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Product Description
With this book, Leila J. Rupp accomplishes what few scholars have even attempted: she combines a vast array of scholarship on supposedly discrete episodes in American history into an entertaining and entirely readable story of same-sex desire across the country and the centuries.
"Most extraordinary about Leila J. Rupp's indeed short, two-hundred-page history of 'same-sex love and sexuality' is not that it manages to account for such a variety of individuals, races, and classes or take in such a broad chronological and thematic range, but rather that it does all this with such verve, lucidity, and analytical rigor. . . . [A]n elegant, inspiring survey." —John Howard, Journal of American History
Amazon.com Review
Although this new history of same-sex desire does not offer the long, satisfying narratives of Lillian Faderman's Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers or the sweep of David Greenberg's The Construction of Homosexuality, it does provide a solid introduction to the subject. Tantalizing fragments from the 17th and 18th centuries are joined with later evidence to flesh out Rupp's vision, which draws on Native American and African practices as well as the culture brought to (and imposed on) America by the Europeans. While surveying the more familiar history of gay culture in the cities, she also describes the growth of small, hidden lesbian and gay communities in places as unlikely as Salt Lake City, far removed from the urban centers of vice. Rupp also surveys changes in attitude toward same-sex love within academia in the last 50 years, as well as in American culture at large, and provides a useful bibliography. --Regina Marler
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