Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights by Eric Marcus (review)

In Making Gay History, non-fiction writer Eric Marcus uses excerpts of sixty-four oral history interviews with activists, educators, and leaders of the lesbian and gay civil rights movement, along with their allies, to tell the story of the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights in the second half of the twentieth century.

What is new in Marcus's work are narrators' insights on the founding, innerworkings, and politics of the most prominent lesbian and gay organizations in the United States between the end of World War II and September 11, 2001. Making Gay History's greatest strength is its collection of narrators who encompass a virtual "who's who" of the LGBT community. These leaders provide fascinating testimony on the origins of lesbian and gay organizations, along with anecdotes of infighting, schisms, and power struggles among liberal and conservative factions as fledgling associations take shape, morph, and grow, while others wither and pass into obscurity. Marcus's work includes the genesis of more than twenty LGBT organizations including: the Mattachine Society, Daughters of Bilitis, the Metropolitan Community Church, the Gay Men's Health Crisis, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, ACT UP, Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, and the Human Rights Campaign, just to name a few.

Narrators also offer insights on resistance. For example, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) chose its name based on its antiwar stance, a desire to challenge the government, and its affinity for the National Liberation Front who sought Vietnam's freedom from American imperialism. Similarly, the Mattachine Society added J. Edgar Hoover to their mailing list and refused to remove him although they received numerous FBI requests. The work also includes recollections of collaboration in counteracting vitriolic rhetoric of antiheroes such as religious conservatives Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant. These recollections are interspersed with counter-narratives of important allies such as Dr. Evelyn Hooker, whose 1957 groundbreaking research led the American Psychological Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illness in 1973, and Abigail Van Buren, whose syndicated "Dear Abby" column provided advice to parents, friends, and individuals struggling with their sexual orientation. Marcus also incorporates testimony of activists such as Frank Kameny, a gay man fired from his civil service job in the 1940s who defiantly proclaimed "in the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, that we [homosexuals] were not sick" and took his fight to the Supreme Court seeking government employment policies that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (146).

Throughout the book, narrators candidly share their poignant and compelling experiences alongside their disappointments. Marcus generously presents their accounts without tedious notation of questions asked and with minimal interviewer commentary. Narrators' perspectives are often presented juxtaposed to one another, enabling readers to see the fragility and fractures within the movement. By his own admission, rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive survey of the fight in the second half of the twentieth century for lesbian and gay equal rights in the United States, the author allows narrators to speak for themselves, thereby shaping the overarching storyline. However, one of Making Gay History's major shortcomings is that participants are often presented with little or no background information. This lack of framing is the work's greatest flaw because it assumes readers are familiar with narrators' roles in the larger historical narrative.

Marketed as a second edition of his seminal work Making History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), Marcus sought to reorganize, rewrite, edit, and judiciously prune the original material. However, his slightly shorter eight—rather than five—part version departs dramatically in style and format from its original. Instead of including narrators' recollections in their entirety within a single part or chapter, Marcus deliberately disassembles...