-lived southern manifestation (232) of the homophile movement in the 1950s, the Mississippi Gay Alliance (MGA) in the 1970s, and gay churches in the 1980s, when LGBT Mississippians achieved greater levels of community solidarity and political power (231). Discussing the limited success of the MGA, Howard argued that gay organizing clashed with local sensibilities, queer and nonqueer, which was another variation on DEmilios discussion of movement-subculture relations. Howard wrote that the churches were more successful, because the states queer Christians . . . rarely responded to a narrow gay movement driven by identity politics; they preferred a more expansive denition of gayness (231). (Arguably, the churches were driven by the dual identity politics of LGBT Christians, and non-Christians probably did not see such denitions as more expansive.) Nevertheless, the new discourse channeled queer feelings into particular modes of gay being and homosexual identity (251). Although critical of what was lost in this process, Howard afrmed that this is what occurred. His last chapter focused on public scandals involving two local politicians accused in the 1970s and 1980s of having feminizing, same-sex, interracial sex. Howard used these episodes to highlight the ongoing inuence of the act-based queer paradigm. His evidence also showed, however, that these politicians were struggling against an ascendant identity-based gay paradigm, which one of them eventually embraced. Overall, while Howards book criticized DEmilios framework, it was more effective at suggesting that the framework needed to be qualied than at offering a replacement. My book on Philadelphia, which focused on relationships between lesbians and gay men in everyday geographies, public cultures, and political movements (v), probably t most readily into DEmilios framework, though it challenged his characterization of the homophile movement.12 Chronologically, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves began with the end of World War II, accepting DEmilios argument about the wars importance, and complemented his dis-

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cussion of national repression in the 1950s with analysis of local examples and variations. Though the period chronicled in the book ended in 1972, the point of extending the discussion beyond Stonewall was to assess continuities and discontinuities across this turning point. Socially, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves privileged sex differences, but it also examined gender, class, ethnicity, and race. Geographically, the book looked at a forgotten big city (17), probably North Americas biggest city without a reputation for a sizable lesbian and gay community (78). In my 2004 preface I argue that learning that New York and San Francisco featured large and dynamic LGBT worlds before the 1970s was not nearly as surprising as discovering that such worlds existed in Philadelphia, a nding that suggested that every large city in the United States likely featured important LGBT communities (ix). Beyond challenging myths about Philadelphia, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves criticized the tendency to conceive of lesbians and gay men as either entirely distinct or completely conjoined (3) and the tendency to view everyday resistance and organized politics as either mutually supporting or fundamentally opposed. In looking at convergences and divergences (10) between lesbians and gay men, the book followed the lead of DEmilio and Newton. In exploring a location featuring dynamic relationships between everyday resistance and homophile politics, it followed the lead of DEmilio. As I argued: Everyday resistance not only inspired, supported, and sustained organized movements, but also worked at odds with them. Activists often encountered opposition and apathy in the communities that they purported to represent, and community members often encountered opposition and apathy in the movements that purported to represent them (6). In this respect, my book warned against romanticizing either communitybased resistance or homophile movement activism. Like DEmilio, I highlighted the roles of LGBT political groups, arguing that organized movements . . . have been key agents of historical change (4) and emphasizing the power that these groups gained to represent, politically and textually, the imagined community of lesbians and gay men (185). Like Howards book, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves began with a section that examined everyday life and everyday resistance across the entire period, but then it proceeded chronologically, rst exploring public debates about same-sex sexuality in the 1950s and then looking at homophile, gay liberation, and lesbian feminist groups in the 1960s and 1970s. While my analysis followed DEmilios in emphasizing that community consciousness preceded political activism, which in turned produced new ways of imagining community, it modied DEmilios portrayal of the movement. First, Philadelphias early homophile era did not feature a pre-

