Benjamin E. Wise, William Alexander Percy

Posted on May 21, 2012 by pordo

William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker
Benjamin E. Wise
UNC Press, 2012

“In this evocative biography, Benjamin E. Wise presents the singular life of William Alexander Percy (1885-1942), a queer plantation owner, poet, and memoirist from Mississippi. Though Percy is best known as a conservative apologist of the southern racial order, in this telling Wise creates a complex and surprising portrait of a cultural relativist, sexual liberationist, and white supremacist.

We follow Percy as he travels from Mississippi around the globe and, always, back again to the Delta. Wise’s exploration brings depth and new meaning to Percy’s already compelling life story–his prominent family’s troubled history, his elite education and subsequent soldiering in World War I, his civic leadership during the Mississippi River flood of 1927, his mentoring of writers Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, and the writing and publication of his classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee. This biography sets Percy’s life and search for meaning in the context of his history in the Deep South and his experiences in the gay male world of the early twentieth century. In Wise’s hands, these seemingly disparate worlds become one.”

Benjamin E. Wise is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.

Allan Bérubé, My Desire for History

Posted on March 8, 2011 by CLGBTH

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and friends of Bérubé, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing.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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Whitney Strub, Perversion for Profit

Posted on March 8, 2011 by CLGBTH

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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