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Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America
The definitive account of the gay rights movement, Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney's Out for Good is comprehensive, authoritative, and excellently written.
This is the definitive account of the last great struggle for equal rights in the twentieth century. From the birth of the modern gay rights movement in 1969, at the Stonewall riots in New York, through 1988, when the gay rights movement was eclipsed by the more urgent demands of AIDS activists, this is the remarkable and—until now—untold story of how a largely invisible population of men and women banded together to create their place in America’s culture and government. Told through the voices of gay activists and their opponents, filled with dozens of colorful characters, Out for Good traces the emergence of gay rights movements in cities across the country and their transformation into a national force that changed the face of America forever.
Out for Good is the unforgettable chronicle of an important—and nearly lost—chapter in American history.
This is the definitive account of the last great struggle for equal rights in the twentieth century. From the birth of the modern gay rights movement in 1969, at the Stonewall riots in New York, through 1988, when the gay rights movement was eclipsed by the more urgent demands of AIDS activists, this is the remarkable and—until now—untold story of how a largely invisible population of men and women banded together to create their place in America’s culture and government. Told through the voices of gay activists and their opponents, filled with dozens of colorful characters, Out for Good traces the emergence of gay rights movements in cities across the country and their transformation into a national force that changed the face of America forever.
Out for Good is the unforgettable chronicle of an important—and nearly lost—chapter in American history.
720 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 2, 2025
40 years ago, as a young adult just out of college, I read in the newspaper that my 6th-grade teacher from a decade prior had died of AIDS. She was one of the first people in the city to pass from the disease. It was shocking, as, for one thing, she did not fit the "type" of person we had come to think at the time as susceptible to a disease with such a social stigma. I remembered her as the epitome of wholesomeness, her kindness and patience; how she had sat with me and helped me through my worst subject, math. She had a sweet, southern voice and manner. Everyone loved her. The news came during that strange time in the early days of the AIDS crisis, full of the confusions and denials typical of people who knew people with the disease, while revealing the biases of the media. She was about 40 when she died, described as a "Ms.", unmarried. Her mother was quoted as saying she definitely "was no homosexual" but had "fallen in with the wrong crowd," without elaboration. The mom, a religious woman, was clearly in some kind of denial.
A year later, I had gotten my first newspaper job. One of my first assignments was to cover a business that was going to offer AIDS screenings on a for-profit basis. The ethics of offering AIDS testing as a money-making venture was going to be part of my story. It would be balanced. That week, our paper had a visiting editor from the Wall Street Journal, sent to us by corporate to critique our stories, presumably to suggest better approaches. The guy was a complete shit -- just thinking about him years later still infuriates me. He tore my story apart, said the business featured in it was ridiculous and, anyway, to paraphrase: "Why do we care about this? We all know these people with AIDS just get it from fisting each other!"
Dehumanizing attitudes like this -- and the monolithic wall of hate gays and lesbians have fought to tear down to gain the rights and protections enjoyed by the majority -- are rife in Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, which follows in fulsome, painstaking detail gay political and social organizing in the United States from the Stonewall Riots in 1969 to the darkest days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
It is a monumental history, sweeping and epic in scope, and tremendously moving, with an enormous cast of true-life characters -- an S-tier reconstruction that puts you on the ground with protesters, in the halls of political power, in the bathhouses, in the meeting rooms and boardrooms, in shabby apartments and the most ritzy LA mansions where activists of all socioeconomic stripe tried in their often conflicting ways to fight a seemingly impossible war, to find allies for a demonized cause. It does all this and more with an intimacy and level of detail that marks the very best, most novelistic books of history. The book centers around the major cites where most of the big political, social and health efforts germinated and grew: New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and several others, moving forward chronologically, switching back and forth to each of the cities during their moments of triumphs, failures and tragedies. Because gay people occupy every kind of social strata, ethnic makeup, political leaning, and philosophical POV, the movement has been one of the most susceptible to political infighting. The book does not shy away from this reality, covering the internecine warfare among gay activists in astonishing detail. From the days of the closeted "homophile" movement of the 1960s and prior, to the days of ACT-UP public activism in the late 1980s, the book covers an enormous swath of history and is a real page-turner.
