The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives & Gay Identities - A Twentieth-Century History - Hardcover

Loughery, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805038965 ISBN 13: 9780805038965

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1998

Synopsis

The only study of gay male history covering the United States since World War I.

Based on hundreds of interviews, new and classic texts, and little-known archival sources, an award-winning writer offers the first narrative history to consider signal moments, general trs, and the multiple meanings of "gay identity" in the whole United States from World War I to the AIDS era and "queer" activism.

The most readable, authoritative, and comprehensive investigation ever, The Other Side of Silence combines history and anecdote, politics and theory to reveal the personalities and textures of a largely unknown culture. A dramatic chronicle of seventy-five years of persecution and accomplishment, the book addresses both in equal detail: witch hunts in schools and the military, crusades of psychiatrists, the resistance long before Stonewall, the inspiring pioneers and activists.

From Newport and the private-party networks of Nebraska and Florida's Emma Jones Society to gay rodeos, athletes, and support groups, here are first-hand accounts of what it has meant (and might mean in the future) to be a sexual outsider in the United States.

About this title

About the Author

Hailed by Jonathan Yardley as a "balanced, discriminating, and, in the best sense of the word, sympathetic" writer, John Loughery is the author of Alias S. S. Van Dine and the Pulitzer Prize-finalist John Sloan (Owl Books, 0-8050-5221-6). He lives in New York City.

Reviews

Loughery's valuable contribution is to add fresh voices (he interviewed scores of gay men around the country) and to bring together almost a century of gay history in one very readable volume.

Neither as academically rigorous as George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994) nor as entertainingly gossipy as Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis (1997), this broader history nevertheless fills in new swaths of our emerging picture of 20th-century gay life. Although some of Loughery's research will come as old news to readers familiar with the Chauncey and Kaiser books (and lesser-known studies by Jonathan Ned Katz, Allan Berube and John D'Emilio), he includes plenty of unfamiliar material too, for instance, his account of a 1919 plot by then assistant secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt to use sexually enthusiastic sailors as spies and informers on the homosexual population of the Navy base in Newport, R.I. Also here are detailed chronicles of gay demonstrations in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Fort Belvoir, Va., that led to New York City's epochal Stonewall riots of 1969. Despite several awkward segues, this freshly assimilated material?along with passages of fertile, personal speculation on possible futures for American sexuality?makes Loughery's study a valuable contribution to the collective portrait of American male homosexuality in our century. Loughery is the art critic of Hudson Review and author of John Sloan: Painter and Rebel. Photos. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Loughery, who has told individual life stories before (e.g., John Sloan: Painter and Rebel, 1995), here attempts the more daunting task of telling a whole community's personal and political history. His prodigiously researched source materials--acknowledged in a rich bibliographic essay at the end--include gay and lesbian archives, newspapers, periodicals, books, and his own interviews with many old enough to remember gay life 60 years ago. The title of the book--taken from the name of a 1970s theater company--points to its centering theme: that the history of gay men in America is the story of a silence learning to speak. Loughery mediates a host of voices, many not generally known, from Harlem Renaissance writer Alain Locke and pioneering gay psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan in the 1920s and '30s, to playwright Mart Crowley, politician Harvey Milk, and scholar John Boswell of more recent history. Topics addressed include the military and WWII, gay bars and baths, literature, Freudianism, the gay press and bookstores, transvestism, homophile (later gay liberation) societies, Stonewall, and gay rights bills. Loughery does not always meet the challenge of integrating the material to hold the reader's interest from one topic to the next: For example, all that binds the histories of Florida's gay Mardi Gras, San Francisco's Society for Individual Rights, and the Metropolitan Community Church, which Loughery subsumes under a single heading, is their origin among gay men in the 1960s. In places, the books reads like a succession of self-contained encyclopedia articles--a feature that is perhaps inevitable in the history of a community which, as Loughery notes in his final, ironically self-questioning chapter, ``Divergent Paths,'' may be more ``useful fiction'' than fact. A good index will help this fact-filled, but not always plot-driven, history communicate its insights to a wider-than-gay audience. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Beginning with a 1919 scandal in Newport, RI, and ending in the 1990s, Loughery uses a variety of sources, including interviews, archival materials, and secondary sources, as he vividly conveys the evolution of a gay male identity in America. Largely focused on white urban men, it is nevertheless more analytical and inclusive of class and race than Charles Kaiser's anecdotal The Gay Metropolis, 1940-1996 (LJ 11/15/97) and extends the geographical parameters to include the "self-conscious, self-directed social world" of gay life throughout the United States. The role of literature is highlighted as both document and promoter of the development of sexual identity. This extremely readable narrative history wisely eschews claims to be "definitive" or "comprehensive" as it chronicles the accomplishments and setbacks of this important political and social movement. Unfortunately marred by occasional redundancies, disorganization, and other minor errors, it is nonetheless recommended for subject collections.?James Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805038965
• ISBN 13: 9780805038965
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 527