A colorful portrait gallery of gay leaders, full of compelling figures and challenging ideas.
Queer activists’ fights for gay rights and other causes are explored in this probing collection of essays by Duberman.
In this work, the author, a City University of New York historian, has gathered pieces that appeared in the Gay & Lesbian Review and other publications, most of them biographical profiles that illuminate key aspects of the gay liberation movement. His subjects include Edward Sagarin, who broached the then-radical idea of gay self-acceptance in his 1951 book The Homosexual in America but later became a pariah in the movement for clinging to the belief that gayness is a psychological disorder; sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who exuberantly embraced a wide range of sexual behaviors as normal; Sylvia Ray Rivera, the celebrated trans activist who argued for opening a carefully buttoned-down gay rights movement to drag queens; Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist who denounced sexism in the gay rights movement; Joe Carstairs, a lesbian and champion speedboat racer who did whatever she wanted, gender norms be damned; and the group Queers for Economic Justice, co-founded by the author, which calls for solidarity between unions, socialists, and gay rights groups. Throughout, Duberman advances a stalwart radicalism: He advocates for building broad alliances between embattled minorities, rejecting rigid sex roles, celebrating erotic fluidity, and questioning monogamous marriage and the nuclear family. Duberman’s sparkling, whip-smart prose mixes bracing political analysis with vivid, gossipy evocations of his subjects, many of whom he knew personally. His portrait of Dworkin, for example, brings out both her in-private gentleness—after an argument, she shyly presented him with a bouquet of flowers—and the strident maximalism of her theorizing (“She also reinforced my already strong conviction that women, gay men, and people of color were involved in a common political struggle against a shared oppressor: the dominance of the heterosexual White male”). The result is an absorbing set of dispatches from the queer revolution.
A colorful portrait gallery of gay leaders, full of compelling figures and challenging ideas.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9798988815006
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
HISTORY | MODERN | UNITED STATES | LGBTQ
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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