Books like Sex-Crime Panic by Neil Miller

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

An anthology of pioneering scholarship that uncovers the histories of gay and lesbian lives across diverse cultures and eras—from ancient Athens to post–World War II San Francisco—examining identity, community, and resistance.

Explores the grassroots fight against the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, detailing the rise of ACT UP, the fight for affordable treatment, and the lives of activists and patients who demanded medical progress and civil rights.

After a teenage girl is murdered on Halloween in 1975, journalist Timothy Dumas investigates the unsolved case that has fused into Greenwich, Connecticut’s social fabric, exposing community silence and unanswered questions.

A dramatic play based on interviews conducted after the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming.

Michael Bronski’s *A Queer History of the United States* traces how LGBT people have shaped and been shaped by American culture from Columbus to the 20th‑century social‑justice movements, using primary documents and social histories.

In Matt Fraction’s provocative graphic novel "Sex Criminals," two lovers discover that intense sexual climax can freeze time worldwide, while a shadowy group seeks to control them. They must unite to fight for freedom and their own identities.

A young Japanese‑American law student unearths a decades‑old unsolved murder during the Watts Riots, unlocking hidden family secrets and confronting race, love, and history in Los Angeles.

A scholarly examination of gay Americans in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, tracing the dynamic power struggle between homosexual citizens and the military and its lasting impact on U.S. defense policy.

A photographic journey through late‑1980s America that captures the varied lives of gay and lesbian communities, illustrating their efforts to form families, reconcile faith, and confront both racism and homophobia.

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

The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage surveys nearly four hundred works across historical periods, highlighting the contributions of figures like Michelangelo, Armistead Maupin, Sappho, and Shakespeare to gay and lesbian literature.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal issues concerning gender and sexual nonconformity in the United States. Part One, which covers the years from the post-Civil War period to the 1980s, is a history of state efforts to discipline and punish the behavior of homosexuals and other people considered to be deviant. During this period such people could get by only at the cost of suppressing their most basic feelings and emotions. Part Two addresses contemporary issues. Although it is no longer illegal to be openly gay in America, homosexuals still suffer from state discrimination in the military and in other realms, and private discrimination and violence against gays is prevalent. William Eskridge presents a rigorously argued case for the "sexualization" of the First Amendment, showing why, for example, same-sex ceremonies and intimacy should be considered "expressive conduct" deserving the protection of the courts. The author draws on legal reasoning, sociological studies, and history to develop an effective response to the arguments made in defense of the military ban. The concluding part of the book locates the author's legal arguments within the larger currents of liberal theory and integrates them into a general stance toward freedom, gender equality, and religious pluralism.

A nonfiction history of how the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on gay rights cases from 1958 to 2000, told through investigative research and interviews.

A police lieutenant in Atlanta who stumbles upon a murder mystery.

James N. Davidson explores homosexuality in ancient Greece, revealing its influence on politics, art, and daily life, and redefining the cultural meaning of same‑sex love.

Gay Izzy and Eve's mission to solve the disappearances of other gay men takes a dark, edgy thriller twist.

No one could have predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal offense would reverberate in American constitutional law, exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and challenging the traditional conception of what makes a family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff’s deputies entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun. Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom. So begins Dale Carpenter’s "gripping and brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work nine years in the making that transforms our understanding of what we thought we knew about Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2003 that invalidated America’s sodomy laws. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Carpenter has taken on the "gargantuan" task of extracting the truth about the case, analyzing the claims of virtually every person involved. Carpenter first introduces us to the interracial defendants themselves, who were hardly prepared "for the strike of lightning" that would upend their lives, and then to the Harris County arresting officers, including a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had "looked eye to eye" in the faces of the men as they allegedly fornicated. Carpenter skillfully navigates Houston’s complex gay world of the late 1990s, where a group of activists and court officers, some of them closeted themselves, refused to bury what initially seemed to be a minor arrest. The author charts not only the careful legal strategy that Lambda Legal attorneys adopted to make the case compatible to a conservative Supreme Court but also the miscalculations of the Houston prosecutors who assumed that the nation’s extant sodomy laws would be upheld. Masterfully reenacting the arguments that riveted spectators and Justices alike in 2003, Flagrant Conduct then reaches a point where legal history becomes literature, animating a Supreme Court decision as few writers have done. In situating Lawrence v. Texas within the larger framework of America’s four-century persecution of gay men and lesbians, Flagrant Conduct compellingly demonstrates that gay history is an integral part of our national civil rights story.