June is Pride Month, and our featured topic is Queer History! Below we have a selection of recent e-books on the Scholars Portal Books platform.

	Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism Lockwood, J. Samaine University of North Carolina Press, 2015 In this thought-provoking study of nineteenth-century America, J. Samaine Lockwood offers an important new interpretation of the literary movement known as American regionalism. Lockwood argues that regionalism in New England was part of a widespread woman-dominated effort to rewrite history. Lockwood demonstrates that New England regionalism was an intellectual endeavor that overlapped with colonial revivalism and included fiction and history writing, antique collecting, colonial home restoration, and photography. The cohort of writers and artists leading this movement included Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, and C. Alice Baker, and their project was taken up by women of a younger generation, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who extended regionalism through the modernist moment. Lockwood draws on a diverse archive that includes fiction, material culture, collecting guides, and more. Showing how these women intellectuals aligned themselves with a powerful legacy of social and cultural dissent, Lockwood reveals that New England regionalism performed queer historical work, placing unmarried women and their myriad desires at the center of both regional and national history.
	Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform Upchurch, Charles University of California Press, 2009 This book examines changing perceptions of sex between men in early Victorian Britain, a significant yet surprisingly little explored period in the history of Western sexuality. Looking at the dramatic transformations of the era—changes in the family and in the law, the emergence of the world’s first police force, the growth of a national media, and more—the book asks how perceptions of same-sex desire changed between men, in families, and in the larger society. To illuminate these questions, it mines a rich trove of previously unexamined sources, including hundreds of articles pertaining to sex between men that appeared in mainstream newspapers. Relating this topic to broader economic, social, and political changes in the early nineteenth century, this book sheds new light on the central question of how and when sex acts became identities.
	Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky; Davis, Madeline D. Routledge, 2014 Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold traces the evolution of the lesbian community in Buffalo, New York from the mid-1930s up to the early 1960s. Drawing upon the oral histories of 45 women, it is the first comprehensive history of a working-class lesbian community. These poignant and complex stories show how black and white working-class lesbians, although living under oppressive circumstances, nevertheless became powerful agents of historical change. Kennedy and Davis provide a unique insider’s perspective on butch-fem culture and argue that the roots of gay and lesbian liberation are found specifically in the determined resistance of working-class lesbians.This 20th anniversary edition republishes the book for a new generation of readers. It includes a new preface in which the authors reflect on where the last 20 years have taken them, and reminisce about the process of creating Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold. For anyone interested in lesbian life during the 1950s, or in the dynamics of butch-fem culture, this study remains the one that set the highest standard for all oral histories and ethnographies of lesbian communities anywhere.
	Gay and Lesbian Elders: History, Law, and Identity Politics in the United States Knauer, Nancy J. Routledge, 2016 The approximately two million gay and lesbian elders in the United States are an underserved and understudied population. At a time when gay men and lesbians enjoy an unprecedented degree of social acceptance and legal protection, many elders face the daily challenges of aging isolated from family, detached from the larger gay and lesbian community, and ignored by mainstream aging initiatives. Drawing on materials from law, history, and social theory, this book integrates practical proposals for reform with larger issues of sexuality and identity. Beginning with a summary of existing demographic data and offering a historical overview of pre-Stonewall views of homosexuality, author Nancy J. Knauer goes on to address the invisibility of this community. She examines the multiple double binds central to their identity formation, including ageism among gays and lesbians and homophobia among seniors. Further, the book focuses on specific legal concerns such as estate planning, housing, discrimination, and financial insecurity, and how they impact this community uniquely. Integrating theory with practical questions of policy, and advancing a new understanding of the construction of sexuality and identity, this book advocates meaningful new reforms designed to ensure equity and dignity in aging regardless of sexual orientation.
	Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota Van Cleve, Stewart University of Minnesota Press, 2012 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.
	Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century Gonda, Caroline; Beynon, John Routledge, 2016 How are romantic and erotic relationships between women represented in the literature of the long eighteenth century? How does Sapphism surface in other contemporary discourses, including politics, pornography, economics and art? After more than a generation of lesbian-gay scholarship that has examined identities, practices, prohibitions and transgressions surrounding same-sex desire, this collection offers an exciting and indispensable array of new scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. The contributors – who include noted writers, critics and historians such as Emma Donoghue, George E. Haggerty, Susan S. Lanser and Valerie Traub – provide varied and provocative research into the dynamics and histories of lesbianism and Sapphism. They build on the work of scholarship on Sapphism and interrogate the efficacy of such a notion in describing the varieties of same-sex love between women during the long eighteenth century. This groundbreaking collection, the first multi-authored volume to examine lesbian representation and culture in this era, presents a diversity of theoretical and critical approaches, from close literary analysis to the history of reading and publishing, psychoanalysis, biography, historicism, deconstruction and queer theory.
	Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750-1900 Janes, Dominic The University of Chicago Press, 2016 Oscar Wilde Prefigured is a study of the prehistory of this “queer moment” in 1895. Janes explores the complex ways in which men who desired sex with men in Britain had expressed such interests through clothing, style, and deportment since the mid-eighteenth century. He supplements the well-established narrative of the inscription of sodomitical acts into a homosexual label and identity at the end of the nineteenth century by teasing out the means by which same-sex desires could be signaled through visual display in Georgian and Victorian Britain. Wilde, it turns out, is not the starting point for public queer figuration. He is the pivot by which Georgian figures and twentieth-century camp stereotypes meet. Drawing on the mutually reinforcing phenomena of dandyism and caricature of alleged effeminates, Janes examines a wide range of images drawn from theater, fashion, and the popular press to reveal new dimensions of identity politics, gender performance, and queer culture.
