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Creating a Place For Ourselves
Creating a Place For Ourselves is a groundbreaking collection of essays that examines gay life in the United States before Stonewall and the gay liberation movement. Along with examining areas with large gay communities such as New York, San Francisco and Fire Island, the contributors also consider the thriving gay populations in cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Washington, D.C., Birmingham and Flint, demonstrating that gay communities are truly everywhere.
Brett Beemyn, Nan Alamilla Boyd, George Chauncey, Madeline Davis, Allen Drexel, John Howard, David Johnson, Liz Kennedy, Joan Nestle, Esther Newton, Tim Retzloff, Marc Stein, Roey Thorpe.
Brett Beemyn, Nan Alamilla Boyd, George Chauncey, Madeline Davis, Allen Drexel, John Howard, David Johnson, Liz Kennedy, Joan Nestle, Esther Newton, Tim Retzloff, Marc Stein, Roey Thorpe.
306 pages, Paperback
First published April 7, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 27, 2021
A really solid collection. One of the real joys of this is that if you don't feel like you can commit to read the whole books from many of these authors, you can just read these essays and get a pretty good sense of at least some of the major points from their work, which is fun and easy if you're busy and on the go. It's also just good to return to these earlier community works and see just how different each one is, to draw out a larger picture of what gay history in the US has looked like over time.
I think my favorite chapter, for personal reasons, is the Flint chapter, though of course many are very good and interesting. There's just a lot in here for folks to explore, so I definitely recommend it from that perspective! I think also it could be very, very good for use in a classroom, again if you don't want to assign the whole books from many of the contributors.
I think my favorite chapter, for personal reasons, is the Flint chapter, though of course many are very good and interesting. There's just a lot in here for folks to explore, so I definitely recommend it from that perspective! I think also it could be very, very good for use in a classroom, again if you don't want to assign the whole books from many of the contributors.
October 25, 2023
A really good collection of articles on queer community histories in the United States. The book brings together important authors in the field of queer history & would make a great introductory reader.
“By the Depression, before automobiles became widely owned beyond the middle class, a rudimentary and vulnerable gay presence had already surfaced in Flint. It existed within a geographic area who’s limits were established by streetcars and walking…Othe traces of Flint’s early homosexual underground further suggest a gay life determined by the bounds of pedestrian mobility.” 230
“Not all spaces appropriated for homosexual activity in Flint, Michigan during the 1950s were stationary. The car not only allowed gay men and women to congregate in downtown bars, but also became and additional site for many men to act on homosexual desires. Sexualized since its inception the automobile has long been acknowledges as a ready avenue for heterosexual passions. But its use for same-sex liaisons is perhaps more significant, for it enabled gay and bisexual men in cities like postwar Flint to subvert the societal norms which sought to deny them social and sexual outlets…
The appropriation of the automobile for intimate sexual exchanges was analogous to the rise of the tearoom: both functioned as sites for fleeting, risky, anonymous sex and provided opportunities for cross-class socializing, becoming a means for teachers to interact with autoworkers, salesmen with college students, and factory supervisors with grocery clerks. The car, however, had the added feature of offering an interior that was specifically designed to be homelike. Moreover, teenagers living at home, married men and labourers who could not afford motel rooms could use their cars for sexual encounters, and if a gay man did not have his own car, he could look for sexual partners who did…To borrow a phrase that George Chauncey has applied to poorer gay men in the 1920s, “privacy could only be had in public.” 235
“George Chauncey, Jr. contends that the capacity of gay men “to build a gay world covertly in the midst of a hostile straight world should be considered a form of resistance, since it was their very ability to keep parts of the gay world invisible that allowed them to circumvent the prohibition of that world.” 243
“By the Depression, before automobiles became widely owned beyond the middle class, a rudimentary and vulnerable gay presence had already surfaced in Flint. It existed within a geographic area who’s limits were established by streetcars and walking…Othe traces of Flint’s early homosexual underground further suggest a gay life determined by the bounds of pedestrian mobility.” 230
“Not all spaces appropriated for homosexual activity in Flint, Michigan during the 1950s were stationary. The car not only allowed gay men and women to congregate in downtown bars, but also became and additional site for many men to act on homosexual desires. Sexualized since its inception the automobile has long been acknowledges as a ready avenue for heterosexual passions. But its use for same-sex liaisons is perhaps more significant, for it enabled gay and bisexual men in cities like postwar Flint to subvert the societal norms which sought to deny them social and sexual outlets…
The appropriation of the automobile for intimate sexual exchanges was analogous to the rise of the tearoom: both functioned as sites for fleeting, risky, anonymous sex and provided opportunities for cross-class socializing, becoming a means for teachers to interact with autoworkers, salesmen with college students, and factory supervisors with grocery clerks. The car, however, had the added feature of offering an interior that was specifically designed to be homelike. Moreover, teenagers living at home, married men and labourers who could not afford motel rooms could use their cars for sexual encounters, and if a gay man did not have his own car, he could look for sexual partners who did…To borrow a phrase that George Chauncey has applied to poorer gay men in the 1920s, “privacy could only be had in public.” 235
“George Chauncey, Jr. contends that the capacity of gay men “to build a gay world covertly in the midst of a hostile straight world should be considered a form of resistance, since it was their very ability to keep parts of the gay world invisible that allowed them to circumvent the prohibition of that world.” 243
March 31, 2022
This is an excellent anthology of local LGBTQ history. The only shortcoming is that the selection from Kennedy and Davis is just chapter two of their Buffalo study and not an original contribution.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews