On Sale: Aug 1, 2008
Page Count: 496 pages
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN-13: 9780786723355

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The “monumental” (The Washington Post), field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century

Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed in the closet, where all gay men were isolated, invisible, and ashamed. Based on years of research in diaries, letters, newspaper stories, and police reports, George Chauncey describes the saloons, speakeasies, and streets where queer men gathered; the intimate parties and immense drag balls where they celebrated; the highly visible residential enclaves they built in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square; and the complex prewar sexual culture they inhabited, which did not divide men into heterosexuals and homosexuals. It offers new perspectives on the LGBT rights revolution of our time by showing that the oppression the movement attacked in the 1960s was not unchanging, but had intensified in the 1930s as a direct response to the visibility of the prewar gay world.

Awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Organization of American Historians' prize for the best first book in any field of history upon its publication in 1994, Gay New York remains a revelatory account of a long-forgotten world and the most widely taught book in American LGBT history.

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George Chauncey

About the Author

George Chauncey is professor of American history at the University of Chicago and the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, which won the distinguished Turner and Curti Awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award.

He testified as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination at the 1993 trial of Colorado’s Amendment Two, which resulted in the Supreme Court’s Romer v. Evans decision that antigay rights referenda were unconstitutional, and he was the principal author of the Historians’ Amicus Brief, which weighed heavily in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision overturning sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives and works in Chicago.

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