Word: lesbian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, to Randy Shilt's best-selling And the Band Played On, to George Chauncey's highly acclaimed Gay New York, the past fifteen years haVE seen a transformation of gay and lesbian history into one of the trendiest fields in publishing and academia...
However, in this increasingly crowded bandwagon of scholarship, no one book has captured all of modern gay and lesbian history. There has been no good reference for the curious, no inclusive suvey, no accessible high school textbook about gay history. Neil Miller's new Out History from 1869 to the Present is such a work...
Miller takes as his central assumption that the defining of the "homosexual" in the late 19th century effectively began the concept of a gay and lesbian culture and shared history. After people began to identify themselves by sexual orientation, gay identity and community developed through a mixture of political and social forces such as psychoanalytic theory, the growth of capitalism, the rise of secularism, the World Wars, the sexual revolution and the power of the left...
Miller traces the development of the modern gay and lesbian community from Walt Whitman's poetry through the Bohemias of the 1920s to the Homophile movement of the 1950s and the age of AIDS, concluding with the first two years of Bill Clinton's presidency. Flipping through the book, you might see the section on the bizarre "Fruit Machine," a device used to detect homosexuality in Canadian civil servants during the 1950s by measuring the how wide a man's pupils dilated when he was shown a picture of a naked man. Such seemingly archaic trivia is engrossing, but most...
Though Miller's book is rare in its equal balance of gay and lesbian history, its geographical slant strongly favors Western cultures. Miller persuasively argues that the trends that led to the formation of a gay identity and community in the West did not appear in other areas until the past decade. Where such trends have developed, such as in Japan or Cuba, he covers them insightfully...