Despite my emphasis on AIDS earlier on, that issue is only covered in the book's last 100 or so pages. Equating gay people with AIDS is not my intention, and the tendency of some enemies of the movement to do so caused it some setbacks during a time when gays and lesbians had just suffered some political losses with the rise of the religious Right in the late '70s and early '80s. Ironically, just as AIDS threatened to destroy everything gay Americans had worked for, it ended up uniting the movement like never before and led to a new round of political gains.
The book was edited by the legendary late, Alice Mayhew, of Simon and Schuster, who honchoed a ton of famous non-fiction classics by Woodward and Bernstein, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David Maraniss, Taylor Branch, and Diane McWhorter. All the Presidents Men and the towering, Parting the Waters about the American Civil Rights movement were some of her most famous projects, which should give you some idea at what level this book is operating.
This book had me in tears at the end. When you learn the fates of so many of the people you've come to know in its pages, but also see how much they achieved, you'll understand way.
Essential reading. Highest recommendation.
c. 2025 e/k
A year later, I had gotten my first newspaper job. One of my first assignments was to cover a business that was going to offer AIDS screenings on a for-profit basis. The ethics of offering AIDS testing as a money-making venture was going to be part of my story. It would be balanced. That week, our paper had a visiting editor from the Wall Street Journal, sent to us by corporate to critique our stories, presumably to suggest better approaches. The guy was a complete shit -- just thinking about him years later still infuriates me. He tore my story apart, said the business featured in it was ridiculous and, anyway, to paraphrase: "Why do we care about this? We all know these people with AIDS just get it from fisting each other!"
Dehumanizing attitudes like this -- and the monolithic wall of hate gays and lesbians have fought to tear down to gain the rights and protections enjoyed by the majority -- are rife in Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, which follows in fulsome, painstaking detail gay political and social organizing in the United States from the Stonewall Riots in 1969 to the darkest days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
It is a monumental history, sweeping and epic in scope, and tremendously moving, with an enormous cast of true-life characters -- an S-tier reconstruction that puts you on the ground with protesters, in the halls of political power, in the bathhouses, in the meeting rooms and boardrooms, in shabby apartments and the most ritzy LA mansions where activists of all socioeconomic stripe tried in their often conflicting ways to fight a seemingly impossible war, to find allies for a demonized cause. It does all this and more with an intimacy and level of detail that marks the very best, most novelistic books of history. The book centers around the major cites where most of the big political, social and health efforts germinated and grew: New York, L.A., San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and several others, moving forward chronologically, switching back and forth to each of the cities during their moments of triumphs, failures and tragedies. Because gay people occupy every kind of social strata, ethnic makeup, political leaning, and philosophical POV, the movement has been one of the most susceptible to political infighting. The book does not shy away from this reality, covering the internecine warfare among gay activists in astonishing detail. From the days of the closeted "homophile" movement of the 1960s and prior, to the days of ACT-UP public activism in the late 1980s, the book covers an enormous swath of history and is a real page-turner.
Despite my emphasis on AIDS earlier on, that issue is only covered in the book's last 100 or so pages. Equating gay people with AIDS is not my intention, and the tendency of some enemies of the movement to do so caused it some setbacks during a time when gays and lesbians had just suffered some political losses with the rise of the religious Right in the late '70s and early '80s. Ironically, just as AIDS threatened to destroy everything gay Americans had worked for, it ended up uniting the movement like never before and led to a new round of political gains.
The book was edited by the legendary late, Alice Mayhew, of Simon and Schuster, who honchoed a ton of famous non-fiction classics by Woodward and Bernstein, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David Maraniss, Taylor Branch, and Diane McWhorter. All the Presidents Men and the towering, Parting the Waters about the American Civil Rights movement were some of her most famous projects, which should give you some idea at what level this book is operating.
This book had me in tears at the end. When you learn the fates of so many of the people you've come to know in its pages, but also see how much they achieved, you'll understand way.
Essential reading. Highest recommendation.
c. 2025 e/k
July 24, 2020
If you are an activist, I strongly recommend this book. It really cemented for me that all the bizarreness of community organizing is in some sense just the way it is -- people are people, personalities are big, hearts are strong.
