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 hobbyists, and others interested in gender nonconformity who incited the second revolution of the title: the ascendance of “transgender” as an umbrella identity in the mid-1990s.

Dame-Griff argues that digital communications sparked significant momentum within what would become the transgender movement, but also further cemented existing power structures. Covering both a historical period that is largely neglected within the history of computing, and the poorly understood role of technology in queer and trans social movements, The Two Revolutions offers a new understanding of both revolutions—the internet’s early development and the structures of communication that would take us to today’s tipping point of trans visibility politics. Through a history of how trans people online exploited different digital infrastructures in the early days of the internet to build a community, The Two Revolutions tells a crucial part of trans history itself.

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 nonconformity—most often categorized as homosexuality—appeared in the campaigns of civil rights organizations, Black liberal elected officials, segregationists, and far right radicals. Deployed in complex and at times contradictory ways, political ideas about homosexuality (and later, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender subjects) became tethered to conceptualizations of Blackness and racial equality.

In this interdisciplinary historical study, Jennifer Dominique Jones reveals the underexamined origins of comparisons between Black and LGBT political constituencies in the modern civil rights movement and white supremacist backlash. Foregrounding an intersectional framing of postwar political histories, Jones demonstrates how the shared non-normative status of Blackness and homosexuality facilitated comparisons between subjects and political visions associated with both. Drawing upon organizational records, manuscript collections, newspaper accounts, and visual and textual ephemera, this study traces a long, conflicting relationship between Black and LGBT political identities that continues to the present day.

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 women like Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and educators like Lucy Diggs Slowe, Black “lady lovers” were at the forefront of the changes in gender and sexuality that accompanied the Jazz Age. The book’s title speaks to the common notion that modern gay history doesn’t begin until the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, which is often held up as the beginning of queer activism and visibility in the US. However, the story in my book begins a hundred years ago, in the early 1920s, focusing on how factors from the Great Migration to Prohibition and the rise of the popular entertainment industry created a fertile ground for Black queer women’s social networks to form in northern cities like New York and Chicago.

The first chapter looks at a series of 1920s newspaper articles about violent acts between alleged Black lady lovers, which did the cultural work of introducing the concept of “the lesbian” to Black readers as an inherently criminal figure. While the first chapter is more about representation and discourse, the second chapter turns to the Black popular entertainment industry, and specifically the “race records” industry which took off in 1920 with the popularity of Black female blues singers. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Alberta Hunter all had relationships with women – or were rumored to have – during the beginning of their popular recording careers in the 1920s. The significance of the entertainment world for Black women, both as a work alternative to domestic service and as a gathering place for lady lovers, is focused on along with the experiences of the classic blues women mentioned. While touring involved constant travel around the North and South, the next chapter focuses specifically on northern Prohibition-era spaces like speakeasies, rent parties, and buffet flats, and their roles in Black lady lovers’ lives. Gladys Bentley, one of the most popular performers in Harlem at this time, who wore men’s clothing on stage and flirted with the women in her audience, is a central figure here. The relationship between sex work and Black lady lovers’ worlds is also examined, as both were overlapping forms of “outlaw” behavior associated with vice underworlds at this time, which allowed women to make independent lives from men. Chapter four turns to Black lady lovers in “high society” from Lucy Diggs Slowe, the dean of women at Howard University, to write and club woman Alice Dunbar-Nelson, dramatic actress Edna Thomas, and literary host and heiress A’lelia Walker, daughter of Madame CJ Walker. This chapter along with chapter two both focus on the strategies women used to take part in queer relationships in a time when they were largely deemed abnormal if not unimaginable.

The conclusion then examines how themes from sexual fluidity to alternative forms of kinship are just some of the central contributions of interwar era Black lady lovers to modern queer culture and life for American women more broadly. It also gestures towards these women’s influence on the next generation of queer spaces, the working-class lesbian bars of the postwar era. Overall, The Famous Lady Lovers aims to introduce readers to the vibrant worlds made by Black queer women in the Prohibition and Great Depression eras, and the important mark they made on American culture in this time, that has influenced generations.

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 particular.

Amy Sueyoshi draws on everything from newspapers to felony case files to oral histories in order to examine how whites' pursuit of gender and sexual fulfillment gave rise to racial caricatures. As she reveals, white reporters, writers, artists, and others conflated Chinese and Japanese, previously seen as two races, into one. There emerged the Oriental—a single pan-Asian American stereotype weighted with sexual and gender meaning. Sueyoshi bridges feminist, queer, and ethnic studies to show how the white quest to forge new frontiers in gender and sexual freedom reinforced—and spawned—racial inequality through the ever evolving Oriental.

Informed and fascinating, Discriminating Sex reconsiders the origins and expression of racial stereotyping in an American city.

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 female physician, Chung established one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1920s. She also became a prominent celebrity and behind-the-scenes political broker during World War II. Chung gained national fame when she began "adopting" thousands of soldiers, sailors, and flyboys, including Ronald Reagan, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. A pioneer in both professional and political realms, Chung experimented in her personal life as well. She adopted masculine dress and had romantic relationships with other women, such as writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker.

This is the first biography to explore Margaret Chung's remarkable and complex life. It brings alive the bohemian and queer social milieus of Hollywood and San Francisco as well as the wartime celebrity community Chung cultivated. Her life affords a rare glimpse into the possibilities of traversing racial, gender, and sexual boundaries of American society from the late Victorian era through the early Cold War period.

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…

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 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…

Recent victories for LGBT rights, especially the spread of same-sex marriage, have gone faster than most people imagined possible. Yet the accompanying rise of gay 'normality' has been disconcerting for activists with radical sympathies. Global in scope and drawing on a wide range of feminist,…

Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today’s Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Capó Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami’s transnational connections reveal that the city has…

Models are everywhere. From the couture runway to the catalogue shoot, models sell things by soliciting our attention, sparking our desires. Whether performing live or in front of the camera, models produce sales through the affective labor of posing. Models do the work of representation in…