Authors: David Eisenbach
ISBN-13: 9780786716333, ISBN-10: 0786716339
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Date Published: May 2006
Edition: (Non-applicable)
David Eisenbach, MA, MPhil, PhD is a teaching fellow at Columbia University. He has lectured about the gay rights movement to audiences at the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland and Columbia University, among others. He lives in New York City.
The explosion of gay visibility following the street riots at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 brought, for the first time, tens of thousands of lesbians and gay men out of the closets and into headline news around the world. Never before had so many gay people at one moment stepped into the spotlight of mainstream American politics, culture, and entertainment. More than any city, New York became overnight the center of the new "Gay Power" movement and served as the focal point for gay protest and politics for the next decade.
Gay Power, chronicles the tumultuous first wave of the modern gay rights movement. From the first-ever gay student group launched at Columbia University in 1965 to the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activist Alliance, and other vanguard organizations that emerged from the Stonewall riots, David Eisenbach draws on archival material and numerous firsthand accounts from the individuals who built the movement. Unlike their predecessors, this new generation of lesbians and gay men spoke as a community, established political clout, appeared openly on television and in the press, demanded equal rights with heterosexuals, and pioneered protest tactics like the "zap," which later ACT UP employed famously in the 1980s.
Foreword : an American revolution | ||
Ch. 1 | "The greatest homosexual population in the world" | 1 |
Ch. 2 | Breaking the "conspiracy of silence" | 19 |
Ch. 3 | Pride of lions | 51 |
Ch. 4 | From Boys in the band to Street fighting man | 80 |
Ch. 5 | The new homosexual | 116 |
Ch. 6 | The made-for-TV movement | 143 |
Ch. 7 | The inner circle affair | 182 |
Ch. 8 | The gay lounge | 205 |
Ch. 9 | "It's official now : we're not sick" | 221 |
Ch. 10 | Miss Oklahoma vs. macho man | 255 |
Epilogue : the conspiracy of silence redux | 291 |