And it is written in a way that is very helpful -- I'm someone who I think is a bit oriented towards what I consider pragmatic, incremental work in lieu of a specific moment for big change (one of those opening moments that so often years of work have created), and this text got me to see the rationale behind more 'radical' tactics.
My central criticism is although the text mentions the role of trans women, lesbians, etc, this is really a white gay male centered narrative. Example: Marsha P. Johnson isn't mentioned, and this story starts right AFTER Stonewall. As in the next day. This may have been a decision around how that night's story is told in other places, but it's a weird one, so this gets a stars-down ding from me in my overall review.
And it is written in a way that is very helpful -- I'm someone who I think is a bit oriented towards what I consider pragmatic, incremental work in lieu of a specific moment for big change (one of those opening moments that so often years of work have created), and this text got me to see the rationale behind more 'radical' tactics.
My central criticism is although the text mentions the role of trans women, lesbians, etc, this is really a white gay male centered narrative. Example: Marsha P. Johnson isn't mentioned, and this story starts right AFTER Stonewall. As in the next day. This may have been a decision around how that night's story is told in other places, but it's a weird one, so this gets a stars-down ding from me in my overall review.
February 29, 2024
A MONUMENTAL HISTORY OF GAY RIGHTS, FROM STONEWALL TO THE 1990s
Authors Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney wrote in the Introduction to this 1999 book, “The modern gay rights movement … is the subject of this book. It is a close, sometimes intimate narrative of a gathering political movement among a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation’s culture… The gay rights movement has elements both parallel and quite different from the movements which have gone before. But the fundamental feeling… which defined this population…is more subtle, more personal than any other. It is sexual… The kinds of oppression that homosexuals have experienced … have all made this civil rights struggle different from the others.” (Pg. 13) They continue, “it was not until homosexuals began to adopt the tactics of other, more radical movements… that the struggle for gay rights gained momentum, and quicker change began to come.” (Pg. 14)
They report that in July 1969, a group meeting in Greenwich Village decide to “adopt the name ‘Gay Liberation Front’ [GLF]… Before this night no other major homosexual rights group had used the word ‘gay’ in its name; indeed, few even dared to use the word ‘homosexual.’ There was no talk among these new activists of disguising their mission with ambiguous titles---no homophile, no Mattachine, no Bilitis.” (Pg. 31)
They note, “Although the police said they were only responding to the complaints of an outraged citizenry, a study … found that the overwhelming majority of the arrests made were made by undercover police officers… acting on their own initiative… Homosexuals captured in those ‘conduct’ sweeps made for the most difficult arrests… The risks of hunting for sex in public places were hardly a surprise, and it was difficult to rally much public sympathy … the gay organization PRIDE … wrote in an open letter to homosexuals in ‘The Advocate,’ ‘We are going to ask you NOT TO CRUISE in public parks. This represents an intolerable situation to the LAPD and rightly so. PRIDE does not condone sexual activity in public places and… condemns such practices.” (Pg. 35-36)
They observe, “Homosexuals… were extraordinarily hard to organize, a disturbing discovery for the experienced veterans of other political movements who joined the GLF… after the raid on the Stonewall. Gay men and lesbians in New York in 1969 were secretive, untrusting and scattered, and often lived at the edge of the law. Almost all the gay bars on Christopher Street prohibited the posting of leaflets, and … talking politics to the customers.” (Pg. 40)
They state, “The first rifts between the men and the women of Gay Liberation Front of New York appeared … [at] a Saturday night gay liberation party… the loft was kept dark… and the music was so loud there was no hope for conversation… Women needed an alternative to the bars as much as men; the women’s bars in New York were possibly even more dreary than the men’s bars.” (Pg. 85) Rita Mae Brown (who had moved from NOW to GLF) observed, “Gender is a stronger behavior determination than sexual orientation… Most gay men don’t understand lesbian women any better than most husbands really understand their wives… Most gay men do not have children; most lesbians don’t make sexual passes in parks… When a lesbian wants a sexual relationship, she gets to know the other woman and then has sex… a gay man … wants to know where his partner lives; later he asks his name.’” (Pg. 87) Brown once disguised herself as a man and visited two gay bathhouses in Manhattan: “It turned out not to be fun; Brown was forever struck by how anxious and driven the men looked as they hunted the hallways for sex.” (Pg. 93)
