The astonishing tale of Fay Etrange—republished in its original unexpurgated formFirst published in 1932, A Scarlet Pansy is an extraordinarily vivid and richly textured depiction of American queer life in the early twentieth century, tracing the coming-of-age of androgynous Fay Etrange. Born in small-town Pennsylvania and struggling with her difference, Fay eventually accepts her gender and sexual nonconformity and immerses herself in the fairy subculture...

Gentleman Jigger stands as a landmark novel, celebrated for its candid exploration of Black sexuality set against the dynamic backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. The story follows Stuartt, a defiantly queer artist, who navigates the complexities of racial and sexual identity in a period of profound cultural upheaval. Originating from a distinguished light-skinned Black family in Washington D.C., Stuartt immerses himself into the burgeoning arts scene of Harlem, where he aligns wit...

Following the discovery of an anonymous libretto, Abner Blossom comes out of retirement to write an opera based on the life of infamous novelist-turned-photographer Cyril Vane. But those who knew Vane and his Russian-born wife, the silent-screen star Madame Olga Petrovna, are prepared to go to any length to suppress the truth about them. Vane’s dark secret follows him to the grave. But his jealous and vengeful widow and her faded cronies employ all the means at their disposal to prevent th...

On its surface, I Am Elijah Thrush is the story of Millicent De Frayne and her sensational half-century campaign to win the love of Elijah Thrush. Elijah, after ruining the lives of countless men and women, is finally in love “incorrectly, if not indecently,” with his great-grandson, Bird of Heaven. To support an unusual habit, a young Black man, Albert Peggs, reluctantly agrees to tell their remarkable story. It is in this telling that the ambitions, desires, and true natures of ...

Challenging widely held assumptions about postwar gay male culture and politics, Homosexuality in Cold War America examines how gay men in the 1950s resisted pressures to remain in the closet. Robert J. Corber argues that a form of gay male identity emerged in the 1950s that simultaneously drew on and transcended left-wing opposition to the Cold War cultural and political consensus. Combining readings of novels, plays, and films of the period with historical research into the nati...

In his bestselling book The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian (1965), Jess Stearn announced that, contrary to the assumptions of many Americans, most lesbians appeared indistinguishable from other women. They could mingle “congenially in conventional society.” Some were popular sex symbols; some were married to unsuspecting husbands. Robert J. Corber contends that The Grapevine exemplified a homophobic Cold War discourse that portrayed the femme as an...

In the Name of National Security exposes the ways in which the films of Alfred Hitchcock, in conjunction with liberal intellectuals and political figures of the 1950s, fostered homophobia so as to politicize issues of gender in the United States.As Corber shows, throughout the 1950s a cast of mind known as the Cold War consensus prevailed in the United States. Promoted by Cold War liberals--that is, liberals who wanted to perserve the legacies of the New Deal but also wishe...

All that Hollywood Allows explores the representation of gender in popular Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. Both a work of feminist film criticism and theory and an analysis of popular culture, this provocative book examines from a cultural studies perspective top-grossing film melodramas, such as A Streetcar Named Desire, From Here to Eternity, East of Eden, Imitation of Life and Picnic.Stereotypically viewed as a complacent and idyllic time, the 1950s ...

A pioneer of LGBTQ studies dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. The genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised stereotypes—aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers—and in the social meaning of style.

This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other ad...

In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives—autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs—are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples from throughout the world and from premodern as well as contemporary cultures, they draw from labor history and class analysis, feminist sociology, race relations, and an...

The Feminist Spectator as Criticbroke new ground as one of the pioneering books on feminist spectatorship, encouraging resistant readings to generate feminist meanings in performance. Approaching live spectatorship through a range of interdisciplinary methods, the book has been foundational in theater studies, performance studies, and gender/sexuality/women's studies. This updated and enlarged second edition celebrates the book's twenty-fifth anniversary with a substantial new int...