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dominantly male Mattachine Society and an exclusively female Daughters of Bilitis. Instead, the local Mattachine Society and Janus Society brought women and men together, and this shaped the groups strategies of respectability. Second, in the mid-1960s part of the homophile movement embraced the sexual revolution, igniting a sex war with the more respectable activists discussed by DEmilio. For example, Janus, which had become a national organization led by men, published the sexually risqu Drum magazine, which became the countrys most widely circulating LGBT movement periodical. Adopting a politics of sexual liberation, Janus offered another instance of the movement and subculture converging, but in this case the convergence centered on sexual politics, which led to devastating state repression. Third, other homophile groups carried forward the politics of militant respectability into the 1970s, suggesting continuities between pre- and post-Stonewall activism. Fourth, multicultural post-Stonewall gay liberationists and lesbian feminists, on separate but parallel paths, rejected the minority model, criticized the homo/heterosexual binary, called on everyone to come out, and thus reconceptualized relationships between sexual politics and sexual communities (13). Although City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves emphasized the diversity of homophile strategies and the sexual radicalism of one homophile faction, its overall conclusion offered a queer critique of LGBT sex/gender conservatism. Rather than represent a queer alternative, I argued, lesbians and gay men participated in and contributed to a conservative consensus about the nature of differences between women and men, reproduced the dominant system of relations between the sexes, and not only left binary sex oppositions in place but reinforced their strength (38687). In the end, then, my book may have modied the portrait of the homophile movement presented by DEmilio, but it joined his in presenting critical historical perspectives on LGBT politics and communities.

The Pacic Northwest and San Francisco, 2003

By the turn of the twenty-rst century there seemed to be enough local historical studies to allow for comparative or synthetic work. Yet in many respects the local monographs were not comparable. Of the ones discussed here, only Chaunceys examined the period before the 1930s, and it looked only at men in the countrys largest city. Kennedy and Daviss book focused on women in a midsize city. Newtons explored a small-town resort. Howards examined men in a southern, rural state. Mine focused on men and women in a big city and explored a time and place with an active community and movement. These differences made it possible

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to compare subjects dened as dissimilar but not those dened as similar. This began to change with the publication of two books on West Coast cities. Peter Boags Same-Sex Affairs examined late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Portland, a dynamic midsize urban center (1), but also looked more broadly at the Northwest. Responding most directly to Gay New York, with which it shared chronological parameters and a focus on male genders and sexualities, Boags book nonetheless worked within DEmilios framework. It was structured around three comparisons, the rst of which followed Gay New York and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold in highlighting class differences. Emphasizing the distinctiveness of the Northwest, which featured a high male-to-female sex ratio, a large multicultural population of transient male laborers, and a white middleclass sector much affected by the rise of corporate capitalism, Boag argued that migratory working-class cultures tended to feature couplings of older jockers and wolfs with younger punks and lambs (2526). In these encounters, the older partner typically penetrated the younger one, either anally or between the legs. In dialogue with Chauncey, Boag argued that in the Northwest masculine punks were more signicant than feminine fairies, and same-sex sexuality was conceptualized more in age-stratied than in gender-stratied terms. Middle-class cultures, in contrast, tended to feature age-homogeneous couplings, and oral sex was more accepted. In Portland, working-class and middle-class cultures developed distinct same-sex sexual geographies and institutions. Workingclass same-sex sex was often conceptualized by dominant society as a product of class, ethnic, and racial degeneration and was actively repressed. Middle-class same-sex sex was largely ignored until public scandals contributed to the emergence of modern conceptions linking homosexuality with middle-class whites, whose identity models and sexual practices contributed a great deal to Americas rst sexual revolution (10). A second comparative discussion, more inuenced by DEmilio, dealt with cities and hinterlands. Examining working-class cultures in nonurban work camps, hobo jungles, and transportation vectors, Boag also explored what happened to these cultures when their participants moved to or through the city. According to Boag, openness, acceptance, and common practice rather than obscurity, disdain, and infrequency were responsible for transient same-sex sexuality on the road (39), while most large cities, despite drawing in gay men, remained hostile (41). In this respect, Boag joined Howard in rejecting the traditional wisdom that rural America is a place averse to homoeroticism and lacking in attractiveness to a community of individuals with same-sex sexual interests (41). Yet Boag also explored urban middle-class geographies and formations, making it clear that

