Escoffier explores sexual revolution as an historical process rather than a single event and he identifies the formative role of LGBT struggles within it, and how LGBT agency and queer vernacular knowledge were essential elements in establishing the conditions for radical change. Although every new success enabled a normalizing form of domination, the exercise of democratic action helped to increase the benefits of community and the freedom of sexual perversity.

Providing a vivid look at the producers and consumers of physique magazines, Buying Gay explores the connections―and tensions―between the gay market and the gay movement. It chronicles a network of photographers, artists, book club owners, and pen-pal club organizers that fostered community while challenging Post Office surveillance, paving the way for open expression of homoerotic desire. It argues that gay commerce was not a byproduct of the movement but a catalyst to it.

During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prison forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily Thuma explores the work of these activists who placed criminalized women, and the multiple violences they confronted, at the heart of their organizing. In the process, All Our Trials illuminates a crucial chapter in a struggle that continues in today’s movements against mass incarceration and for transformative justice.