In Out in the Union, Miriam Frank chronicles the connections of labor politics with LGBT movements since the 1970s. Featuring in-depth interviews with queer labor activists, Frank examines organizing projects, caucuses, coalitions and collective bargaining to shape an inclusive and national history of the convergence of labor and LGBT interests.

Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants
Phil Tiemeyer
University of California Press, 2013

“In this vibrant new history, Phil Tiemeyer details the history of men working as flight attendants. Beginning with the founding of the profession in the late 1920s and continuing into the post-September 11 era, Plane Queer examines the history of men who joined workplaces customarily identified as female-oriented. It examines the various hardships these men faced at work, paying particular attention to the conflation of gender-based, sexuality-based, and AIDS-based discrimination. Tiemeyer also examines how this heavily gay-identified group of workers created an important place for gay men to come out, garner acceptance from their fellow workers, fight homophobia and AIDS phobia, and advocate for LGBT civil rights. All the while, male flight attendants facilitated key breakthroughs in gender-based civil rights law, including an important expansion of the ways that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act would protect workers from sex discrimination. Throughout their history, men working as flight attendants helped evolve an industry often identified with American adventuring, technological innovation, and economic power into a queer space.”

Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement
Marc Stein
Routledge Press, 2012

“Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement provides a new narrative history of U.S. gay and lesbian activism, drawing on primary research in the field and the best scholarship on the history of the gay and lesbian movement.

Focusing on four decades of social, cultural, and political change in the second half of the twentieth century, Stein examines the changing agendas, beliefs, strategies, and vocabularies of a movement that encompassed diverse actions, campaigns, ideologies, and organizations. From the homophile activism of the 1950s and 1960s, through the rise of gay liberation and lesbian feminism in the 1970s, to the multicultural and AIDS activist movements of the 1980s, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement provides a strong foundation for understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer politics today.

Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement provides a short, accessible overview of an important and transformational struggle for social change, highlighting key individuals and events, influential groups and networks, strong alliances and coalitions, difficult challenges and obstacles, major successes and failures, and the movement’s lasting effects on the country. This volume will be valued by everyone interested in gay and lesbian history, the history of social movements, and the history of the United States.”