Word: lesbian
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...Past is formatted like a high school history book. The majority of the text is historical narrative, while smaller sections profile major players in gay and lesbian history like Marguerite Yourcenar and Michel Foucault or present excerpts from important and representative texts about the gay experience of the period. The first time Miller mentions an important figure, his or her name is highlighted with bold type. This familiar form makes the book incredibly accessible and straight-forward...
...highlighting people literally and within his text, Miller emphasizes the actions of individuals over events or trends in gay and lesbian history. Miller's stress on the person serves several purposes. First and most sublime, this tactic is reader friendly. We love to read personal narratives...
Second, it is a great way to measure the historical gay and lesbian population. This technique brings to light important figures in history, but is somewhat problematic. Though some of the figures he mentions have not been proven to be gay or lesbian, Miller claims them anyway. He knows that he will get flack for his discussions onfEleanor Roosevelt and Langston Hughes, so he props up his rhetoric. The fact that their sexuality (and that of others') is ambigous or incomplete, he says, "elucidate[s] the lack of sexual clarity of the times in which they lived." Still, there...
Third, reading these biographies shows the suffering and pain this population has endured to reach its contemporary status. To Miller's credit, the profiles are not always congratulatory, and fairly portray both the negative and the positive episodes in gay and lesbian history...
...remarkably political in its use of scholarship and sources, Out of the Past avoids this bent. While Boswell undermined the Christian condemnation of homosexuality and Shilts exposed government inaction and corruption, Miller is just providing a resource. Some might say that just claiming the existence of a gay and lesbian history is a political statement, but Miller's book proves that this is an invalid point. Out of the Past is an accessible, entertaining and thorough reference to a subject whose scope we are just now discovering...