They recount, “in Rita Mae Brown’s apartment… the women of the GLF had taken to calling themselves the Radicalesbians, to differentiate themselves from the gay men… Martha Shelley had suggested the women draft a paper … ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’ … asserts the importance of lesbians to the feminist movement. But it also spoke… to homosexual women who felt abandoned both by the gay movement and the feminist movement… The manifesto was, in effect, a road map to a separate political movement for lesbians… The Radicalesbians were among the first women to experiment with what was called ‘separatism,’ limiting their political and social universe to women only.” (Pg. 90-91) Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon “created the Daughters of Bilitis” for lesbians: “Del Martin’s cry was the strongest challenge yet to the tenuous new gay rights movement...” (Pg. 95, 97) Soon, however, “NOW recognizes the double oppression of women who are lesbians… NOW acknowledges the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminists.” (Pg. 101-102)
They report, “Like everything else in the gay movement, the Metropolitan Community Church arose out of personal experience, and it, too, had roots in gay bars. It was in a gay bar… that Troy Perry, a previously married man and former Church of God minister, had experienced a kind of catharsis… When Pastor Troy Perry… had told his Church of God overseer that he was homosexual, the bishop had kicked him out of the church and parsonage. ‘I wish there were a church somewhere for all of us who are outcast,’ he said to God…. And then the thought came to him: Why are you waiting for somebody else? On the first Sunday in October, in the living room of the little pink house… he rented with a friend… Troy Perry conducted the first service … the new church needed to be a place where people of different backgrounds could feel comfortable.” (Pg. 179-180)
They recount, “ten days before Christmas 1973, an era was ending… the board of … the American Psychiatric Association … voted … to remove homosexuality from the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual'… closing a battle that had been politely launched … in 1964 before erupting into a belligerent campaign by the new generation of gay activists at end of the decade… it was no longer a mental illness. It was the first great victory of the movement, and it had not come easily.” (Pg. 199)
In 1977 in Dade County, Florida, a civil ordinance was proposed “to bar discrimination based on ‘affectional or sexual preference’…” Anita Bryant [who said, “Since homosexuals don’t procreate… the only way to increase their numbers was to recruit, and what better place to do this than in the schools?"] became the public face of ‘Save Our Children, Inc.’ which ‘evolved into a political juggernaut… The Save Our Children forces stumbled across a powerful weapon … courtesy of the gay movement itself… the gay rights platform homosexual leaders had adopted in 1972, includ[ed] the plank calling for the abolition of age of consent laws.” After the anti-discrimination ordinance was repealed by a 2-to-1 vote, “the Dade County results revealed that the movement remained painfully unsophisticated, divided and dominated by extreme personalities, and apparently unprepared for the fights that lay ahead.” (Pg. 291-309) They lament, “The repeal of the Dade County gay rights ordinance unleashed a flood of feelings … within the homosexual rights movement and among conservative Christians who had never organized politically around a social issue before. For the gay rights movement, it would prove to be a very bleak year.” (Pg. 316) In 1978, California state senator John Briggs proposed a state law barring homosexuals from teaching in public schools; it failed by 58% to 42%. (Pg. 389)
They note, “At first, the only glimpse the world at large had of this gay male culture was during such extravagances as the Gay Freedom Day Parades in San Francisco, [which were] broadcast to such devastating effect in Dade County. But now… accounts were showing up in mainstream books… In 1978, Hollywood screenwriter Larry Kramer published his first novel, ‘F-g-ots’, which he presented as a satirical look at Now York’s gay male world… Still, the more disquieting chapters of gay sex life that he presented were based on his own observation and, sometimes, personal experience.” (Pg. 448)
But “In 1979 the spread of sexually transmitted disease in the gay male community had been a recurring story… By the end of the 1970s, two-thirds of the gay men in San Francisco had been exposed to chronic hepatitis… But by the start of the1980s, the diseases were approaching epidemic proportions… When the first reports of a new sexual disease surfaced anecdotally in… 1981… people … began to hear jumbled and ominous accounts of gay men in intensive care units suffering from what seemed to be a new and deadly form of pneumonia… [New York anesthesiologist Larry Mass] wrote a story that appeared on May 18, 1981… [that] was the first story reporting on what would come to be known as AIDS… Mass was familiar enough with the highly sexualized gay male community to understand the medical implications of a fatal disease transmitted by sexual conduct. But Mass… had no way of knowing just how unprepared the gay rights movement was for what now lay ahead.” (Pg. 451-452)
