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 Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.

Beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a new generation of LGBT students in California began to organize publicly on college and university campuses, inspired by contemporaneous social movements and informed by California’s rich history of LGBT community formation and political engagement. Here Are My People documents how a trailblazing group of queer student activists in California made their mark on the history of the modern LGBTQ movement and paved the way for generations of organizers who followed.

Rooted in extensive archival research and original oral histories, Here Are My People explores how this organizing unfolded, comparing different regions, types of campuses, and diverse student populations. Through campus-based organizations and within women’s studies programs, and despite various forms of reactionary resistance, student organizers promoted LGBT-themed educational programming and changes to curriculum, provided peer support like counseling and hotlines, and sponsored events showcasing queer creative practices including poetry, theater, and film. Collaborating across various campuses, they formed regional and statewide alliances. And, importantly, LGBT student organizers engaged California’s vibrant gay liberation and lesbian feminist political communities, forging new and important relationships in the movement which enhanced both on and off-campus LGBT organizing.

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, brings that history to light in A QUEER HISTORY OF NEWFOUNDLAND.



Organized queer activism dates back to at least 1974 in this province, but queer presence and community stretches back much farther. Rollmann spent years scouring archives, newspapers and court records to chronicle that history. She draws on archival work as well as more than 120 first-hand interviews with activists and community members to document this history behind the history of the province. The book focuses on the fight for human rights protections, AIDS activism, the growth of the city's vibrant queer bar scene, lesbian struggles for space in the feminist movement, trans struggles for recognition and health care, and more. Just as same-sex intimacy emerged in spaces as varied as the fishing industry and campus dorms, queer liberation also took diverse forms in this province, from quiet living-room consciousness-raising groups to angry, in-your-face marches on homophobic bars. Newfoundland and Labrador has been tied into national and international queer liberation networks ever since the 1970s, but NL'ers also played a major role in shaping those national movements. This book explores all of these stories, and more. The story of the queer rights movement in this province is one of great pride and joy; one of hardship and struggle; and ultimately, one of triumph. Why? Because: There have always been – and always will be – queers in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Hospital Time is a memoir about friendship, family, and caregiving in the age of AIDS. Amy Hoffman, a writer, lesbian activist, and former editor of Gay Community News, chronicles with fury and unflinching honesty her experience serving as primary caretaker for her friend and colleague, Mike Riegle, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Hoffman neither idealizes nor deifies Riegle, whom she portrays as a brilliant man, devoted prison rights activist, and very difficult friend.
Hoffman became central to Riegle’s caregiving when he asked her to be his health-care proxy, and although she willingly chose to do this, she explores her conflicting feelings about herself in this role and about her involvement with Riegle and his grueling struggle with hospitalization, illness, and, finally, death. She tells of the waves of grief that echoed throughout her life, awakening memories of other losses, entering her dreams and fantasies, and altering her relationships with friends, family, and even total strangers.
Hoffman’s memoir gives voice to the psychological and emotional havoc AIDS creates for those in the difficult role of caring for the terminally ill and it gives recognition to the role that lesbians continue to play in the AIDS emergency. A foreword by Urvashi Vaid, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, offers a meditation on the politics of AIDS and the role of family in the lives of lesbians and gay men.

Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now.

Queer Newark charts a history in which working-class people of color are the central actors and in which violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire. Drawing from rare archives that range from oral histories to vice squad reports, this collection’s authors uncover the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches. Exploring the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, they offer fresh perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community relations with police, Latinx immigration, and gentrification, while considering how to best tell the rich and complex stories of queer urban life. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey’s largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America.

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,…

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…

Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC’s gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed…

Fashioning Sapphism draws on the tools of historical inquiry, the theoretical strengths of feminist and queer theories, and the interpretive strategies of various disciplines to scrutinize the social, cultural and political context surrounding the 1928 publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of…