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Gay and Lesbian History Month:
In addition to being the month of Halloween and National Coming Out Day,
October is Gay and Lesbian History Month, a time when lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender people are encouraged to discover and remember our communities'
collective past. To further these lofty goals, The Book Nook takes a look at some
of the more recent books of LesBiGay and Trans history.
Previous years have been good to gay history. 1997 gave us The Gay Metropolis by Charles Kaiser and 1998 gave us The Other Side of Silence by John Loughery. 1999's contribution to gay studies, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movrement in America by Dudley Clendinen & Adam Nagourney (Simon & Schuster; $30) promised to continue this worthy tradition. New York Times reporters Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney took seven years and seven hundred interviews to produce Out forGood, and even then only covered the period from 1969 to 1988 (with an Epilogue about the Election of 1992). To their credit, the authors did not limit their scope to New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, but also included gay activism in Boston, Austin, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, Miami and other places. A comprehensive history of "the last great struggle for equal rights in American history" is always welcome, and I hoped to enjoy Out for Good. So much greater, then, was my disappointment. Clendinen and Nagourney's turgid narrative might work in the pages of the New York Times but not in an epic work of over 700 pages.
Even worse, the authors diligently describe each and every bitch fight that has
divided our community and are quicker to remind us of the various activists'
AIDS-related deaths than of what they contributed to our communities when
they were alive. Readers who have thirty dollars to spare might enjoy Out
for Good's occasional flashes of brilliance. The rest of you would do
well to just skip the book
A better study of the lesbian and gay movement is Witness to Revolution: The Advocate Reports on Gay and Lesbian Politics, 1969-1999,edited by Chris Bull (Alyson; $16.95). This collection of stories from The Advocate is limited by that publication's limitations and what its publishers and editors thought was important at any particular time. This editorial bias was most marked during the David Goodstein period (1975-1985), when that publisher's personal piques affected his journal's coverage. Even editor Chris Bull admits that The Advocate "was largely silent during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, addressing the topic only to question a connection between the disease and gay men." Still, Witness to Revolution is an impressive and quite readable study of gay and lesbian politics from 1967, when founder Dick Michaels surreptitiously mimeographed the first copies of The Advocate, to the present day.
Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in Americaby John-Manuel Andriote (University of Chicago; $30) is the second. As an AIDS activist and a journalist who specializes in AIDS-related issues, John-Manuel Andriote is uniquely qualified to write a history of the epidemic and its impact on "the nation's hardest hit community, gay men." Victory Deferred is a story of great loss but also of great heroism, as an unpopular, besieged minority, after some hesitation, united to mourn our dead, care for our sick and fight against those who would use the epidemic as an excuse to hate us. In 1992, historian Blanche Wiesen Cook published Volume 1 of her multi-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, which took her subject through 1932.Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 2, 1933-1938 (Viking; $34.95) takes the First Lady of the World through the first six years of her husband Franklin's presidency, when ER became the liberal voice of a nation. In Cook's account, the First Lady is seen as the true idealist and liberal, often nagging her more pragmatic and political husband to do the right thing. Eleanor Roosevelt broke the mold that shaped the lives of previous first ladies, speaking out in favor of civil rights, decent housing, health care and world peace, though admittedly she was slow to attack Adolf Hitler's persecution of European Jews. Eleanor Roosevelt also goes where few books dared go before, in its frank depiction of ER's roller coaster relationship with journalist Lorena "Hick" Hickock. |
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