They continue, “The new disease seemed certain to offer fuel to the attack by the religious right on homosexuality. It appeared to be explicitly linked to homosexuality; it was even called ‘gay cancer,’ then GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency… This was the politically threatening atmosphere in which members of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis listened to [Larry] Kramer publicly chastising gay men for ‘f--king their brains out.’ They worried that such public statements would... be used against them by their new political enemies.” (Pg. 465) Randy Shilts of the San Francisco Chronicle “turned himself into a full-time AIDS reporter, and a singularly effective one.” (Pg. 482)
In 1986, “The Supreme Court had now ruled that states could properly punish people for engaging in homosexual relations, an unambiguous finding that---as Jerry Falwell put it---‘perverted moral behavior is not accepted practice in this country.’ … The most important judicial body in the United States had expressed a certain distaste for gay men and women and suggested they be treated differently from other Americans.” (Pg. 537)
In the closing chapter, they note, “There was a brief period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when gay activists took to publicly identifying closeted homosexuals, forcing them into the open as a political gesture. But it was a passing moment…” (Pg. 569) They conclude, “it seems fair to say that in … 1992, there was something approaching a gay vote… This gathering of a gay vote was a direct response to an epidemic, and to the radically different ways that the two major parties… reacted to it. It had never happened before. It has not since. Whether it does again will almost certainly depend or the acceptance or rejection homosexuals find in the rest of the American political culture.” (Pg. 572-573)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying LGBT history.
Authors Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney wrote in the Introduction to this 1999 book, “The modern gay rights movement … is the subject of this book. It is a close, sometimes intimate narrative of a gathering political movement among a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation’s culture… The gay rights movement has elements both parallel and quite different from the movements which have gone before. But the fundamental feeling… which defined this population…is more subtle, more personal than any other. It is sexual… The kinds of oppression that homosexuals have experienced … have all made this civil rights struggle different from the others.” (Pg. 13) They continue, “it was not until homosexuals began to adopt the tactics of other, more radical movements… that the struggle for gay rights gained momentum, and quicker change began to come.” (Pg. 14)
They report that in July 1969, a group meeting in Greenwich Village decide to “adopt the name ‘Gay Liberation Front’ [GLF]… Before this night no other major homosexual rights group had used the word ‘gay’ in its name; indeed, few even dared to use the word ‘homosexual.’ There was no talk among these new activists of disguising their mission with ambiguous titles---no homophile, no Mattachine, no Bilitis.” (Pg. 31)
They note, “Although the police said they were only responding to the complaints of an outraged citizenry, a study … found that the overwhelming majority of the arrests made were made by undercover police officers… acting on their own initiative… Homosexuals captured in those ‘conduct’ sweeps made for the most difficult arrests… The risks of hunting for sex in public places were hardly a surprise, and it was difficult to rally much public sympathy … the gay organization PRIDE … wrote in an open letter to homosexuals in ‘The Advocate,’ ‘We are going to ask you NOT TO CRUISE in public parks. This represents an intolerable situation to the LAPD and rightly so. PRIDE does not condone sexual activity in public places and… condemns such practices.” (Pg. 35-36)
They observe, “Homosexuals… were extraordinarily hard to organize, a disturbing discovery for the experienced veterans of other political movements who joined the GLF… after the raid on the Stonewall. Gay men and lesbians in New York in 1969 were secretive, untrusting and scattered, and often lived at the edge of the law. Almost all the gay bars on Christopher Street prohibited the posting of leaflets, and … talking politics to the customers.” (Pg. 40)
