Page 2 : Gay Studies / Gay History - Gay Non-Fiction Books - RainbowSauce for The Best in Gay Reading

These pages include fascinating books on various aspects of the history of male homosexuality. From homosexuality in ancient history to studies of modern history, there's photographic books of pre-war gay society to the history of well known gay institutions. If you're interested in our community history, these books make a great starting point. For books on general gay and lesbian history - check out the GLBT non-fiction section!

These gay studies books are available from the UK, USA and Canada - click on any flag for further reviews or to buy. You can now click on any author's name to view all their available books. Further information on each individual book opens in a new window for easier browsing of Rainbowsauce.

Click through any authors name to view all their available books!
	All Books by David M. Halperin - Author of : One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and Other Essays on Greek Love Paperback - 230 pages (December 1989) Routledge; ISBN: 0415900972 "Gay Studies/History; Halperin's subject is the erotics of male culture in ancient Greece. Arguing that the modern concept of "homosexuality" is an inadequate tool for the interpretation of these features of sexual life in antiquity, Halperin offers an alternative account that accords greater prominence to the indigenous terms in which sexual experiences were constituted in the ancient Mediterranean world. Wittily and provocatively written, Halperin's meticulously drawn windows onto ancient sexuality give us a new meaning to the concept of "Greek love."" Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:
	All Books by John Ibson - Author of : Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography Hardcover: 272 pages - (September 2002) Smithsonian Institution Press; ISBN: 1588340554 "Gay Studies/History; These photographs, spanning from before the Civil War to the 1950s, reveal a lost world. They show men comfortably sitting on each other's laps, embracing, holding hands, and expressing their various relationships through countless examples of simple physical contact. Rather than imposing contemporary notions of sexuality by assuming the images only illustrate a portion of the gay past, John Ibson returns them to their own time to examine what they meant to the subjects. His perspective unearths a hidden aspect of American men's history. His analysis focuses on the history of male intimacy and how these everyday photographs challenge conventional boundaries between erotic and platonic, homosexuality and heterosexuality. He explores the photos as symbols of male association from a time when America was far more gender-segregated than it is today, and men felt no anxiety about showing their affection for one another. The images present men of different ages, classes, and races in a range of settings: posed in photographers' studios, on beaches, in lumber camps, on farms, on ships, indoors and out. Ibson concludes his study with images from the 1950s, in which the men begin to show a rigid and limited set of expressions. All the photographs are being published here for the first time, and are drawn from Ibson's private collection of more than 5,000 images." Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:
	All Books by Charles Kaiser - Author of : The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996 Paperback - 416 pages (September 1998) Harvest Books; ISBN: 0156006170 "Gay Studies/History; Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996, a history of gay life centered in New York, is packed with tales of writers and literature. Kaiser provides a kaleidoscope of details and stories that create a vision of how gay people lived, and illuminates a culture that had enormous influence on both New York and American society. Kaiser writes about such luminaries as Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin, but the real drive of The Gay Metropolis is how gay art and writings transformed the lives of everyday gay people. By the end of the book it is clear that gay artistic influence has transformed the American metropolis for both heterosexuals and homosexuals.." Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:
	All Books by Jonathan Ned Katz - Author of : Love Stories : Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality Hardcover - 426 pages (December 2001) University of Chicago Press (Trd); ISBN: 0226426157 "Gay Studies/History; Forget about the Lincoln Bedroom scandals of the Clinton administration; the real scandal is who was in Lincoln's bed in 1837. This highly provocative, often startling reconsideration of 19th- and early 20th-century male-male sexual relationships begins with a detailed description of what Katz depicts as Abraham Lincoln's romantic, erotic relationship with Joshua Speed, the man with whom he shared a decades-long intimate friendship, as well as a bed for three years. While Speed himself wrote that "no two men were ever more intimate," Katz is not arguing that these two men were homosexual; Katz makes it clear that referring "to early nineteenth-century men's acts or desires as gay or straight, homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual" places "their behaviors and lusts within our sexual system, not theirs." Katz, whose groundbreaking 1976 Gay American History is foundational to contemporary gay and lesbian studies, has researched deeply and widely, uncovering astonishing materials: a relationship between John Stafford Fiske, the U.S. consul to Scotland in 1870, and famous British cross-dresser Ernest Boulton; the existence of the Slide, a male-male pick-up bar in Greenwich Village in the 1890s; romances between older sailors and their "chickens" during the Civil War. Walt Whitman, noted Harvard mathematician James Millis Peirce, writer Charles Warren Stoddard, English philosopher Edward Carpenter Katz finds these men engaged in deeply loving and erotic friendship with no specific labels of sexual orientation attached. All of this is described and shaped with enormous sensitivity and judiciousness. Written clearly, succinctly and free from postmodern jargon, Katz's arguments are strong and vibrant. By contextualizing "sexual, acts, sexual desires, sexual identities" in their historical periods, but never avoiding the specifics of sexual activity or emotional connection, he contributes surprising, even shocking, insights into how sexual and emotional relationships are constructed, as well as demonstrating the enormous diversity and malleability of human eroticism." Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:
	All Books by John Loughery - Author of : The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives and Gay Identities : A Twentieth Century History Paperback - 544 pages (June 1999) Owl Books; ISBN: 080506124X "Gay Studies/History; The only study of gay male history covering the United States since World War I. Based on hundreds of interviews, new and classic texts, and little-known archival sources, an award-winning writer offers the first narrative history to consider signal moments, general trends, and the multiple meanings of "gay identity" in the whole United States from World War I to the AIDS era and "queer" activism. The most readable, authoritative, and comprehensive investigation ever, The Other Side of Silence combines history and anecdote, politics and theory to reveal the personalities and textures of a largely unknown culture. A dramatic chronicle of seventy-five years of persecution and accomplishment, the book addresses both in equal detail: witch hunts in schools and the military, crusades of psychiatrists, the resistance long before Stonewall, the inspiring pioneers and activists. From Newport and the private-party networks of Nebraska and Florida's Emma Jones Society to gay rodeos, athletes, and support groups, here are first-hand accounts of what it has meant (and might mean in the future) to be a sexual outsider in the United States." Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:
	All Books by Richard Plant - Author of : The Pink Triangle: the Nazi War Against Homosexuals Paperback (February 1988) Henry Holt (Paper); ISBN: 0805006001 "Gay Studies/History; Plant gives incredible detail into the lives of those in charge of the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis in World War II. In addition to a behind the scenes look into Nazi operations, including biographies of SS Himmler and Roehm, Hitler's top officials, Plant puts it all in the context of what gay Berlin/Germany was like at the time and leading up to WWII." Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:
	All Books by A. L. Rowse - Author of : Homosexuals in History : A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts Paperback - 400 pages 2nd edition (August 1997) Carroll & Graf; ISBN: 0786704233 "Gay Studies/History; Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Tchaikovsky, Oscar Wilde, Ernst Rohm, Noel Coward--these men shared a sexual orientation that defied their eras' ideas of biology, and often ran counter to mainstream society. In this book, A.L. Rowse, an eminent historian, examines the lives of these homosexual men of genius and their times." Click to buy this book in USA, UK:
	All Books by Colm Toibin - Author of : Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature Hardcover: 288 pages - (October 8, 2002) Publisher: Scribner; ISBN: 0743229444 "Gay Literature Studies; Gay Studies/History; In Love in a Dark Time, Colm Tóibín appraises the life and work of nine highly influential writers and artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. These were figures for whom being gay seemed to come second in their public lives, either by choice or by necessity – but in their private lives, in their own spirit, the laws of desire changed everything. From Oscar Wilde, born in the 1850s, to Pedro Almodovar, born a hundred years later, this book studies how a changing world altered gay lives in ways both subtle and profound. Tóibín is drawn with sympathetic fascination to each of his subjects: to Elizabeth Bishop and her artistic triumph over her demons; to James Baldwin, whose own agent advised him to burn the manuscript for Giovanni’s Room; to Francis Bacon for his refusal to play the role of the “tragic queer”; to unlovable Thomas Mann, victim of his biographers. Colm Tóibín interweaves close reading of the artist’s work with detailed analysis of the personality behind it to illuminating effect." Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:
	All Books by Barry Werth - Author of : The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal Paperback: 352 pages (March 5, 2002) Anchor Books; ISBN: 0385494696; 1 Anchor edition *~~ Featured Book Review ~~* "Gay Studies/History; During his thirty-seven years at Smith College, Newton Arvin published groundbreaking studies of Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Longfellow that stand today as models of scholarship and psychological acuity. He cultivated friendships with the likes of Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman and became mentor to Truman Capote. A social radical and closeted homosexual, the circumspect Arvin nevertheless survived McCarthyism. But in September 1960 his apartment was raided, and his cache of beefcake erotica was confiscated, plunging him into confusion and despair and provoking his panicked betrayal of several friends. An utterly absorbing chronicle, The Scarlet Professor deftly captures the essence of a conflicted man and offers a provocative and unsettling look at American moral fanaticism." Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:
	All Books by Craig A. Williams - Author of : Roman Homosexuality : Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity Hardcover - 416 pages (May 1999) Oxford Univ Pr on Demand; ISBN: 0195113004 "Gay Studies/History; This comprehensive study of Roman sexuality and the ideologies of masculinity discusses a wide range of ancient texts, arguing that native Roman concepts of masculinity did not rely on the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality, but were instead structured around such antitheses as free vs. slave, dominant vs. subordinate, and masculine vs. effeminate." Click to buy this book in USA, Canada, UK:

Gay Studies - Gay History Books - Page 2