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.

The women’s suffrage movement, much like many other civil rights movements, has an important and often unrecognized queer history. In Public Faces, Secret Lives Wendy L. Rouse reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the suffrage movement included a variety of individuals who represented a range of…

This comprehensive reference guide tracks the development of the HIV/AIDS pandemic as it occurred in Toronto, Canada, during the years 1981 through 1990. Each entry in the chronology is combined with a brief bibliography of sources. Coverage is selective, and focuses on news reports and articles…

A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people…

New York’s LGBTQ+ history is everywhere, but rarely is it visibly documented. Aside from current venues and a handful of landmark plaques, important queer spaces from the city’s past have otherwise been forgotten about, or remain entirely hidden.

This multifaceted book joyfully and poignantly…

For a generation that has seen the legalization of gay marriage, increasing numbers of families with two mothers or two fathers, and the respected presidential candidacy of an openly gay man like Pete Buttigieg, the 1960s - 1990s can seem a time remote in every regard. Yet the present grows out of…

In "No One Helped" Marcia M. Gallo examines one of America's most infamous true-crime stories: the 1964 rape and murder of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens, New York. Front-page reports in the New York Times incorrectly identified thirty-eight indifferent witnesses…

Nearly fifteen years before the Stonewall Rebellion and the birth of gay liberation came the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). Like its predominantly gay male counterparts, the Mattachine Society and ONE, Inc., DOB was launched in response to the oppressive antihomosexual climate of the McCarthy era, when…

This inspiring biography of Craig Rodwell illuminates the life of a central activist and conscience of gay liberation, the visionary founder of the landmark Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop and the prime mover behind the inaugural pride march of 1970.

Set against the vibrant backdrop of New York and…

The long nineteenth century witnessed the rapid evolution of the American experiment. For men who desired sex with other men, it was a time marked by both bold exploration and tentative community building, as issues of sexual orientation and gender identity played out against the backdrop of a new…

A century ago in Nevada the idea that there was a queer community worthy of equal right, privilege, and responsibility was beyond imagining. Same-gender love was a criminal offense and Nevada’s LGBTQ community faced a desperate battle for equality. As time passed, however, their movement slowly…

Queer Virginia is a long-needed record of the courageous and creative ways that LGBTQ+ people across the commonwealth have persevered and fought for their rights. The history recovered here is remarkable and illuminating, including the life of Hannah Nokes, a Black transgender woman who overcame…

How female prostitutes and men who sought sex with other men shaped the history and emergence of modern Paris in the nineteenth century

In the 1800s, urban development efforts modernized Paris and encouraged the creation of brothels, boulevards, cafés, dancehalls, and even public urinals.…

When Making History was first published in 1992, the acclaimed oral historian Studs Terkel called it, "One of the definitive works on gay life." Novelist Armistead Maupin said that author "Eric Marcus not only writes with grace and clarity but makes it look so easy—the ultimate measure of…

A completely revised and updated edition of the classic volume of oral history interviews with high-profile leaders and little-known participants in the gay rights movement that cumulatively provides a powerful documentary look at the struggle for gay rights in America.

From the Boy Scouts and…

Disgraced is a sweeping religious and cultural history of US Protestant sex scandals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the birth of the modern press to the advent of the internet age, the book traces the public downfalls of religious leaders who purported to safeguard the morality of…

This renowned history of intersex in America has been comprehensively updated to reflect recent shifts in attitudes, bioethics, and medical and legal practices.

In Bodies in Doubt, Elizabeth Reis traces the changing definitions, perceptions, and medical management of intersex (atypical sex…

Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements.…

Sex is usually assumed to be a closely guarded secret of prison life. But it has long been the subject of intense scrutiny by both prison administrators and reformers—as well as a source of fascination and anxiety for the American public. Historically, sex behind bars has evoked radically different…

A look at the history of psychiatry’s foundational impact on the lives of queer and gender-variant people.

In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously…

In 1922 Robert Allerton—described by the Chicago Tribune as the “richest bachelor in Chicago”—met a twenty-two-year-old University of Illinois architecture student named John Gregg, who was twenty-six years his junior. Virtually inseparable from then on, they began publicly referring to one another…