Books like Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities by John D'Emilio

A groundbreaking history of gay life in New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Explores the history of sexuality through the lens of enslaved individuals, European immigrants, and urban middle-class Americans, shedding light on race, gender, class inequality, and the complex nature of sexuality in American history from the 19th to the 20th century.

A collection of essays charting the strides of LGBT activists in shaping U.S. public policy and law, illustrating how persistent advocacy transformed a hostile landscape into one of greater rights and recognition.

In 1969, police raids on New York’s Stonewall Inn sparked the riots that ignited the modern LGBTQ rights movement, reshaping society’s view of gay life.

Tracing the arc of transsexuality in America, Joanne J. Meyerowitz chronicles individual stories, medical breakthroughs, and cultural shifts that redefined sex, gender, and rights throughout the twentieth century.

A riveting narrative of the pivotal moment that changed the face of LGBTQ history, 50 years after the Stonewall riots.

A comparative study of gay and lesbian movements worldwide, tracing their growth from the 1969 Stonewall uprising through postwar resurgence to modern activism across five continents.

Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was “invented” as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black/white “color line,” the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality. At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public’s attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and sexual “deviance” were used to reinforce each other’s terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis’s late nineteenth-century work on “sexual inversion,” the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer’s fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. Queering the Color Line will have broad appeal across disciplines including African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, cinema studies, and gender studies.

A groundbreaking history of gay male identity in the United States, from World War I to the AIDS era.

Gay Power chronicles the rise of the modern gay rights movement from the 1965 Columbia student group to the transformative Stonewall riots, highlighting New York’s role as the political and cultural epicenter of LGBTQ activism.

A nonfiction account of Southern gays and lesbians from 1945 to the 1969 Stonewall Riot, detailing their hidden lives, emerging identities, and early activism amid broader civil rights struggles in the American South.

An updated sociological study of the global gay and lesbian movement, examining its rise, strategies, human‑rights gains, AIDS activism, and cultural nationalism amid New Right opposition.

E. Marcus’s revised *Making History* traces five decades of gay civil‑rights activism in the United States, drawing on more than 60 real‑life stories to chart the movement’s rise from early struggles to national recognition.

Before Stonewall traces the early, pre‑1969 struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights in the United States through concise biographies of key activists such as Harry Hay, Del Martin, and Frank Kameny.

This book argues that American butch-femme bar culture of the mid-20th century should be interpreted as a sacred space for its community. Before Stonewall when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill, these bars were the only place where many could have any community at all. This book explores this community as a site of a lived corporeal theology and political space. It reveals that religious institutions such as the Metropolitan Community Church were founded in such bars, that traditional and non-traditional religious activities took place there, and that religious ceremonies such as marriage were often conducted within the bars by staff. It examines how these bars became not only ecclesiastical sites but also provided the fertile ground for the birth of the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights before Stonewall.