Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays that demonstrate how LGBT people played critical roles in local, state, and national politicsIn the 1970s, queer Americans demanded access not only to health and social services but also to mainstream Democratic and Republican Party politics. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s made the battles for access to welfare, health care, and social services for HIV-positive Americans, many of them gay men, a critically important story in the changing relationship between sexual minorities and the government. The 1980s and 1990s marked a period in which religious right attacks on the civil rights of minorities, including LGBT people, offered opportunities for activists to create campaigns that could mobilize a base in mainstream politics and contribute to the gradual legitimization of sexual minorities in American society. Beyond the Politics of the Closet features essays by historians whose work on LGBT history delves into the decades between the mid-1970s and the millennium,
Trade Review"
Beyond the Politics of the Closet draws together scholars ready to steer the histories of American governance and politics in new directions. By centering LGBT people, these writers reveal that LGBT politics transformed the state and realigned the nation's electoral coalitions at the end of the twentieth century." * Christopher Agee, University of Colorado, Denver *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Privilege, Power, and Activism in Gay Rights Politics Since the 1970s
Jonathan Bell
Part I. Public Policy Comes Out: The 1970s
1. A Clinic Comes Out: Idealism, Pragmatism, and Gay Health Services in Boston, 1971-1985
Catherine Batza
2. "A Ray of Sunshine": Housing, Family, and Gay Political Power in 1970s Los Angeles
Ian M. Baldwin
3. Making Sexual Citizens: LGBT politics, health care, and the State in the 1970s
Jonathan Bell
Part II. Confronting AIDS
4. AIDS and the Urban Crisis: Stigma, Cost, and the Persistence of Racism in Chicago, 1981-1996
Timothy Stewart-Winter
5. "Don't We Die Too?" The Politics of AIDS and Race in Philadelphia
Dan Royles
6. Black Gay Lives Matter: Mobilizing Sexual Identities in the Eras of Reagan and Thatcher Conservativism
Kevin Mumford
Part III. Beyond Liberalism and Conservatism
7. Gay and Conservative: An Early History of the Log Cabin Republicans
Clayton Howard
8. "No Discrimination and No Special Rights": Gay Rights, Family Values, and the Politics of Moderation in the 1992 Election
Rachel Guberman
9. Homophobia Baiting: Queering the Trayvon Martin Archives and Challenging the Anti-Blackness of Colorblind Politics
Julio Capó, Jr.
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
