In 1971, Daniel Pinello came out as a gay man in the most public forum then conceivable for a 21-year-old: the front­ page feature article of a Williams College student newspaper. He was the first queer person there unequivocally to disclose a homosexual orientation. Then, after law school, Pinello ran a free weekly walk-in legal-counseling service for lesbians and gay men at the Mattachine Society, a foundational homophile organization near the famous Stonewall Inn.

A professor at the City University of New York, Pinello con­ducted pioneering research on gay and lesbian issues in three pivotal books: Gay Rights and American Law, America’s Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage, and America’s War on Same-Sex Couples and Their Families. The empirical foundation for the last two was more than 250 videotaped interviews he carried out between 2004 and 2012 with same­ sex couples in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin.

In 2008, Pinello and his partner committed civil disobedience to lobby the New York Legislature on behalf of marriage equal­ity. They applied for a marriage license from a Long Island town clerk. When their request was denied, the two refused to leave the office until the police issued them summonses for trespass.

All of these heartfelt events and more (including moving love stories with two men) are evocatively chronicled in Equal: A Memoir of Gay Rights.

Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel is the first biography of Gordon Merrick, the most commercially successful writer of gay novels in the twentieth century. This book shows how Merrick’s novels were largely based on his own life and time as a Princeton theater star, a Broadway actor, a New York reporter, an OSS spy, and the friend of countless artists and celebrities as an expatriate in France, Greece, and Sri Lanka. He lived much of his life as an openly gay man with his longtime partner, Charles Hulse. His 1970 novel, The Lord Won’t Mind, broke new ground by showing that an affirming, explicitly gay novel could be a bestseller. His subsequent gay novels were both a cultural phenomenon and a lightning rod for literary critics. This book also examines the complex, often conflicting responses to Merrick’s novels by gay readers and critics, and it thus recovers the early post-Stonewall debates over the definition of “gay literature.” By reconstructing Merrick’s life and critical fortunes, this book expands our understanding of what it means to be a gay man in the twentieth century.

In Gay Print Culture, Juan Carlos Mezo González investigates the relationship between transnational gay liberation politics, periodicals, and images in Mexico, the United States, and Canada from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s. Mezo González examines the production, content, circulation, and reception of leading gay periodicals published in these countries, including community-based gay liberation publications and commercially oriented gay lifestyle and erotic magazines. He demonstrates how they aimed to visualize the political goals of gay liberation, particularly those concerning the liberation and celebration of homoerotic desires. Mezo González contends that visualizing these goals allowed activists, editors, publishers, and artists to foster the formation of gay communities and identities while advancing gay liberation movements at the local, national, and international levels. In so doing, he furthers understandings of the transnational nature of gay periodicals, the relationship between gay liberation politics and visual culture, and the existing tensions between the liberation of some and the oppression of others across the American continent.

3, 2, 1… inhale, deep. From the Victorian infirmary and the sex clubs of the 1970s, poppers vapour has released the queer potential inside us all.

This is the intriguing story of how poppers wafted out of the lab and into gay bars, corner shops, bedrooms and porn supercuts. Blending historical research with wry observation, Adam Zmith explores the cultural forces and improbable connections behind the power of poppers.

What emerges is not just a history of pub raids, viral panics and pecs the size of dinner plates. It is a collection of fresh and provocative ideas about identity, sex, utopia, capitalism, law, freedom and the bodies that we use to experience the world.

In Deep Sniff, what starts as a thoughtful enquiry into poppers becomes a manifesto for pleasure.

Intimate Friends offers a fascinating look at the erotic friendships of educated English and American women over a 150-year period, culminating in the 1928 publication of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s scandalous novel of lesbian love. Martha Vicinus explores all-female communities, husband-wife couples, liaisons between younger and older women, female rakes, and mother-daughter affection. Women, she reveals, drew upon a rich religious vocabulary to describe elusive and complex erotic feelings.

Vicinus also considers the nineteenth-century roots of such contemporary issues as homosexual self-hatred, female masculinity, and sadomasochistic desire. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and other archival sources, she brings to life a variety of well known and historically less recognized women, ranging from the predatory Ann Lister, who documented her sexual activities in code; to Mary Benson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury; to the coterie of wealthy Anglo-American lesbians living in Paris.

In vivid and colorful prose, Intimate Friends offers a remarkable picture of women navigating the uncharted territory of same-sex desire.

Sapphistries tells the stories of women (and female-bodied individuals who might not have identified as women) who have desired, loved, and had sex with women from the beginning of time to the present and all around the globe. Leila Rupp draws on an extensive body of literature to fashion a…

Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010, critically examines the development of a doctrine of “heteronormative supremacy” in U.S. law in the period from 1965 to 1973. It offers in-depth analyses of six important…

“It Didn’t Start with Stonewall.” That’s the key message of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, a history of gay and lesbian activism in the decades before the Stonewall uprising of 1969. John D’Emilio covers the work of little-known organizations like the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of…

Joseph Fischel’s provocative book, Sodomy’s Solicitations, builds out a politics of sexual justice that challenges state sex exceptionalism. By tracing several twenty-first century contestations around Louisiana anti-sodomy laws, Fischel examines patterns and practices of sexual injustice that are…

Who, and what, is “heterosexual”? How did we come to think about ourselves, and our sexualities, in terms of something called “heterosexuality” and what does it mean that we do? These questions are at the core of Hanne Blank’s Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, a look at…

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…

Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present was first published in 1981 by William Morrow; was a New York Times Notable Book of 1981; won the Stonewall Book Award in 1982; was named by Lambda Literary Review as One of the 100 Best…

An unconventional but undeniable story of love and family between men

Originally published in 1950, the long out-of-print novel The Bitterweed Path was rediscovered in 1996 with the support of John Howard’s critical introduction. In the years since, new generations have witnessed its subtle yet…

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…

Funded and published by the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District, this extensively illustrated booklet is based on original research using archives, oral history interviews, and primary and secondary sources to trace the emergence of one of the world's most famous gayborhoods back to the early 1950s. The…

Eve Adams was a rebel. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912. The young woman took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York.

Then, in 1925, Adams…

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…

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is…

Most America’s know the story of Senator Joseph McCarthy and how he set off a “red scare” when he famously charged in 1950 that the US State Department and other government agencies had been infiltrated by communist agents. But few Americans know that McCarthy also charged that the government had…

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…

The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History presents a broad overview and more than 200 primary sources on the LGBT rebellion that erupted when New York City police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar in 1969. The book explores the developments in the 1960s that culminated in the uprising, the…

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…

This first critical biography of radio broadcaster, stage director, and auteur filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis examines his prolific body of work within the socio-political context of his times. Best known as a bold modernist for triple-Oscar-winner ‘Zorba the Greek’, Michael likewise was hailed as an…

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.

The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling…