Stacey Copeland's Lavender Sounds explores lesbian radio history and its evolution into queer feminist podcasting today, exploring the politics, aesthetics, and cultural activism embedded in queer feminist soundwork. Through deeply personal and archival explorations, Stacey Copeland traces the emergence of queer feminist soundwork—a unique blend of community-led storytelling, political resistance, and creative expression rooted in feminist and LGBTQ+ activism. At the heart of the book lies a powerful idea: sound is not just heard but felt, connecting generations through shared voices and struggles. In conversation with award-winning and cutting-edge queer and feminist podcast producers from across Canada and the U.S., Lavender Sounds invites us to turn a feminist-embodied ear to the past to uncover the ways gender, race, and sexual orientations are embedded in our everyday media listening practices. From pioneering Canadian radio shows like Vancouver's The Lesbian Show and Montreal's Dykes on Mykes to today's queer chumcasts and audio documentary, Lavender Sounds is a journey through auditory landscapes where joy, protest, intimacy, and identity intersect. This book opens a vibrant conversation about how radio and podcasting are vital tools for marginalized communities to connect, create, and claim space in the media world.

In Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the new sexual sciences—from anthropological accounts of religion as rooted in ancient fertility cults to psychoanalytic theories that explained religious experience in terms of psychosexual development—characterized religion as closely connected to the sexual. The outcome, as Joy Dixon argues, was a new sense that religion itself could be sexually suspect. One result was an increasing concern to police "sexual heresies" to produce a supposedly normal (healthy, monogamous, and heterosexual) religiosity. The overall effect was a narrowing of the sexual possibilities inside "orthodox" religion and the association of alternative forms of religion with dissident sexualities that continues to shape both religion and secularism today. Drawing on a wide range of materials from diverse elements of British society, this book emphasizes the dynamic relationships between the histories of religion and of sexuality and the historical contingency of the categories we use to understand the relationship between the two.

Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was “invented” as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black/white “color line,” the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality.
At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public’s attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and sexual “deviance” were used to reinforce each other’s terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis’s late nineteenth-century work on “sexual inversion,” the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer’s fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality.

For generations, queer and trans Asian Americans have shaped the history of the United States—often in ways overlooked or erased from the historical record. Breathing Fire brings these lives and struggles into focus, offering a sweeping survey of queer Asian American history from the nineteenth century to the present. Through vivid stories of activists, artists, and ordinary individuals, Amy Sueyoshi reveals how queer Asian Americans forged communities, fought for LGBTQ rights, and challenged the boundaries of belonging.

Drawing on archival sources, oral histories, and a wide body of scholarship, Sueyoshi offers an introductory text that traces how queer Asians in America navigated shifting landscapes of immigration restriction, racial discrimination, and sexual regulation. Early immigrants from Asia arrived with cultural traditions that often accommodated diverse sexualities and gender expressions, yet they encountered increasingly rigid moral codes in the United States. Across the twentieth century, many lived quietly under the radar, while others helped spark transformative movements for civil rights and gay liberation. They navigated anti-Asian sentiment, homophobia, transphobia, and sex negativity to assert their freedom to be queer, some more defiantly than others.

By placing queer Asian Americans within significant signposts in LGBTQ, Asian American, and US history, Breathing Fire highlights their intimate lives and connections as well as their perseverance in pursuing queer desires.

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. In Outed, historian Timothy Stewart-Winter reveals that the effects of antigay policing were felt not only by the men but by their colleagues, families, and, in this case, the First Family.

Walter Jenkins’s political banishment had long-ranging effects, from how Johnson conducted the remainder of his presidency to how media coverage of political and sexual scandals became more explicit and salacious. Stewart-Winter reveals Jenkins’s influence and legacy, encompassing but also looking beyond the scandal. Jenkins had a significant impact on Johnson’s career and how it is remembered, including both his signal accomplishment—the programs and laws that constituted the Great Society—and his signal failure: his catastrophic judgment, after Jenkins’s exile, regarding the Vietnam War.

Drawing on Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today.

Stranger Intimacy explores cross-racial intimacy and everyday life of migrants in cities and rural regions in the Western United States and the Canadian and Mexican borderlands. Tracing the labor, sexual and domestic experiences of South Asian migrants in the early 20th century, Shah examines more…

After World War II, Atlanta and Charlotte emerged as leading urban centers in the South, redefining the region through their competing metropolitan identities. Both cities also served as home to queer communities who defined themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings and profited to…

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and…

During World War II, Mom Chung's was the place to be in San Francisco. Soldiers, movie stars, and politicians gathered at her home to socialize, to show their dedication to the Allied cause, and to express their affection for Dr. Margaret Chung (1889-1959). The first known American-born Chinese…

Freewheeling sexuality and gender experimentation defined the social and moral landscape of 1890s San Francisco. Middle class whites crafting titillating narratives on topics such as high divorce rates, mannish women, and extramarital sex centered Chinese and Japanese immigrants in…

The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire before Stonewall examines the worlds that Black queer women created in the interwar era and their important role in American culture at this time. From famous blues singers and performers like Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith, to activists and club…

In the early twenty-first century, comparisons between the modern civil rights movement and the movement for marriage equality reached a fever pitch. These comparisons, however, have a longer history. During the five decades after World War II, political ideas about same-sex intimacy and gender…

The Two Revolutions explores how the rise of the internet shaped transgender identity and activism from the 1980s to the present. Through extensive archival research and media archeology, Avery Dame-Griff reconstructs the manifold digital networks of transgender activists, cross-dressing computer…

In 2003 the US Supreme Court overturned anti-sodomy laws across the country, ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that the Constitution protects private consensual sex between adults. To some, the decision seemed to come like lightning from above, altering the landscape of America's sexual politics all at…

Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and…

Hospital Time is a memoir about friendship, family, and caregiving in the age of AIDS. Amy Hoffman, a writer, lesbian activist, and former editor of Gay Community News, chronicles with fury and unflinching honesty her experience serving as primary caretaker for her friend and colleague, Mike Riegle,…

Through decades of repression – both intentional and unintentional – the powerful story of 20th century queer community-building and activism in this province has remained largely ignored. Until now. Journalist Rhea Rollmann, through extensive interviews, archival work and investigative reporting,…

Taking into account recent historic changes, this second edition updates the essays on the Supreme Court, same-sex marriage, the Right, and trans history. Authors of several other essays have taken the opportunity to add new material and references where warranted.

Beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a new generation of LGBT students in California began to organize publicly on college and university campuses, inspired by contemporaneous social movements and informed by California’s rich history of LGBT community formation and political…

The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars.In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark…

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume…

In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America. Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the fundamental right to marry. In the span of two generations, American law underwent a dramatic transformation. Though the fight for marriage equality has…

Since the 1990s Marc Epprecht has helped lay the groundwork for critical masculinity and African queer studies with such publications as the award-winning Hungochani: The History of a Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa. Here he steps outside of the academic comfort zone with a mix of…

Though today’s LGBTQ people owe a lot to the generations who came before
them, their historical inheritances are not always obvious.
Working with the archives of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical
Society, artist E.G. Crichton decided to do something to bridge this generation
gap.…

Last Call South Florida sweeps aside the glitter and glamour of the Sunshine State’s LGBTQ nightlife scene to reveal the vibrant tapestry of real people who thrived on both sides of the bar. From the harrowing days of bar raids and police arrests to the triumphs of hard-won rights, this book dives…