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  • The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle by Lillian Faderman
  • Leila J. Rupp
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. By Lillian Faderman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Pp. 794. $35.00 (cloth).

The Gay Revolution is a prodigiously researched account of the gay and lesbian movement from the emergence of homophile activism to the recent victories in the areas of military policy and marriage equality. Faderman begins the book with a striking contrast between the 1948 arrest on sodomy charges of E. K. Johnston, a much-loved journalism professor at the University of Missouri, and the ceremony in 2012 elevating Tammy Smith to the rank of brigadier general with her wife by her side. It is a moving contrast that foreshadows the tale Faderman tells of the “long-fought battles, tragic losses, and hard-won triumphs” that brought us from there to here (xvii). This hefty volume takes us from the homophile movement, to pre-Stonewall protests, to Stonewall and the emergence of gay liberation and lesbian feminism, to the culture wars with the antigay New Right, to the AIDS struggle, to the fight over military service, to the legal battles against sodomy laws and workplace discrimination, to marriage equality activism, ending with a consideration of “what remains to be done” before gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people “will truly be first-class citizens” (xvii). Along the way, we encounter the struggles within the movement, primarily between radicals and assimilationists.

As the opening vignettes illustrate, it is Faderman’s telling of the stories of individual lives that most distinguishes this book both from the existing works that focus on one or another phase of activism and from Marc Stein’s comprehensive analysis of the movement.1 Faderman mined archives, oral histories, arrest records, court cases, and the contemporary media and topped it all off with her own extensive interviews with a wide variety of individuals, some famous, some less known. People’s lives and struggles fill the pages of the book. The chapter that leads off her discussion of gay and lesbian activists targeting the Democratic National Convention in 1972, for example, begins with Bruce Voeller, “six feet tall, with a scraggly white-blond beard and ponytail,” looking “at first glance like a radical.” Faderman adds: “He was not” and tells of Voeller first contacting George McGovern, [End Page 522] who promised he would make sure “homosexually oriented individuals” received first-class citizenship, then organizing a planning meeting in an unheated Chicago church, and launching the fight for recognition within the Democratic Party (249, 250). Faderman tells great stories, with a novelist’s flair.

These strengths—the exhaustive narrative, the mobilization of stories—have a downside as well. The wealth of detail on every phase of activism can be overwhelming. What people were doing and thinking sometimes carries us away from what is, fundamentally, a social movement story. For example, Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings take center stage in the homophile movement section, Kameny “fairly banging out his annoyance on the typewriter keys” in a letter lecturing Clifford Norton, a NASA employee entrapped by the police who hesitated to come out publicly, and Gittings sharing his “single-mindedness” and “conviction that they were right and the world must be made to see it” (158, 145). Kameny “liked to think of himself as the Father of the gay civil rights movement; eventually he would call Barbara Gittings its Mother” (145). At the same time, Faderman reminds us that the Mattachine Society had very few members. But it is important to remember that the actions of individuals, no matter how heroic, would not have made the same difference without a movement behind them.

It is also the case that, while many of the details are new, the overall arc of the story is well known from the work of a host of historians, beginning with John D’Emilio.2 The more than 250 pages of notes give some acknowledgment to existing work, but they are more a guide to the primary sources and a means of providing additional information than a way to track the contributions of others. That will, of course, matter little to...

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