Posts com a Tag ‘LGBT’

In 1974, when I announced to my faculty adviser that I intended to do a dissertation on some aspect of the history of homosexuality, the decision represented an act of faith on my part. At that point, there was no “gay history,” the phrase I would have then used among my peers. The year before, I had met Jonathan Ned Katz, who, together with me and a few others in New York, founded the Gay Academic Union as an effort to bring researchers of various sorts together to explore how our skills could be used to support the gay liberation movement. Katz had already written a play, Coming Out!, whose script was drawn entirely from documents he had discovered related to the history of homosexuality in the United States. He was continuing to pursue that research, and it would culminate in the massive documentary collection, Gay American History, that he published in 1976.1 Gay American History was a groundbreaking—indeed, revolutionary—piece of work. But, to me, still in the early stages of dissertation research, documents that stretched across 350 years of history on a broad range of topics— law, culture, science, social life, and more—did not necessarily demonstrate the feasibility of writing the kind of tightly knit, focused monograph that a history department expected from a graduate student. Leia Mais