They state, “The first rifts between the men and the women of Gay Liberation Front of New York appeared … [at] a Saturday night gay liberation party… the loft was kept dark… and the music was so loud there was no hope for conversation… Women needed an alternative to the bars as much as men; the women’s bars in New York were possibly even more dreary than the men’s bars.” (Pg. 85) Rita Mae Brown (who had moved from NOW to GLF) observed, “Gender is a stronger behavior determination than sexual orientation… Most gay men don’t understand lesbian women any better than most husbands really understand their wives… Most gay men do not have children; most lesbians don’t make sexual passes in parks… When a lesbian wants a sexual relationship, she gets to know the other woman and then has sex… a gay man … wants to know where his partner lives; later he asks his name.’” (Pg. 87) Brown once disguised herself as a man and visited two gay bathhouses in Manhattan: “It turned out not to be fun; Brown was forever struck by how anxious and driven the men looked as they hunted the hallways for sex.” (Pg. 93)
They recount, “in Rita Mae Brown’s apartment… the women of the GLF had taken to calling themselves the Radicalesbians, to differentiate themselves from the gay men… Martha Shelley had suggested the women draft a paper … ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’ … asserts the importance of lesbians to the feminist movement. But it also spoke… to homosexual women who felt abandoned both by the gay movement and the feminist movement… The manifesto was, in effect, a road map to a separate political movement for lesbians… The Radicalesbians were among the first women to experiment with what was called ‘separatism,’ limiting their political and social universe to women only.” (Pg. 90-91) Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon “created the Daughters of Bilitis” for lesbians: “Del Martin’s cry was the strongest challenge yet to the tenuous new gay rights movement...” (Pg. 95, 97) Soon, however, “NOW recognizes the double oppression of women who are lesbians… NOW acknowledges the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminists.” (Pg. 101-102)
They report, “Like everything else in the gay movement, the Metropolitan Community Church arose out of personal experience, and it, too, had roots in gay bars. It was in a gay bar… that Troy Perry, a previously married man and former Church of God minister, had experienced a kind of catharsis… When Pastor Troy Perry… had told his Church of God overseer that he was homosexual, the bishop had kicked him out of the church and parsonage. ‘I wish there were a church somewhere for all of us who are outcast,’ he said to God…. And then the thought came to him: Why are you waiting for somebody else? On the first Sunday in October, in the living room of the little pink house… he rented with a friend… Troy Perry conducted the first service … the new church needed to be a place where people of different backgrounds could feel comfortable.” (Pg. 179-180)
They recount, “ten days before Christmas 1973, an era was ending… the board of … the American Psychiatric Association … voted … to remove homosexuality from the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual'… closing a battle that had been politely launched … in 1964 before erupting into a belligerent campaign by the new generation of gay activists at end of the decade… it was no longer a mental illness. It was the first great victory of the movement, and it had not come easily.” (Pg. 199)
In 1977 in Dade County, Florida, a civil ordinance was proposed “to bar discrimination based on ‘affectional or sexual preference’…” Anita Bryant [who said, “Since homosexuals don’t procreate… the only way to increase their numbers was to recruit, and what better place to do this than in the schools?"] became the public face of ‘Save Our Children, Inc.’ which ‘evolved into a political juggernaut… The Save Our Children forces stumbled across a powerful weapon … courtesy of the gay movement itself… the gay rights platform homosexual leaders had adopted in 1972, includ[ed] the plank calling for the abolition of age of consent laws.” After the anti-discrimination ordinance was repealed by a 2-to-1 vote, “the Dade County results revealed that the movement remained painfully unsophisticated, divided and dominated by extreme personalities, and apparently unprepared for the fights that lay ahead.” (Pg. 291-309) They lament, “The repeal of the Dade County gay rights ordinance unleashed a flood of feelings … within the homosexual rights movement and among conservative Christians who had never organized politically around a social issue before. For the gay rights movement, it would prove to be a very bleak year.” (Pg. 316) In 1978, California state senator John Briggs proposed a state law barring homosexuals from teaching in public schools; it failed by 58% to 42%. (Pg. 389)
