Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.

I feel I will always owe Ned Katz an enormous debt of gratitude for this early classic compendium on gay and lesbian history in the USA. First, he is both sincere and thorough in his feminism and determination to give lesbians equal representation and thoughtful analysis. Second, he might be said

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to have been the first to open my eyes to the full range of psychic terrors, traumas and horrors that constituted gay life in the USA from the 1940s to late 1960s. The testimonies of young men beaten within an inch of their lives with no recourse at law, education, family, or police; the lesbians dragged off to shock therapy and institutionalization; and, more so, the less dramatic but pervasive stories of silencing, violence, shaming, threat, marginalization, and multiple, insidious assault. We have not yet even come close to understanding the traumas and desolations of that period, nor the more fundamental forces that caused homophobia to erupt in a putatively democratic society that had just borne witness--however much at a remove--to the Holocaust. Thanks, Ned--you opened my young eyes to what my immediate gay ancestors had endured.

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