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 genders and sexualities. However, owing to the constant pressure to present a “respectable” public image, suffrage leaders publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.

Rouse argues that queer suffragists did take meaningful action to assert their identities and legacies by challenging traditional concepts of domesticity, family, space, and death in both subtly subversive and radically transformative ways. Queer suffragists also built lasting alliances and developed innovative strategies in order to protect their most intimate relationships, ones that were ultimately crucial to the success of the suffrage movement. Public Faces, Secret Lives is the first work to truly recenter queer figures in the women’s suffrage movement, highlighting their immense contributions as well as their numerous sacrifices.

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 deep into the lives of those who made history.

Meet the investors and entrepreneurs who built the foundation, the entertainers, bartenders, go-go boys, drag performers, and “bar celebrities” who brought life to the stage, and the customers who found solace and community in these havens. This isn’t just a nightlife chronicle; it’s a celebration of a resilient community that emerged stronger from every challenge.

What makes South Florida’s LGBTQ bar scene unique is its dazzling blend of glamour, diversity, and unyielding spirit. Historians Fred Fejes and Rick Karlin have meticulously researched this distinctive community, covering an era from Prohibition to the present day. Focusing from Palm Beach to Broward, and Miami-Dade to Key West, they capture the essence of a community that has withstood the test of time and adversity.

Fejes and Karlin’s journey unearthed countless personal stories and experiences, bringing the history of South Florida’s LGBTQ bar community to life. Their extensive archival research and interviews have culminated in a captivating book that informs and entertains.

Last Call South Florida presents a rich tapestry of recollections, memories, histories, and artifacts. It’s not just a book; it’s a vital contribution to LGBTQ history, preserving the legacy of a community that shaped the cultural landscape of South Florida. Dive into this fascinating chronicle and celebrate the vibrant, resilient spirit of South Florida’s LGBTQ bar community.

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. She selected 19 innovative LGBTQ artists, writers, and musicians, then
paired each of them with a deceased person whose personal artifacts are part of
the archive.
Including 25 pages of vivid images, Matchmaking in the Archive documents this
monumental creative project and adds essays by Jonathan D. Katz, Michelle
Tea, and Chris Vargas, who describe their own unique encounters with the
ghosts of LGBTQ history. Together, they make the archive come alive in
remarkably intimate ways.

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 story-telling and reflection on his personal experiences, motivations, and methodological and ethical challenges through research and teaching on diverse topics encountered along the way: African women's history, homosexuality /homophobia, environmental history, HIV / AIDS, human rights, and tourism. A central concern is to understand how masculinities have been constructed and contested within disordered gender, race, class and other relations, and to wonder how the many associated harms might be fruitfully addressed at this moment of multiple existential crises. Understanding today's "hegemonic masculinity" as an artefact of colonialism and racial capitalism that is tenaciously reproduced through the fantasy of endless economic growth, he invites men to constructively engage with African feminism, decolonization and degrowth theory.

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 received a considerable amount of attention from scholars and the media, it was only a small part of the more than half-century struggle for queer family rights. Family Matters uncovers these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex sexuality in American law and society – and ultimately made marriage equality possible. This book, however, is more than a history of queer rights. Marie-Amélie George reveals that national legal change resulted from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures were everyday people without legal training. Consequently, she offers a new way of understanding how minority groups were able to secure meaningful legal change.

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…

This illustrated history highlights the triumphs and tribulations of publishing an openly gay periodical in Toronto in the mid-1960s, several years before the establishment of a viable Canadian gay liberation movement. GAY lasted only two years, and was in many ways a failure. But it also had…

A Desired Past is an accessible synthesis of the history of same-sex sexuality in the United States, from the beginnings of interactions among Native Americans, European colonists, and enslaved Africans to the present. As the title suggestions, it both adds desire to the story of U.S. history and…

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,…

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…

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…

An Army of Ex-Lovers is a memoir about the Boston LGBT community of the 1970s and specifically about the experience of the author, Amy Hoffman, who worked on the staff of the Gay Community News from 1978 – 1982, and for several years thereafter served as a board member and writer for the…

Between 1957 and 1963 a Florida Legislative Investigation Committee actively pursued lesbian and gay schoolteachers, subjected them to interrogation, fired them from teaching positions, and revoked their professional credentials. The Florida legislature established the committee in 1956, in response…

Before Wilde is a social history of sex between men in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It is based on a sample of over one thousand trial reports relating to sex between men published in leading London newspapers between 1820 and 1870. Most of the cases analyzed were not sensational, and…

Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such…

The autobiography of Jim Egan (1921–2000), Canada's pioneer gay activist, who publicly fought for gay civil rights from 1949 through the 1990s.

“I cannot understand why so many men spend years, sometimes even a lifetime, agonizing over the fact that they are gay. Homosexuality was never a problem…

City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2000 (and later published with a new preface in a second edition by Temple University Press), is the first book-length study of lesbian and gay history in a major U.S. city,…

Contagious Divides explores a century of epidemics and racial crises to show how Chinese immigrants were demonized as medical menace in the nineteenth century to model citizen in the mid-twentieth century. Public health officials, politicians, women social reformers, white labor union leaders and…

In the decades since it was identified in 1981, HIV/AIDS has devastated African American communities. Members of those communities mobilized to fight the epidemic and its consequences from the beginning of the AIDS activist movement. They struggled not only to overcome the stigma and denial…

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…

For decades, the history of sexuality has been a multidisciplinary project serving competing agendas. Lesbian, gay and queer scholars have produced powerful narratives by tracing back as continuous or discontinuous a homosexual or queer subject. Yet organizing historical work around modern…

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…

It’s Saturday night in Key West, and the “best show in town” is about to begin. Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret tells the story of the 801 Girls, a troupe of drag queens who perform every night of the year in Key West, Florida. It is the story of drag and what it means in contemporary American…

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…