Not that long ago, an eager reader could have read in a single summer all the books on LGBTQ+ history that had been written. Now, more and more books are being published all the time. “Book Shelf” is an attempt to introduce you to some of those books and encourage you to read them and learn more about their subjects. We provide short summaries of the book and a link to the publisher's website. The Book Shelf highlights the most recent five books added and then features all of our books in alphabetical order. If you are an author and want us to add your book to the Book Shelf, please contact us at marcs@sfsu.edu.
Freewheeling sexuality and gender experimentation defined the social and moral landscape of 1890s San Francisco. Middle class whites crafting titillating narratives on topics such as high divorce rates, mannish women, and extramarital sex centered Chinese and Japanese immigrants in particular.
Amy Sueyoshi draws on everything from newspapers to felony case files to oral histories in order to examine how whites' pursuit of gender and sexual fulfillment gave rise to racial caricatures. As she reveals, white reporters, writers, artists, and others conflated Chinese and Japanese, previously seen as two races, into one. There emerged the Oriental—a single pan-Asian American stereotype weighted with sexual and gender meaning. Sueyoshi bridges feminist, queer, and ethnic studies to show how the white quest to forge new frontiers in gender and sexual freedom reinforced—and spawned—racial inequality through the ever evolving Oriental.
Informed and fascinating, Discriminating Sex reconsiders the origins and expression of racial stereotyping in an American city.
During World War II, Mom Chung's was the place to be in San Francisco. Soldiers, movie stars, and politicians gathered at her home to socialize, to show their dedication to the Allied cause, and to express their affection for Dr. Margaret Chung (1889-1959). The first known American-born Chinese female physician, Chung established one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1920s. She also became a prominent celebrity and behind-the-scenes political broker during World War II. Chung gained national fame when she began "adopting" thousands of soldiers, sailors, and flyboys, including Ronald Reagan, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. A pioneer in both professional and political realms, Chung experimented in her personal life as well. She adopted masculine dress and had romantic relationships with other women, such as writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker.
This is the first biography to explore Margaret Chung's remarkable and complex life. It brings alive the bohemian and queer social milieus of Hollywood and San Francisco as well as the wartime celebrity community Chung cultivated. Her life affords a rare glimpse into the possibilities of traversing racial, gender, and sexual boundaries of American society from the late Victorian era through the early Cold War period.
Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. As key sites of cultural and political significance, this volume shows the essential role these institutions served for multiple social justice movements including women’s liberation, LGBTQ equality, and food justice, as well as for training women workers and entrepreneurs.
This systematic study outlines the crucial steps it took to establish these businesses during eras when sexism was so institutionalized it was difficult for unmarried women to obtain a bank loan, while also showing the continuities and influences of past businesses on contemporary places. Through an examination of important establishments across America, Alex D. Ketchum first examines the foundational principles behind these businesses, noting key differences between cooperative, for-profit, and non-profit models. She then looks to issues of financing, labour, pay, food sourcing, and cultural programming to understand how these organizations reconciled feminist beliefs with capitalism and how they strove for more equitable and sustainable business practices.
Brimming with illuminating archival research, interviews with influential restaurateurs, and illustrated with photographs, menus, posters, and calendars, Ingredients for Revolution is a fundamental work of women’s history, food history, and cultural history.
After World War II, Atlanta and Charlotte emerged as leading urban centers in the South, redefining the region through their competing metropolitan identities. Both cities also served as home to queer communities who defined themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings and profited to varying degrees from the emphasis on economic growth. Uniting southern women's history with urban history, La Shonda Mims considers an imaginatively constructed archive including feminist newsletters and queer bar guides alongside sources revealing corporate boosterism and political rhetoric to explore the complex nature of lesbian life in the South.
Mims's work reveals significant differences between gay men's and lesbian women's lived experiences, with lesbians often missing out on the promises of prosperity that benefitted some members of gay communities. Money, class, and race were significant variables in shaping the divergent life experiences for the lesbian communities of Atlanta and Charlotte; whiteness especially bestowed certain privileges. In Atlanta, an inclusive corporate culture bolstered the city's queer community. In Charlotte, tenacious lesbian collectives persevered, as many queer Charlotteans leaned on Atlanta's enormous Pride celebrations for sanctuary when similar institutional community supports were lacking at home.
Stranger Intimacy explores cross-racial intimacy and everyday life of migrants in cities and rural regions in the Western United States and the Canadian and Mexican borderlands. Tracing the labor, sexual and domestic experiences of South Asian migrants in the early 20th century, Shah examines more than a hundred cases of illicit sexual contact between South Asian, white, European immigrant, Chinese, and Native American males.