They note, “At first, the only glimpse the world at large had of this gay male culture was during such extravagances as the Gay Freedom Day Parades in San Francisco, [which were] broadcast to such devastating effect in Dade County. But now… accounts were showing up in mainstream books… In 1978, Hollywood screenwriter Larry Kramer published his first novel, ‘F-g-ots’, which he presented as a satirical look at Now York’s gay male world… Still, the more disquieting chapters of gay sex life that he presented were based on his own observation and, sometimes, personal experience.” (Pg. 448)
But “In 1979 the spread of sexually transmitted disease in the gay male community had been a recurring story… By the end of the 1970s, two-thirds of the gay men in San Francisco had been exposed to chronic hepatitis… But by the start of the1980s, the diseases were approaching epidemic proportions… When the first reports of a new sexual disease surfaced anecdotally in… 1981… people … began to hear jumbled and ominous accounts of gay men in intensive care units suffering from what seemed to be a new and deadly form of pneumonia… [New York anesthesiologist Larry Mass] wrote a story that appeared on May 18, 1981… [that] was the first story reporting on what would come to be known as AIDS… Mass was familiar enough with the highly sexualized gay male community to understand the medical implications of a fatal disease transmitted by sexual conduct. But Mass… had no way of knowing just how unprepared the gay rights movement was for what now lay ahead.” (Pg. 451-452)
They continue, “The new disease seemed certain to offer fuel to the attack by the religious right on homosexuality. It appeared to be explicitly linked to homosexuality; it was even called ‘gay cancer,’ then GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency… This was the politically threatening atmosphere in which members of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis listened to [Larry] Kramer publicly chastising gay men for ‘f--king their brains out.’ They worried that such public statements would... be used against them by their new political enemies.” (Pg. 465) Randy Shilts of the San Francisco Chronicle “turned himself into a full-time AIDS reporter, and a singularly effective one.” (Pg. 482)
In 1986, “The Supreme Court had now ruled that states could properly punish people for engaging in homosexual relations, an unambiguous finding that---as Jerry Falwell put it---‘perverted moral behavior is not accepted practice in this country.’ … The most important judicial body in the United States had expressed a certain distaste for gay men and women and suggested they be treated differently from other Americans.” (Pg. 537)
In the closing chapter, they note, “There was a brief period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when gay activists took to publicly identifying closeted homosexuals, forcing them into the open as a political gesture. But it was a passing moment…” (Pg. 569) They conclude, “it seems fair to say that in … 1992, there was something approaching a gay vote… This gathering of a gay vote was a direct response to an epidemic, and to the radically different ways that the two major parties… reacted to it. It had never happened before. It has not since. Whether it does again will almost certainly depend or the acceptance or rejection homosexuals find in the rest of the American political culture.” (Pg. 572-573)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying LGBT history.
March 21, 2021
I have been reading this book, super slowly, for about a year, and I am genuinely sad to be done with it. And ending this before the cocktail emerged, while so many gay men were still dying without hope, was devastating. But it is well worth the sad, is incredibly inspiring, and we need more and more and more history books of our community. Being a part of this, having these folks as ancestor and family, is one of a multitude of reasons I am so glad I’m gay. 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
My only note: I wish they would do a rerelease, although I realize Adam Nagourney has now passed, and change the word “homosexual” to “gay and lesbian” or “LGBTQ” because it is jarring now to read language that feels pathologizing instead of celebratory.
My only note: I wish they would do a rerelease, although I realize Adam Nagourney has now passed, and change the word “homosexual” to “gay and lesbian” or “LGBTQ” because it is jarring now to read language that feels pathologizing instead of celebratory.
February 23, 2023
This book by two gay New York Times authors provides extensive detail about the struggle for gay rights, not only by various gay and lesbian organizations, but also by gay rights activists within the two major parties. Based on extensive interviews with over 700 people, they provide intimate (sometimes too intimate for my taste) portraits of the gay rights leaders of the era, some of whom are now almost forgotten. They are clearly on the side of the incrementalists who worked within the system. Although their story focuses on the coastal struggles (New York, Florida, California), Minnesota and some Minnesota leaders in the struggle are featured. It was published in 1999, but their story ends in 1992, so there's lots of uncovered territory.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews