Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.6 / 5.0

Fresh Thinking About Gay History:

Chauncey's book offers serious and original thinking about queer history and about general urban history as well. Freed from the myths that have persisted about the place of homosexuals in U.S. society, the author paints a new portrait of what transpired just before the turn of the last century and into the early decades of the 20th century.

The most important idea he explains is that the concepts of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" as we understand them today didn't exist one hundred years ago.... more info

Excellent!:

Chauncey's book is extremely well-written, and very informative. It is truly a historical triumph. It unabashedly delves into the complicated constructs that we in the gay community have built around sexuality, and how those constructs play themselves out in the larger society. Chauncey also does an incredible job getting the reader into the mindset of the early 20th Century New Yorker and illustrating how different that mindeset is from our present day thinking. However, it is fascinating to see how much... more info

A treasure chest of forgotten lore:

This book was preceded in my conciousness by high critical praise and so I approached it with great expectations. And in great part it met these expectations.

More than anything else, this is a work of love, being the excavation of forgotten facts in the history of gay life as it was lived by decades of gay men, experiences now mostly forgotten or scattered in obscure and fading documents. It is an extraordinary work of social archeology, resurrecting a world I never knew exisited. And Chauncey does this... more info

Similar Products:

Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities by John D'Emilio

The Gay Metropolis by Charles Kaiser

A Consumers' Republic : The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America by LIZABETH COHEN

Sex in the Heartland by Beth Bailey

Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 by Sarah Deutsch

?