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In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? This book illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture. Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, the text maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. It integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

In the past two decades the city of Madrid has been marked by pride, feminism, and globalization—but also by the vestiges of the machismo nurtured during the long years of the Franco dictatorship. This book examines how lesbian literary culture fares in this mix from the end of the countercultural movement la movida madrileña in 1988 until the gay marriage march in 2005. This book traverses the various literary spaces of the city associated with queer culture, in particular the gay barrio of Chueca, revealing how it is a product of interrelations—a site crisscrossed by a multiplicity of subjects who constitute it as a queer space through the negotiation of their sexual, racial, gender, and class identities. The book recognizes Chueca as a political space as well, a refuge from homophobia. It also shows how the spatial and literary practices of Chueca relate to economic issues. In examining how women’s sexual identities have become visible in and through the Chueca phenomenon, this work is a revealing example of transnational queer studies within the broader Western discussion on gender and sexuality.

EATING FIRE: MY LIFE AS A LESBIAN AVENGER is an activist’s memoir spanning two decades from the Culture Wars of the ‘90’s through today’s War on Terror. Engaging the reader with a picaresque activist adventure, Cogswell simultaneously explores questions of identity, resistance, and citizenship, evoking Richard Wright’s Black Boy as she attempts to insert lesbians into America’s ongoing narrative of liberty and justice for all.

For too long, LGBTQ communities—including Minnesota’s—have been maligned, misrepresented, and often outright ignored. Myths regarding the queer experience have grown and become embedded in local and national consciousness. The absence of queer stories over time in local historical and popular writing only served to further this ignorance, but great strides have been made in recent decades to celebrate Minnesota’s vibrant queer history. This book presents a history of queer life in Minnesota. The text blends oral history, archival narrative, newspaper accounts, and fascinating illustrations to paint a remarkable picture of Minnesota’s queer history. More than 120 concise historical essays lead readers from the earliest evidences of queer life in the state before the Second World War—for example, Oscar Wilde’s visit to Minnesota and “rumors” at the Alexander Ramsey house—to riverfront vice districts, protest and parade sites, bars, 1970s collectives, institutions, public spaces, and private homes.

1.2 million people in the United States are currently living with HIV, and over 30 states have laws criminalizing HIV nondisclosure and/or exposure. As more people continue to be infected (at a rate of about 50,000 per year in this country alone), and as mortality continues to decline, HIV infection will become an increasingly common, shared experience. Yet, today, in Western countries where effective treatments are easily available to many of those who need them, to disclose one’s HIV-positive status is not as easy a proposition as some may think. A personal narrative of a gay man’s life with HIV, the book tells a story of diagnosis and adaptation to what is essentially a new life. It focuses on the experience of having one’s own body caught in a catastrophic pandemic and in an intricate web of discourses—medical, legal, academic, moral, etc.—and spaces—urban, institutional, virtual. How does one deal with a disease that is no longer the automatic death sentence it once was but continues to terrify people as if it were? What is it like to live with HIV after 9/11 and the so-called war on terror, when fear and suspicion have become the order of the day? Going beyond personal experience, the book goes on to probe popular culture and politics as well as literary memoirs and films in order to ask deeper questions about our relationships with others.

THE 1980 MARIEL BOATLIFT was a turning point in Miami’s Cuban American and gay histories. My work begins with this moment of cultural collision. It examines discourses about Mariel that both sensationalized and silenced the gay presence, the challenges faced by homosexual men who entered as part of the boatlift, and the emergent Cuban American gay culture that transformed Miami’s ethnic and sexual landscapes.

Under Bright Lights vividly describes the emergence in twenty-first century Manila of a “bright lights” scene: a world composed of dance clubs, upmarket bars, party circuits, and other commercial sites that evoke images of a gay globe, but which remain bound to a landscape of disorder, mass poverty, and urban decay. Benedicto argues that queer world-making practices sustain elite desires for global modernity and the class, gender, and racial orders that structure urban life in the post-colony. Further, Benedicto analyzes how the fantasy of global gay modernity is imperiled during touristic journeys to global cities, when privileged gay men from Manila encounter Filipino labor migrants in sites of transit and come face-to-face with the exclusionary racial orders that operate in gay spaces overseas. By implicating queer practices of mobility in local and transnational cultures of domination, Bright Lights, Gay Globality challenges popular interpretations of the “third world” queer as a necessarily radical figure. It puts into question the theories of alternative modernity that have dominated research on postcolonial cities, interrogates the idealization of movement in the study of non-normative sexualities, and complicates Euro-American efforts to unpack queer complicities with neoliberal culture.