Badpuppy Gay Today

Tuesday, 10 June 1997

Pre-publication praise from prominent Americans and Book-of-The Month-Club and Quality Paperback Book Club arrangements have placed Charles Kaiser, author of the forthcoming history, The Gay Metropolis (Houghton-Mifflin), in a significant role as 1997's most celebrated researcher and interpreter of gay events occurring between World War II and the present. Kaiser has held, among other significant positions, one as Newsweek magazine's former media editor.

Though other histories have covered a similar timeframe, few have been hailed by famous mainstream personalities with such vigor. In significant ways Kaiser's approach differs from earlier works like Stonewall, which, some charge, has been written in an author's heat of personal biases. Kaiser's book will appear during Gay History Month, in October.

"This is the liveliest gay history I've ever read: richly detailed, briskly narrated, eminently sane," says celebrated author, Edmund White.

Television's Lesley Stall believes Kaiser wrote his history to both teach and entertain, and that he has accomplished both missions. "I laughed and cried and couldn't stop reading," she says, "This is a truly wonderful, wonderful book."

Arthur Laurent, author of West Side Story, Gypsy, and The Way We Were, calls Kaiser's work "a surprisingly fascinating history," while praising the book's engrossing readability, while John Gregory Dunne, of The New York Observer calls the work "Absolutely riveting!"

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch believes Kaiser has produced a "masterpiece" and that he "brilliantly weaves together the lives of the heroes of the gay rights movement with the lives of young men and women who, while facing lesser barriers today than fifty years ago, must still overcome enormous prejudices based on their sexual orientation."

A host of other commentators are also finding The Gay Metropolis as history "deeply moving", trumpeting that its story is "crucial to modern American history." In telling this history, says David J. Garrow, "Kaiser illuminates the courage and contributions of hundreds of men and women who pioneered the struggle for sexual freedom and equality."

Historian Kaiser says he's glad at being able to take a temporary rest from labors which, literally, have taken many years. In autumn, however, the rested author will go on the open road, sponsored by his Houghton Mifflin publisher, appearing in major cities from coast to coast.

J. Anthony Lukas has climbed on the gay history bandwagon too, calling The Gay Metropolis "absorbing" and a "social history of a very high order." Lukas relates that, "scarcely a page went by on which I did not learn something surprising, something fascinating, something instructive."