![]() ![]() The FBI could keep fat files on “known homosexuals.” Bars could be raided and the patrons arrested and charged. ![]() Lesbians and gay men can be committed to psychiatric hospitals against their will (as I was by my parents as a teenager). We were treated as pariahs because we had been medicalized and psychiatrically profiled and deemed to be dangerous, unstable, even treasonous. Gay men and lesbians are pitted against every controlling body in America: the press demonizes us in service to the courts, the military, the schools, the psychiatric community. The battle as Faderman lays it out, is almost a class struggle-one of “the people” (lesbians and gay men) and society’s hierarchy, the “suits versus streets” that she illumines. It is, unquestionably, her crowning achievement as a historian. Faderman has plumbed the archives of libraries, newspapers, legislative bodies, lesbian and gay organizations, police files, and also interviewed more than 100 activists and others to get this meticulously researched book to us. But over 100 pages of footnotes allude to that breadth her research is extraordinary. The breadth of Faderman’s scholarship here may be lost to the non-academic reader who will be pulled in right from the prologue by Faderman’s easy, colloquial, immensely readable style. ![]()
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