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he favored the tradition that holds that modern gay and lesbian communities emerged rst in cities (6). In this way, he developed DEmilios argument about urbanization, and he similarly developed DEmilios argument about industrialization by emphasizing the sexual signicance of the new corporate white-collar sector. A third comparative discussion contrasted the periods before and after a major Portland vice scandal in 1912, which brought unprecedented public attention to the homosexual culture of middle-class whites. Before 1912 the most visible same-sex sexual subculture in the Northwest was one that the regions predominantly transient labor force had forged, and its visibility was due in part to middle-class white societys concerted surveillance (3). The 1912 scandal, which centered on a local YMCA and implicated middle-class whites, led to a seismic shift (4) in which the broader Northwest citizenry rst learned that a thriving male homosexual community existed in their midst (2). Ultimately, this led progressive reformers to initiate harsh crackdowns. Meanwhile, homosexuality also became implicated in regional class struggles when political populists attacked the sexual corruption of business and reform elites. Boag thus concurred with DEmilio not only on the importance of nineteenth-century socioeconomic transformations but also on the signicance of dynamic relationships between politics and communities. Nan Alamilla Boyds Wide-Open Town opened up multiple translocal comparative possibilities insofar as it covered women and men, before and after World War II, in bar-based cultures and homophile communities (6). Like DEmilios work on movement-subculture convergence, Boyds focused on San Francisco, which had a uniquely queer environment in the post-Prohibition era (11). From its origins as a frontier town marked by multicultural diversity, high male-to-female sex ratios, lawlessness, and licentious entertainment (2), San Francisco developed a live-and-let-live sensibility (4) that encouraged gender and sexual commerce, tourism, transgression, and vice. Chronologically, Boyd suggested several modications to DEmilios framework. Like DEmilio, she highlighted transformations in the late nineteenth century, when publicly visible LGBT cultures emerged in the context of industrialization and urbanization. Like Chauncey and Boag, she emphasized the repressive campaigns of early-twentieth-century social reformers. Boyds portrait of San Francisco in the 1930s, however, differed from Chaunceys portrait of New York insofar as San Franciscos publicly visible queer cultures and communities . . . blossomed in 1933 with the repeal of Prohibition and the emergence of queer entertainments in the citys tourist-district nightclubs, bars, and taverns (5).

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While Boyd accepted the notion that World War II transformed the city (112), she emphasized that it functioned to elaborate and extend the tourist-based cultures that emerged in the post-Prohibition era, rather than to fundamentally alter them (9). As for the postWorld War II era, her book, like DEmilios, Newtons, and mine, examined new forms of repression and resistance in the 1950s. Highlighting the emergence of the homophile movement, Boyd followed DEmilio in emphasizing its leftist origins in the 1950s, its turn to assimilationist respectability, and its radicalization in the 1960s. Boyds book ended with an episode identied by DEmilio, the 1965 New Years Day raid on a costume ball organized by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual; the response to this raid demonstrated the growing political strength of what was increasingly known as the citys gay community (6). Boyd concluded that while Stonewall was a turning point on the East Coast, it was not a mobilizing factor in San Francisco (10). Thus she departed from DEmilios conclusions, but without comparing the pre- and post-Stonewall eras. Moreover, Boyds argument paralleled DEmilios insofar as the 1965 ball, much like New York Citys 1969 Stonewall Riots, concentrated the political energies of organizations already in place and hastened the politicization of bar-based populations (236). Along with her predecessors, Boyd explored the rise of gay consciousness. Like Howard, she argued against a linear relationship between behavior, identity, community, and activism (14), used the term queer for those who did not identify themselves as gay or lesbian (6), and emphasized that for many decades queer communities . . . did not form a cohesive whole (5). As she pointed out, Sometimes the differences between queer communities overwhelmed the possibility of forging a larger collectivity, but at other timesduring a bar raid, perhapsa larger sense of community seemed on the brink of articulation (56). Articulation began in the 1950s, when entertainers promoted the notion of a gay community (59) and the gay bar evolved into a kind of politicized community center (62). Early homophile groups introduced the necessary ction of national community (162), and in the 1960s what was increasingly called a gay community in San Francisco began to look and act like a formidable political constituency (19). As for agents of resistance and change, Boyd joined Kennedy and Davis as well as Chauncey in emphasizing bar-based cultures. Especially important were entertainers and bar owners, some of whom began in the 1940s to wage court battles for LGBT rights. According to Boyd, the greatest challenges to dominant society did not come from factions that clearly articulated same-sex sexual identities or aligned themselves with overtly political organizations but instead derived

