He never prevailed in his 1961 lawsuit against the U.S. who became a gay activist in 1957 after being fired from his civil service job, solely for being homosexual. Gay activism changed with the times and the issues: There are a lot of stories, countless protagonists and staggering amounts of information, making the book feel like a 12-hour opera with 800 characters.įaderman shines in certain narratives, such as the story of Frank Kameny, a Harvard Ph.D.

Given that the shelves groan with all this prior scholarship, I am not completely convinced that this ginormous tome deepens our understanding of the movements for LGBT equality, though it does collect everything in one place.įaderman’s story is like the old introduction from ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”: “the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat.” She works hard to cast a wide net, both geographically and gender-wise, which is difficult, given that many of the greatest struggles and victories took place on the two coasts, and the majority of the key figures were highly educated middle- or upper-class gay white men. The book appears a few years after Michael Bronski’s “A Queer History of the United States,” following in the tradition of Jonathan Ned Katz’s groundbreaking “Gay American History” (1976), as well as works by John D’Emilio, Estelle Freedman and others, though most of these books focus on social history, not activism.

“The Gay Revolution” is excessively detailed, which makes it challenging to read the best strategy might be to dip in and out, skipping around for the choice bits, rather than reading its 794 pages straight through. She is a tireless researcher but sometimes suffers from a forest-for-the-trees problem. The author of “Surpassing the Love of Men” and “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” - both classics of lesbian history - Faderman draws on extensive interviews, existing scholarship, primary research and a lifetime of pioneering work on LGBT history.

In the meantime, their teachers might do well to consult Lillian Faderman’s “The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle,” an encyclopedic history of the modern movement for LGBT rights from the late 1940s to the present.

Still, many school districts are not exactly on top of this task: It may be some time before most California schoolchildren learn about Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (founders of the Daughters of Bilitis) with the same gravitas given to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Here in California, things are starting to change as schools implement the Fair Education Act, a 2011 measure that mandates inclusion of LGBT history in public education (along with the histories of ethnic and racial groups and people with disabilities).

The Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman