No Bath But Plenty of Bubbles


Book Description

The Gay Liberation Front dragged homosexuality out of the closet, onto the streets and into the public eye. Its London supporters held the first gay demonstrations, organized the first Pride march and ran the first public gay dances in Britain. The Front contained an alliance of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals long before 'queer' was fashionable, and challenged homophobia before we had a word for it. Their direct action and street theatre were the envy of the rest of the revolutionary counterculture, their politics the most diverse, their communes the wildest and their arguments the loudest. In two short years, the Gay Liberation Front created the conditions for a lesbian and gay movement for generations to come and then imploded into fragments that became our newspapers, helplines and activist groups. Lisa Power has gathered the accounts of people who were there, the papers they wrote and the comments of bemused bystanders. She tells the previously unheard stories of the London Gay Liberation Front; of the sisters and brothers who created a brave and resourceful movement out of little but their own will and imagination and who gave us pride and anger and ideals.




No Bath But Plenty of Bubbles


Book Description

The Gay Liberation Front dragged homosexuality out of the closet, onto the streets and into the public eye. Its London supporters held the first gay demonstrations, organized the first Pride march and ran the first public gay dances in Britain. The Front contained an alliance of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals long before 'queer' was fashionable, and challenged homophobia before we had a word for it. Their direct action and street theatre were the envy of the rest of the revolutionary counterculture, their politics the most diverse, their communes the wildest and their arguments the loudest. In two short years, the Gay Liberation Front created the conditions for a lesbian and gay movement for generations to come and then imploded into fragments that became our newspapers, helplines and activist groups. Lisa Power has gathered the accounts of people who were there, the papers they wrote and the comments of bemused bystanders. She tells the previously unheard stories of the London Gay Liberation Front; of the sisters and brothers who created a brave and resourceful movement out of little but their own will and imagination and who gave us pride and anger and ideals.




The Way Out


Book Description

In 1957, there were over a thousand men in prison for 'homosexual offences'. A little over half a century later, homosexuality is an active part of the mainstream. Homosexuality has a public profile - on TV, in film and in literature and popular culture. When did today's fairly open discourse on homosexuality begin? Sebastian Buckle argues that homosexuality as a public identity began after the Second World War, on the release of the Wolfenden Report which recommended gay sex be decriminalised, and tells the story of homosexuality in the public eye. Buckle takes us through early images of homosexuality in the 1950s, the founding of the Gay Liberation Front, Section 28 and community radicalism under Margaret Thatcher's government, the AIDs crisis of the 1980s, the expanding musical and cultural influence of gay subcultures and the resulting partial acceptance into the mainstream of queer identities. The result is a complex and nuanced history of gay movements, society and the media, and a fresh look at how the struggle for acceptance and equality has been fought.




Gay Men and the Left in Post-war Britain


Book Description

Available in paperback for the first time, his book demonstrates how the personal became political in post-war Britain, and argues that attention to gay activism can help us to fundamentally rethink the nature of post-war politics. While the Left were fighting among themselves and the reformists were struggling with the limits of law reform, gay men started organising for themselves, first individually within existing organisations and later rejecting formal political structures altogether. Culture, performance and identity took over from economics and class struggle, as gay men worked to change the world through the politics of sexuality. Throughout the post-war years, the new cult of the teenager in the 1950s, CND and the counter-culture of the 1960s, gay liberation, feminism, the Punk movement and the miners' strike of 1984 all helped to build a politics of identity. There is an assumption among many of today's politicians that young people are apathetic and disengaged. This book argues that these politicians are looking in the wrong place. People now feel that they can impact the world through the way in which they live, shop, have sex and organise their private lives. Robinson shows that gay men and their politics have been central to this change in the post-war world.




Queer Domesticities


Book Description

Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotypes and looks at how they play out in the home and family lives of queer men.




Queer Premises


Book Description

Queer premises provide vital social and cultural infrastructure – a queer infrastructure – connecting different generations and locations, facilitating the movement of resources, across and beyond the city. Queer Premises offers evidence for how London's diverse LGBTQ+ populations have embedded themselves into urban space, systems and resources. It sets out to understand how, across their different material dimensions, bars, cafés, nightclubs, pubs, community centres, and hybrids of these typologies, have been imagined, created and sustained. From the 1980s to the present, Campkin asks how, where, and why these venues have been established, how they operate and the purposes they serve, what challenges they face and why they close down.




What is Freedom?


Book Description

All of us feel the presence of freedom in how we conceptualize, interact with, and accept or reject our political and economic institutions. But what is it? Where did this value come from? How should we describe it in theory? How should we pursue it in practice? For the past two years activist Toby Buckle, host of the popular Political Philosophy Podcast, has interviewed many of the world's leading historians, philosophers, and activists to try and understand freedom's meanings and applications in the modern world. Through a series of accessible interviews this volume introduces the reader to many of the contemporary ideas and debates about freedom from a wide range of perspectives in an engaging conversational presentation. Featuring a foreword by Cécile Fabre, the book includes contributions from Elizabeth Anderson, Mary Frances Berry, Ian Dunt, Michael Freeden, Nancy Hirschmann, Omar Khan, Dale Martin, Orlando Patterson, Phillip Pettit, John Skorupski, Peter Tatchell, and Zephyr Teachout.




The Unfinished Revolution


Book Description

Compares the post-Second World War histories of the American and British gay and lesbian movements.




Modern Love


Book Description

Private life has altered beyond all recognition during the past one hundred years. Britain in 1900 was emerging from a Victorian era in which prudery, patriarchal authority, and pettifogging rules of etiquette were widely perceived to have circumscribed relations between men and women. The twentieth century witnessed a reaction against this system of separate spheres spearheaded by reformers eager that the sexes become each other's equals and intimates. Modern Love traces the trajectory of this new model of personal relationships over the course of the twentieth century, from its emergence out of the crucible of the suffrage campaign through its reshaping by the women's liberation movement. It explores its impact on smut merchants, warring couples, and teenagers, as well as its reception by such diverse figures as Bertrand Russell and Germaine Greer. It draws on sources as varied as suffragette propaganda, banned sex manuals, marriage counseling literature and pin-up magazines. Marcus Collins teaches modern British history at Emory University.




Reclaiming Genders


Book Description

This collection of essays is an interdisciplinary work bringing together an internationally acclaimed group of transgender writers. Informed by both academic and street experiences, it considers the practical issues faced in changing the world view of gender as well as the limitations of queer, feminism and post-modernism. In a wide-ranging set of contributions, it addresses our engendered places now and what we can aim for in the future. It evaluates the mechanisms we can use to galvanize both the micro theories of gender as a personal experience of oppression and the macro theories of gender as a site of social regulation. The collection aims to take identity politics and reclaim identity for the self.