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This book is a historiographic exploration of the first wave of films made as a part of the consolidation of gay liberation movement politics and philosophy in the U.S. between the mid 1940s and the late 1970s. It looks at how numerous kinds of film, movie-going contexts and industrial materials (advertisements, posters, reviews) operated in relation to gay liberationist discourse. A primary consideration is how this body of 200+ films—including home movies, avant-garde and experimental films, feature length independent dramas, and hardcore porn—moved beyond representational concerns to offer complex elaborations of what it might mean to be a participant in gay life. The book weaves together an expansive range of archival materials and case studies, exploring how proto gay and gay liberation era cinema took form through discourses both dominant and countercultural, how specific places and moments fostered censorship-challenging, antinormative cinema and cinema-going practices, and how gay cinema facilitated new and emergent publics. Through four chapters, the book charts changes in film and promotion as the sociopolitical organization of male-desiring men moved from a discourse of homosexuality to one of gay liberation, showing how both were taken up as self-reflexive zones of cultural production and performance.

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, black gay men produced a rich and diverse body of cultural work—poetry, fiction, literary journals and anthologies, magazines, newspapers, performance and visual art—to narrate their experiences with and everyday struggles against racism, homophobia, capitalism, and HIV/AIDS. This book discusses this cultural renaissance, and focuses on activities in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Drawing on literary analysis, archival materials, oral histories, and interviews, the book demonstrates how black gay men used these literary and cultural forms to address trauma and violence in their communities, build connections among black gay men, engage in political mobilization, and assert more complex narratives of racial, gender, and sexual selfhood. Individual chapters focus on the magazine Blacklight and the performance group Cinque; the works of Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam; the history and cultural production of writers’ group, Other Countries Collective; and the diaries of poet, novelist, translator, and scholar Melvin Dixon.

This book explores the worship and community central to the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), a coalition of predominantly African American, LGBT congregations with a Pentecostal style of worship. TFAM's central doctrine is "radical inclusivity," a commitment to embrace all those who might have been rejected or marginalized by mainstream black churches, but which has been expanded to include all persons regardless of race, sexuality, or religious background. The book looks closely at how TFAM worship is legitimated through the use of historical insignia of black culture, how it challenges traditional concepts of charismatic leadership, and how it elaborates ideas about authenticity.

Before the movement commonly described as “gay liberation” was well under way, queer life in the United States is sometimes thought to have been a veritable prison of shame, repression, illegality, and invisibility. Indeed during the 1950s, on the very eve of the “liberation,” the United States experienced an especially harsh, widespread outbreak of homophobia—with countless arrests, lost jobs, even lost lives, in a fierce cultural orgy of mandatory heterosexuality. Focusing on several American males who lived before the “liberation,” in stories of agency as well as agony, of fulfillment and pleasure as well as thwarted desire and self-loathing, Men without Maps freshly explores the actual quality of life for those “of the generation before Stonewall” who yearned for and sometimes experienced sexual involvements with other men. A few of the men studied are moderately well known today, but most are not. The involvements of some with other men were examples of long-lasting gay domesticity, while the encounters that others had were fleeting. Relying mostly on archival material--such as letters, memoirs, and snapshots--previously unused by a scholar, the book first explores those midcentury males, more numerous than usually realized, who lived as part of a male couple; it then examines experiences of solitary queer men who found coupling to be either unappealing or simply unattainable. Men without Maps joins John Ibson’s acclaimed previous books, Picturing Men and The Mourning After, to form a trilogy of studies, from varying angles, of male relationships in modern American society.

This book examines the perceptions, regulations, and experiences of non-normative (queer) sexualities in Hungary between 1873, when Budapest became a unified metropolis, and the decriminalization of consensual same sex acts in 1961. In considering the relationship between political systems and the regulation and policing of sexuality, the book illustrates that across different and ideologically opposed systems, tolerance of some forms of homosexuality co-existed with increased surveillance of homosexuals. While it excavates a thriving homosexual culture across illiberal political regimes, the book also describes how these regimes consciously and even retroactively erased historical documents about the presence and tolerance of homosexuals. More broadly, the book provides a historical analysis of the evolution of East-Central European states. It elucidates how the management of non-normative sexual and gender behavior was intimately tied to Hungarian state-building. Rather than a marginal issue, the way officials handled non-normative sexuality was an important marker of Budapest’s and the Hungarian state’s place among rapidly modernizing European nation-states. That Hungarian authorities incorporated the ideas of Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud into their treatment of non-normative sexualities, at times ahead of their Western counterparts, offers evidence that Budapest was not a cultural backwater but was instead an important participant in a European conversation usually associated with Berlin, London, and Paris.

This book is centered on a surprisingly simple image: a newborn baby simultaneously crying out and drawing its first breath. These twin ideas—absorption and expulsion, the intake of physical and emotional nourishment, and the exhalation of breath—form the backbone of this book. These titular bodies range from fetuses in utero to fully eroticized adults, all the way to celestial giants floating in space. The author illustrates his exploration of the body's capacities to receive and resist what is ostensibly alien using a typically eclectic set of sources, from literary icons like Marquis de Sade to cinematic provocateurs such as Bruno Dumont and Lars von Trier. This book will be of interest to scholars of Freud, Foucault, and film studies, or anyone who has ever stopped to ponder the give and take of human corporeality.

In the mid-twentieth century, gay life flourished in American cities even as the legal repression of queer communities reached its peak. Liquor investigators infiltrated and shut down gay-friendly bars. Plainclothes decoys entrapped men in parks and clubs. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors. This book chronicles that painful history, tracing the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics inspired in court. Exploring the internal dynamics of anti-gay policing, it reveals that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of sexual difference, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of same-sex practices. Far from universally embraced, the project of anti-gay policing inspired deep contestation within the criminal justice system, reflecting political, institutional, and pragmatic disputes often unrelated to the legal status of homosexuality. At the same time, legal battles over anti-gay policing provided a powerful arena for testing the era’s shifting understandings of same-sex practices, bringing the weight of the law to bear in deciding which public or professional beliefs about homosexuality were authoritative and often transforming their political significance. The policing of gay life at mid-century provides a powerful case study of the complex intersections between state repression and public knowledge about marginalized social groups: how the possibilities of police power reflect the law’s many ways of understanding—and misunderstanding—the very thing being policed.