Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World »

Nicholas C. Edsall is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia and the author of Richard Cobden: Independent Radical.

Nicholas C. Edsall is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia and the author of Richard Cobden: Independent Radical.

As recently as the 1970s, gay and lesbian history was a relatively unexplored field for serious scholars. The past quarter century, however, has seen enormous growth in gay and lesbian studies. The literature is now voluminous; it is also widely scattered and not always easily accessible. In Toward Stonewall, Nicholas Edsall provides a much-needed synthesis, drawing upon both scholarly and popular writings to chart the development of homosexual subcultures in the modern era and the uneasy place they have occupied in Western society.

Edsall's survey begins three hundred years ago in northwestern Europe, when homosexual subcultures recognizably similar to those of our own era began to emerge, and it follows their surprisingly diverse paths through the Enlightenment to the early nineteenth century. The book then turns to the Victorian era, tracing the development of articulate and self-aware homosexual subcultures. With a greater sense of identity and organization came new forms of resistance: this was the age that saw the persecution of Oscar Wilde, among others, as well as the medical establishment's labeling of homosexuality as a sign of degeneracy.

The book's final section locates the foundations of present-day gay sub-cultures in a succession of twentieth-century scenes and events — in pre-Nazi Germany, in the lesbian world of interwar Paris, in the law reforms of 1960s England — culminating in the emergence of popular movements in the postwar United States.

Rather than examining these groups in isolation, the book considers them in their social contexts and as comparable to other subordinate groups and minority movements. In the process, Toward Stonewall illuminates not only the subcultures that are its primary subject but the larger societies from which they emerged.

Library Journal

In this comprehensive chronicle, Edsall (history, emeritus, Univ. of Virginia; Richard Cobden: Independent Radical) charts the historical, social, literary, and scientific implications of homosexual subcultures in western Europe and America during the last three centuries. Despite the severe punishments meted out for "buggery" in 18th-century Europe, a "sodomitical subculture" emerged, which transmuted into the passionate, if sexually ambiguous, friendships of the 19th century and, later, into the latent homoeroticism lurking in such "pure" institutions as the YMCA, English public schools, and the early Boy Scouts. He traces this subculture up through the two events that helped define the gay liberation movement in the English-speaking world: the passage of the Sexual Offenses Act in 1967, which decriminalized sodomy in the United Kingdom, and the Stonewall uprising in New York City in 1969. Although much of the material is familiar, it is presented with freshness and authority; and while lesbian history is given only cursory examination, this is overall a well-wrought and richly detailed work that dovetails nicely with Louis Crompton's recent and fine Homosexuality and Civilization, which covers similar ground from ancient civilizations through the 18th century with little overlap. Recommended for all gay and lesbian studies and history collections.-Richard J. Violette, Special Libs. Cataloguing, Victoria, B.C. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.