Connecting capitalism, policing practices, racialization, and the regulation of domesticity and sexuality, Nayan Shah scours court records, immigration bureaucracies, and news accounts for rich and vibrant stories of non-normative sociality among multi-racial transient migrants in the early twentieth century. Building a social tapestry, Stranger Intimacy depicts a diverse public world of belonging and the ways that ethics care, sensations and cultural frames create the grounds for both alliances and conflicts.
The book reveals how intimate acts and relationships are policed, surveilled and punished and the how local, national and international government operate together to create racial and sexual prohibitions that erupted in the breaking of tenancy contracts, destroy housing arrangements, and lead to forfeiture of lands and property,
Shah unsettles official attempts to pin down migrants, to fix them in place in nuclear family households, within proper heterosexual constraints. Charting the contested terrains of western North America a century ago, with their complex border crossings, couplings, and collectives, this book radically enhances understandings of estrangement and belonging today.
LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements. Lavender and Red recounts a far different story: a history of queer radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war, and…
This authoritative reference guide covers the first twelve years of the organized homophile/gay liberation movement in Canada, from 1964 (when the Association for Social Knowledge [ASK], Canada's first large-scale homophile organization, was formed in Vancouver) through 1975 (the year of the…
This comprehensive reference guide is a continuation of Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada: A Selected Annotated Chronology, 1964–1975. It starts where the first volume left off, and highlights some of the seminal events and people involved in the fight for gay rights in Canada to the end of 1981.…
Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s is an edited companion volume to Loftin’s monograph, Masked Voices. Letters to ONE contains 127 letters written from 1953 to 1965 to the first openly gay magazine in the United States. Most of the letters reproduced in this book were…
Bayard Rustin is one of the most important social justice activists in mid-twentieth-century U.S. history. He was a critical figure in the movement for racial justice and equality. Before Martin Luther King, Jr., before Malcolm X, Rustin was working to bring the cause to the forefront of America’s…
Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America analyzes approximately 1000 letters written to ONE, the first openly gay magazine in the United States, from 1953 to 1965. In these letters, a diverse cross-section of gay men and lesbians across the U.S. and beyond shared their anxieties about…
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America was first published in 1991 by Columbia University Press; won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award for non-fiction in 1992; was selected as the “Editor’s Choice” at the…
Between 1873 and 1879, the Prefecture of the Police in Paris kept a ledger of arrests for public offenses against decency, which they entitled “Pederasts and Others.” In it they included male prostitutes, thieves, and vagrants, as well as men who sought the company and sexual favors of other men. In…
In September 1897 Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) contemplated crafting a poem to his new love, western writer Charles Warren Stoddard. Recently arrived in California, Noguchi was in awe of the established writer and the two had struck up a passionate correspondence. Still, he viewed their relationship as…
Eight gay men wrote their autobiographies in French between 1845 and 1905: some of them reflected on their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; others provided brief impressions of their loves and desires. A few of them dramatized their lives following contemporary theatrical and fictional models,…
Over the course of the last half century, queer history has developed as a collaborative project involving academic researchers, community scholars, and the public. Initially rejected by most colleges and universities, queer history was sustained for many years by community-based contributors and…
Queering the Redneck Riviera recovers the forgotten and erased history of gay men and lesbians in North Florida, a region often overlooked in the story of the LGBTQ experience in the United States. Jerry Watkins reveals both the challenges these men and women faced in the years following World War…
Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement by Marc Stein, published originally in 2012 and revised for a second edition in 2023, is a volume in a Routledge book series on U.S. social movements. The book was written primarily for classroom use and public education purposes. It provides a…
Sapphistries tells the stories of women (and female-bodied individuals who might not have identified as women) who have desired, loved, and had sex with women from the beginning of time to the present and all around the globe. Leila Rupp draws on an extensive body of literature to fashion a…
Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010, critically examines the development of a doctrine of “heteronormative supremacy” in U.S. law in the period from 1965 to 1973. It offers in-depth analyses of six…
“It Didn’t Start with Stonewall.” That’s the key message of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, a history of gay and lesbian activism in the decades before the Stonewall uprising of 1969. John D’Emilio covers the work of little-known organizations like the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of…
Who, and what, is “heterosexual”? How did we come to think about ourselves, and our sexualities, in terms of something called “heterosexuality” and what does it mean that we do? These questions are at the core of Hanne Blank’s Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, a look at…
Stranger Intimacy explores cross-racial intimacy and everyday life of migrants in cities and rural regions in the Western United States and the Canadian and Mexican borderlands. Tracing the labor, sexual and domestic experiences of South Asian migrants in the early 20th century, Shah examines more…
Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present was first published in 1981 by William Morrow; was a New York Times Notable Book of 1981; won the Stonewall Book Award in 1982; was named by Lambda Literary Review as One of the 100 Best…
Eve Adams was a rebel. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912. The young woman took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York.
Then, in 1925, Adams…