Notes
NOTES Introduction 1. Elsa Gidlow, Elsa: I Come with My Songs; The Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow (San Francisco: Druid Heights, 1986), 301 and 302. 2. Ibid., 303. 3. Ibid., 305. 4. Ibid., 301. 5. In her analysis of Gidlow and Liz Boyer Reinstein, Elizabeth Kennedy suggested that for segments of the upper class during the 1920s and 1930s, and for the artistic circle in which Gidlow traveled, all sexuality was deemed a strictly personal matter. Thus, in this context, a lesbian relationship might be viewed as parallel to a heterosexual affair and ‘‘graciously ignored.’’ See Kennedy, ‘‘But We Would Never Talk about It: The Structures of Lesbian Discretion in South Dakota, 1928–1933,’’ in Ellen Lewin, ed., Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 15–39, here 38. 6. See Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays and Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 35. See also Ellen Lewin, Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Katherine Arnup, Lesbian Parenting: Living with Pride and Prejudice (Charlottetown, P.E.I.: Gynergy Books, 1995). See also Ellen Herman, ‘‘All in the Family: Lesbian Motherhood Meets Unpopular Psychology in a Dysfunctional Era,’’ in Lewin, ed., Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America, 83–104. 7. Much of this gay historiography has been social history or history with an ethnographic approach. On the public presence of gays within commercial establishments and political activist circles, see, for example, John D’Emilio’s work of the postwar period, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (1983; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), as well as Gary Kinsman’s The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada (Montreal : Black Rose, 1987), which looks at gays as civil rights activists, in a study of sexual regulation and resistance in Canada from the colonial period through the postwar era. David Johnson looks at the postwar discrimination of gays in The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), while Allan Berube and Paul Jackson have both explored the gay social presence in the World War II military in the United States and 198 Notes to Pages ix–xi Canada, respectively. See Berube’s Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Penguin, 1991) and Jackson’s One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military during World War II (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). For gay community studies, see Brett Beemyn, ed. Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997). One full-length study to have emerged from this work is Marc Stein’s City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Finally, see John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (1988; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997 ), esp. 288–95. 8. On homosexuality in the colonial era, see Richard Godbeer, ‘‘Sodomy in New England,’’ in Kathy Peiss, ed., Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 92–105. The literature on same-sex friendship in the antebellum period is extensive, but see, for example, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘‘The Female World of Love and Ritual,’’ and Karen Hansen, ‘‘An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American Women,’’ both also anthologized in Peiss, Major Problems, 201–36. See also Jonathan Katz, ‘‘Coming to Terms: Conceptualizing Men’s Erotic and Affectional Relations in the United States, 1820–1892,’’ in Martin Duberman, ed., A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 216–35. 9. George Chauncey has shown a viable gay culture well before World War II in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890– 1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis have done the same for the working-class lesbian community living in Buffalo, New York. See Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin, 1993), which looks at the 1930s to the 1960s. These works show how gay communities formed by claiming public spaces for socializing and performing. The bifurcation between public and private is not rigid in these works. Kennedy’s interview correspondents, for example, talked about how they...
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