The Deviant's War

Author: Eric Cervini
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY. INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER. New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Winner of the 2021 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. One of The Washington Post's Top 50 Nonfiction Books of 2020. From a young Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, and the Creator and Executive Producer of The Book of Queer (coming June 2022 to Discovery+), the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall. In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back. Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory.

The Deviant's War

Author: Eric Cervini
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374139797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Book Description
A Publishers Weekly most anticipated spring book From a young Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall. In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back. Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War is the story of what followed. This book is an assiduously researched history of an early champion of gay liberation, one who fought for the right to follow his passion and serve his country in the wake of Joseph McCarthy's Lavender Scare. We follow Kameny as he explores the underground gay scenes of Boston and Washington, D.C., where he formulates his arguments against the U.S. Government's classification of gay men and women as "sexual perverts." At a time when staying in the closet remained the default, he exposed the hypocrisies of the American establishment, accelerated a broader revolution in sexual morals, and invented what we now know as Gay Pride. Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory.

Gay Is Good

Author: Michael G. Long
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815652917
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Contrary to popular notions, today’s LGBT movement did not begin with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Long before Stonewall, there was Franklin Kameny (1925–2011), one of the most significant figures in the gay rights movement. Beginning in 1958, he encouraged gay people to embrace homosexuality as moral and healthy, publicly denounced the federal government for excluding homosexuals from federal employment, openly fought the military’s ban against gay men and women, debated psychiatrists who depicted homosexuality as a mental disorder, identified test cases to advance civil liberties through the federal courts, acted as counsel to countless homosexuals suffering state-sanctioned discrimination, and organized marches for gay rights at the White House and other public institutions. In Gay Is Good, Long collects Kameny’s historically rich letters, revealing some of the early stirrings of today’s politically powerful LGBT movement. These letters are lively and colorful because they are in Kameny’s inimitable voice—a voice that was consistently loud, echoing through such places as the Oval Office, the Pentagon, and the British Parliament, and often shrill, piercing to the federal agency heads, military generals, and media personalities who received his countless letters. This volume collects approximately 150 letters from 1958 to 1975, a critical period in Kameny’s life during which he evolved from a victim of the law to a vocal opponent of the law, to the voice of the law itself. Long situates these letters in context, giving historical and biographical data about the subjects and events involved. Gay Is Good pays tribute to an advocate whose tireless efforts created a massive shift in social attitudes and practices, leading the way toward equality for the LGBT community.

The Deviant Prison

Author: Ashley T. Rubin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108484948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Book Description
A compelling examination of the highly criticized use of long-term solitary confinement in Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary during the nineteenth century.

The Gay Revolution

Author: Lillian Faderman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451694121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 832

Book Description
A chronicle of the modern struggle for gay, lesbian and transgender rights draws on interviews with politicians, military figures, legal activists and members of the LGBT community to document the cause's struggles since the 1950s.

Deviant Ways

Author: Chris Mooney
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 067104060X
Category : Private investigators
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Book Description
A psychopath called the Sandman delights in slaughtering families and obliterating neighborhoods--and catching it all on a sophisticated network of surveillance cameras. Detective Jack Casey, a former FBI profiler whose life was shattered by an unspeakable crime, knows the Sandman wants him to witness the mass murders. Now in a race to save the next family, Jack must face his own inner demons.

Deviant Globalization

Author: Nils Gilman
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441178104
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
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Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies

Author: Chris Straayer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231079792
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
On homosexuality in cinema.

Secret City

Author: James Kirchick
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1627792333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 607

Book Description
The New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 Named one of Vanity Fair's “Best Books of 2022” “Not since Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history.” —George Stephanopoulos Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City. For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret “too loathsome to mention” held enormous, terrifying power. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory. Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.

Hoover's War on Gays

Author: Douglas M. Charles
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700621199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
At the FBI, the “Sex Deviates” program covered a lot of ground, literally; at its peak, J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious “Sex Deviates” file encompassed nearly 99 cubic feet or more than 330,000 pages of information. In 1977–1978 these files were destroyed—and it would seem that four decades of the FBI’s dirty secrets went up in smoke. But in a remarkable feat of investigative research, synthesis, and scholarly detective work, Douglas M. Charles manages to fill in the yawning blanks in the bureau’s history of systematic (some would say obsessive) interest in the lives of gay and lesbian Americans in the twentieth century. His book, Hoover’s War on Gays, is the first to fully expose the extraordinary invasion of US citizens’ privacy perpetrated on a historic scale by an institution tasked with protecting American life. For much of the twentieth century, when exposure might mean nothing short of ruin, gay American men and women had much to fear from law enforcement of every kind—but none so much as the FBI, with its inexhaustible federal resources, connections, and its carefully crafted reputation for ethical, by-the-book operations. What Hoover’s War on Gays reveals, rather, is the FBI’s distinctly unethical, off-the-books long-term targeting of gay men and women and their organizations under cover of “official” rationale—such as suspicion of criminal activity or vulnerability to blackmail and influence. The book offers a wide-scale view of this policy and practice, from a notorious child kidnapping and murder of the 1930s (ostensibly by a sexual predator with homosexual tendencies), educating the public about the threat of “deviates,” through WWII’s security concerns about homosexuals who might be compromised by the enemy, to the Cold War’s “Lavender Scare” when any and all gays working for the US government shared the fate of suspected Communist sympathizers. Charles’s work also details paradoxical ways in which these incursions conjured counterefforts—like the Mattachine Society; ONE, Inc.; and the Daughters of Bilitis—aimed at protecting and serving the interests of postwar gay culture. With its painstaking recovery of a dark chapter in American history and its new insights into seemingly familiar episodes of that story—involving noted journalists, politicians, and celebrities—this thorough and deeply engaging book reveals the perils of authority run amok and stands as a reminder of damage done in the name of decency.