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from queer and gender-transgressive groups that occupied the social world of bars (14). Invoking Kennedy and Daviss work, she argued that bar-based resistance was prepolitical in relation to homophile movements but political (12) insofar as traversing landscapes and claiming space had a political momentum of its own (14). Specically referring to bar-based court battles, Boyd criticized the standard view that the homophile movement led the way in developing formal political resistance strategies (111) and emphasized that homophile activists distanced themselves from the working-class and transgender culture of queer bars, promoted gender-normative identities, and favored integration and assimilation (14). Boyd thus claimed to disagree with DEmilio, but DEmilio had also highlighted the homophile movements retreat to respectability and its distance from LGBT communities (in the second part of his three-part schema). Furthermore, Boyd acknowledged that the homophile contribution to queer life in the city was profound (147). Like DEmilio, she argued that the homophile movement changed in the 1960s, when various developments forced bar-based and homophile movements to work together (18). Exploring new campaigns and groups, including the League for Civil Education, the San Francisco Tavern Guild, the Society for Individual Rights, and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, Boyd argued that a new discourse of resistance emerged on the border between San Franciscos queer-bar cultures and its homophile communities (18). She concluded, Where bar-based constituents had asserted collective rights (the right to association) and homophile communities had asserted individual rights (the right to due process), the emergence of a viable political constituency suggested an alternative approach to civil rightsa minority-based discourse based on equal protection law (219). In the end, Boyd joined DEmilio and me in suggesting that the homophile movement turned in new, more radical directions in the mid-1960s. While she joined Howard in rejecting a linear narrativizing of behavior, identity, community, and activism, her book, like his, reproduced this framework when analyzing change over time.

Historiographical Conclusions
In the fall of 2003 the Social Sciences Research Council sponsored (and Margot Canaday and Pippa Holloway organized) Sexual Worlds, Political Cultures, a conference inspired in part by the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. Many of the conference participants paid homage to DEmilios work, not necessarily because they agreed with everything he

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had written but because his book had proved so compellingly productive. Another sign of DEmilios inuence is that of the U.S.-focused dissertations in the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History bibliography that are not local studies, many focus on political themes initially explored in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. One example by David K. Johnson, recently published as The Lavender Scare, integrates a local study of Washington, DC, with analysis of federal government persecution in the 1950s and 1960s, a subject highlighted in DEmilios book. DEmilios inuence can also be traced in dozens of other books and articles on local U.S. LGBT history, including those that concentrate on queer formations not directly linked to the sexual politics and sexual communities highlighted in DEmilios book. In making a case for DEmilios inuence on local studies, this essay has minimized departures, disagreements, and conicts. The local studies may have shared with Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities a foundation in Marxist feminist social constructionism, but they have built on this foundation to stress the importance of cultural developments. They may have followed Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities in emphasizing urbanization, industrialization, and wartime mobilization, but they have also placed cities within larger regional geographies; examined corporate capitalism, tourist economies, real estate development, and cultural commercialization; and explored multiple wars, migrations, and mobilizations. The local works may have agreed with DEmilio that new identities and communities emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but those identities and communities look more diverse now, and their class, ethnoracial, sex/gender, and sexual features have been examined in greater depth. Moreover, processes of identity and community consolidation appear more complex and contested; the transition from gender inversion to homosexual object-choice models, if there has been one, seems less complete; there is a greater sense of what was lost as well as what was gained in these developments; and there is a greater appreciation of the importance of queer desires and acts that exceed the bounds of homosexual identities and communities. The local studies may have agreed with DEmilio on the historical signicance, changing politics, and multiple strategies of the postWorld War II homophile movement, but they have expanded the concept of LGBT political resistance, highlighted more of the movements conservative and radical features, and offered new ways of conceptualizing relationships between politics and communities. The local studies may have shared with Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities a sense of the importance of Stonewall, but they have offered new perspectives on when, where, whether, why, and for whom Stonewall was a turning point. Nevertheless, DEmilios broad historical framework, built on a sequential

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narrativizing of desires, acts, identities, communities, and movements, remains strong. I would argue that this sequential narrative has been adopted so widely (even by those who have criticized it) not because we have failed to appreciate what it leaves out, not because it helps us offer stories of progress, and not because we have failed to imagine queerer possibilities. Rather, it reects what history today tends to be: not the study of the past, which after all is what many disciplines explore, but the critical study of change over time, with special emphasis on human agents of change. As Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities rst demonstrated in the eld of U.S. LGBT history, the sequential narrativizing of desires, acts, identities, communities, and movements offers a compelling way of writing critically about dynamics of change in the twentieth century. For better and for worse, when Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and its progeny address these dynamics, they imagine cultural communities and political movements coming together to make meaningful social change.

