The Line Of Dissent: Gay Outsiders and the Shaping of History

by Martin Duberman

Overview

THE TITLE OF THIS COLLECTION, The Line of Dissent, suggests a common denominator for a truly diverse group of individuals-beyond the fact that all were amazing people who lived extraordinary lives. They were trailblazers who forged new ways of thinking or being, and all made major contributions to LGBT life and culture.

These essays (with a few exceptions) first appeared in The G&LR, a national, bimonthly magazine. The first to be published, in 1997, was an in-depth profile of Edward Sagarin, author of The Homosexual in America (1951), dubbed "the Father of the Homophile Movement." The latest, from 2022, provides new insights into the work of Alfred Kinsey, who pretty much invented the field of sex research, and his acolyte C.A. Tripp, author of the explosive 1975 book The Homosexual Matrix.

Between these scholarly bookends are activists, poets, artists, and daredevils. A three-part series on impresario Lincoln Kirstein reveals how he brought the art of ballet to America. Several profiles can be found at the intersection of the LGBT struggle and leftist politics: activist Barbara Deming and her strategy of "direct action nonviolence"; Sylvia Rivera, who sparked the transgender revolution decades before her time; and bisexual Andrea Dworkin, the radical second wave feminist. Another group includes visual artists such as painter Robert Rauschenberg and designer Ed Wormley, and poets such as W. H. Auden and Black activist Essex Hemphill. There's even a chapter on lesbian speedboat racer Joe Carstairs, who burst all kinds of barriers when she won major trophies in the 1920s.

In short, it's a wild ride covering a breathtaking swath of LGBT history, all brought to you in Martin Duberman's informative, easygoing style of writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798988815006
Publisher:	G&lr Books
Publication date:	01/08/2024
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

MARTIN DUBERMAN, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at CUNY, is the author of some two dozen books, including Haymarket, Jews, Queers, Germans, and, most recently, his memoir Reaching Ninety. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Vernon Rice Drama Desk Award, three Lambda Literary Awards, a special award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for his contributions to literature, the 2007 lifetime achievement award from the American Historical Association, and the Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and has received honorary degrees from Amherst College and Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2024-01-19
Queer activists’ fights for gay rights and other causes are explored in this probing collection of essays by Duberman.

In this work, the author, a City University of New York historian, has gathered pieces that appeared in theGay & Lesbian Review and other publications, most of them biographical profiles that illuminate key aspects of the gay liberation movement. His subjects include Edward Sagarin, who broached the then-radical idea of gay self-acceptance in his 1951 book The Homosexual in Americabut later became a pariah in the movement for clinging to the belief that gayness is a psychological disorder; sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who exuberantly embraced a wide range of sexual behaviors as normal; Sylvia Ray Rivera, the celebrated trans activist who argued for opening a carefully buttoned-down gay rights movement to drag queens; Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist who denounced sexism in the gay rights movement; Joe Carstairs, a lesbian and champion speedboat racer who did whatever she wanted, gender norms be damned; and the group Queers for Economic Justice, co-founded by the author, which calls for solidarity between unions, socialists, and gay rights groups. Throughout, Duberman advances a stalwart radicalism: He advocates for building broad alliances between embattled minorities, rejecting rigid sex roles, celebrating erotic fluidity, and questioning monogamous marriage and the nuclear family. Duberman’s sparkling, whip-smart prose mixes bracing political analysis with vivid, gossipy evocations of his subjects, many of whom he knew personally. His portrait of Dworkin, for example, brings out both her in-private gentleness—after an argument, she shyly presented him with a bouquet of flowers—and the strident maximalism of her theorizing (“She also reinforced my already strong conviction that women, gay men, and people of color were involved in a common political struggle against a shared oppressor: the dominance of the heterosexual White male”). The result is an absorbing set of dispatches from the queer revolution.

A colorful portrait gallery of gay leaders, full of compelling figures and challenging ideas.

Kirkus Reviews