My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History
Allan Bérubé
John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, eds.
UNC Press, 2011

This anthology pays tribute to Allan Bérubé (1946-2007), a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990), Bérubé also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, who were close colleagues and friends of Bérubé, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing. The book provides a retrospective on Bérubé’s life and work while it documents the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, the essays attest to the power of history to mobilize individuals and communities to create social change.

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Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
Whitney Strub
Columbia University Press, 2010

While America is not alone in its ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the preferences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. This pattern has grown even more pronounced since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the “floodtide of filth” that was supposedly sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right’s political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the “family values” agenda that shifted the country to the right.

Perversion for Profit traces the anatomy of this trend and the crucial function of pornography in constructing the New Right agenda, which has emphasized social issues over racial and economic inequality. Conducting his own extensive research, Whitney Strub vividly recreates the debates over obscenity that consumed members of the ACLU in the 1950s and revisits the deployment of obscenity charges against purveyors of gay erotica during the cold war, revealing the differing standards applied to heterosexual and homosexual pornography. He follows the rise of the influential Citizens for Decent Literature during the 1960s and the pivotal events that followed: the sexual revolution, feminist activism, the rise of the gay rights movement, the “porno chic” moment of the early 1970s, and resurgent Christian conservatism, which now shapes public policy far beyond the issue of sexual decency.

Strub also examines the ways in which the left failed to mount a serious or sustained counterattack to the New Right’s use of pornography as a political tool. As he demonstrates, this failure put the Democratic Party at the mercy of Republican rhetoric. In placing debates about pornography at the forefront of American postwar history, Strub revolutionizes our understanding of sex and American politics.

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Queer Twin Cities
Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project
University of Minnesota Press, 2010

The Twin Cities is home to one of the largest and most vital GLBT populations in the nation—and one of the highest percentages of gay residents in the country. Drawn from the pioneering work of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project—a collective organization of students, scholars, and activists devoted to documenting and interpreting the lives of GLBT people in Minneapolis and St. Paul—Queer Twin Cities is a uniquely critical collection of essays on Minnesota’s vibrant queer communities, past and present.

A rich blend of oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Queer Twin Cities uses sexuality to chart connections between people’s lives in Minnesota. Topics range from turn-of-the-century Minneapolis amid moral reform—including the highly publicized William Williams murder trial and efforts to police Bridge Square, aka “skid row”—to northern Minnesota and the importance of male companionship among lumber workers, and to postwar life, when the increased visibility of queer life went hand in hand with increased regulation, repression, and violence. Other essays present a portrait of early queer spaces in the Twin Cities, such as Kirmser’s Bar, the Viking Room, and the Persian Palms, and the proliferation of establishments like the Dugout and the 19 Bar. Exploring the activism of GLBTTwo-Spirit indigenous people, the antipornography movements of the 1980s, and the role of gay men in the gentrification of Minneapolis neighborhoods, this volume brings the history of queer life and politics in the Twin Cities into fascinating focus.

Engaging and revelatory, Queer Twin Cities offers a critical analysis of local history and community and fills a glaring omission in the culture and history of Minnesota, looking not only to a remarkable past but to our collective future.

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