Notes
For opportunities to discuss some of the ideas presented here I thank audiences at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (especially Jeffrey Merrick) and Swarthmore College (especially Timothy Stewart-Winter). Conversations with Laura Doan at GLQ helped immensely. Jorge Olivares reads and improves virtually everything I write for publication. Over the years I have been enriched greatly by dialogue with most of the scholars whose works are discussed in this essay. 1. Among the early U.S.-based scholars who most inuenced the later development of U.S. LGBT history were Henry Abelove, Allan Brub, Michael Bronski, George Chauncey, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Martin Duberman, Lisa Duggan, Lillian Faderman, Estelle Freedman, Eric Garber, Jonathan Ned Katz, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Joan Nestle, Esther Newton, Leila Rupp, Judith Schwartz, and Carroll SmithRosenberg. Licatas dissertation, completed at the University of Southern California, was never published as a book. Gutirrezs dissertation was revised and published as When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 15001846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). See also Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1981); and Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History (New York: Avon, 1976). In this review I cite the rst edition of DEmilios book. On this part of DEmilios framework see Steven Maynard, Without Working? Capitalism, Urban Culture, and Gay History, Journal of Urban History 30 (2004): 37898.

2.

3. 4.

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5. 6.

7.

8.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964). For the Committee on Lesbian and Gay Historys bibliography of history dissertations see www.usc.edu/isd/archives/clgh/dissertations.html. I prepared the original version; it has been updated by Leisa Meyer. Even works that do not appear to be local in general orientation have adopted local modes of analysis. See, e.g., the discussion of Sacramento in Sharon R. Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); of Chicago and New York in Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); of Memphis in Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and of Washington, DC, in David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). This essay was conceived as a work of historiography, which historians generally understand to refer to the history of history (with history dened as the study of the past). Historiographical writing usually reviews and analyzes the development of scholarship over time, focusing, for example, on scholarly trends, patterns, conversations, dialogues, debates, paradigms, continuities, and discontinuities, as well as on the larger contexts that inuenced these developments. Some readers may be troubled by the section of this essay that focuses on my own work, but there is a tradition in U.S. historiographical writing of discussing ones own contributions to a eld. See, e.g., Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History, Gender and History 1 (1989): 5067; Linda K. Kerber, Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Womans Place: The Rhetoric of Womens History, Journal of American History 75 (1988): 939; Howard N. Rabinowitz, More than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Journal of American History 75 (1988): 84256; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Hearing Womens Words: A Feminist Reconstruction of History, in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 1152; and Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A Review of the Literature, in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 121. Including my own work in a discussion of historiographical developments posed several challenges, and I thank the friends, colleagues, and readers who have worked to ensure that I am neither too easy nor too hard on my own work. For various reasons, pretending that I have not published in this eld (or acknowledging that I have but only in a cursory way) did not seem like a viable option as this essay took shape. The implicit and explicit criticisms of the eld that I make in the essays introduction

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and conclusion should be read as applying to my own work as well as to the other works discussed. That said, I recognize that some of the essays arguments can be read as partial (in both senses of the term) defenses of my particular contributions; that would be the case if I did not include a section on my own work, and similar claims could be made about most reviews written by scholars about the work of other scholars. The standard work on U.S. historiography, which foregrounds debates about objectivity, is Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 9. Chauncey made a similar argument in earlier work on Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1910s, but the need to take care in making generalizations about language is suggested by the fact that queer referred to feminine men in Newport but nonfeminine men in New York. See George Chauncey Jr., Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era, Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 189212. 10. Brett Beemyn, ed., Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997). 11. On the queer turn and its relationship to U.S. history see Henry Abelove, The Queering of Lesbian/Gay History, Radical History Review, no. 62 (1995): 4457; Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Lisa Duggan, Making It Perfectly Queer, Socialist Review 22, no. 1 (1992): 1131; William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); and Martha M. Umphrey, The Trouble with Harry Thaw, Radical History Review, no. 62 (1995): 823. 12. For a different challenge to DEmilios characterization of the homophile movement see Martin Meeker, Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s, Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 78116. In this review I cite the rst edition of my book.