	The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History Mullen, Patrick R. Oxford University Press, 2012 Is Irish history at the dawn of the twenty-first century still, as Stephen Dedalus quipped, a nightmare? With the demise of the Celtic Tiger, the collapse of the housing bubble, and the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church, Ireland is an island looking for a new story. This book argues that queer culture has a vital role to play in the creation of a reinvigorated national image for the Republic and for Northern Ireland. Looking back to the first wave of Irish modernism in the works of Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, Roger Casement, and James Joyce, the author reveals how these writers deployed queer aesthetics to shape inclusive forms of national affiliation as well as to sharpen anti-imperialist critiques. Turning to Ireland’s postmodernist boom in the works of Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and Jamie O’Neill, the book shows that queer sensibilities and style remain key cultural resources for negotiating the political and economic realities of globalization. Irish queer aesthetics operate as both a mode of self-making and a novel form of social labor linked to modern transformations of capitalism. Situating his work in relation to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the author brings together the disparate fields of queer theory and theories of empire to promote Irish culture’s contributions to a more just world order. This book engages an array of sources and media to make an original contribution to Irish and modernist studies, the history of sexuality, and theories of economic and aesthetic value.
	Prairie fairies: a history of queer communities and people in western Canada, 1930-1985 Korinek, Valerie Joyce University of Toronto Press, 2018 Prairie Fairies draws upon a wealth of oral, archival and cultural histories to recover the experiences of queer urban and rural people in the prairies. Focusing on the five major urban centres: Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary, Prairie Fairies explores the regional experiences of queer men and women from 1930-1985. Challenging the preconceived narratives of queer history, Valerie J. Korinek argues that queer people have a long history in the prairie west, and that their histories, previously marginalized or omitted, deserve attention. Korinek pays tribute to the prairie activists and actors who were responsible for creating spaces for socializing, politicizing and organizing other queer people, both in the cities and rural areas. Far from the stereotype of the isolated, insular Canadian prairies of small towns and farming communities populated by faithful farm families, Prairie Fairies historicizes the transformation of prairie cities, and ultimately the region itself, into a predominantly urban and diverse place.
	Queer 1950s Bauer, Heike; Cook, Matthew Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 This collection brings together scholars from across the humanities in a fresh examination of queer lives, cultures and thought in the first full post-war decade. Through explorations of sexology, literature, film, oral testimony, newspapers and court records it nuances understandings of the period, and makes a case for the particularity of queer lives in different national contexts ₆ from Finland to New Zealand, the UK to the USA – whilst also marking the transnational movement of people and ideas. The collection rethinks perceptions of the 1950s, traces genealogies of sexual thought in that decade, and pinpoints some of its legacies. In so doing, it explores the utility of queer theoretical approaches and asks how far they can help us to unpick queer lives, relationships and networks in the past.
	A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, D.C Beemyn, Genny Routledge, 2015 Based on archival work, personal interviews, and literary history, A Queer Capital is a history of LGBT Washington D.C. during the long decades from the turn of the 20th century through the Eisenhower era. The book is a lively history of black and white gay communities and individuals, attesting to the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of a city sometimes believed to be neither. Of particular importance is the discussion of how racial identities and gay identities were interrelated during the period. A Queer Capital is a book for readers interested in gay life, in Washington D.C. history, and in African American life and culture in the first half of the twentieth century.
	Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi Sueyoshi, Amy University of Hawai’i Press, 2012 In September 1897 Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) contemplated crafting a poem to his new love, western writer Charles Warren Stoddard. He viewed their relationship as doomed by their introverted dispositions and differences in background. While confessing his love to Stoddard, Noguchi had a child with his editor, Léonie Gilmour; became engaged to Ethel Armes; and upon his return to Japan married Matsu Takeda—all within a span of seven years. This book argues that Noguchi was not a dedicated polyamorist: He deliberately deceived the three women, to whom he either pretended or promised marriage while already married. The book asserts further that Noguchi’s intimacies point to little-known realities of race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and illuminate how Asian immigrants negotiated America’s literary and arts community. As Noguchi maneuvered through cultural and linguistic differences, his affairs assert how Japanese in America could forge romantic fulfillment during a period historians describe as one of extreme sexual deprivation and discrimination for Asians, particularly in California. Moreover, Noguchi’s relationships reveal how individuals who engaged in seemingly defiant behavior could exist peaceably within prevailing moral mandates. In unveiling Noguchi’s interracial and same-sex affairs, this book attests to the complex interaction between lived sexualities and socio-legal mores as it traces how one man negotiated affection across cultural, linguistic, and moral divides to find fulfillment in unconventional yet acceptable ways.
	Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance Blackmore, Josiah; Hutcheson, Gregory S. Duke University Press, 1999 Martyred saints, Moors, Jews, viragoes, hermaphrodites, sodomites, kings, queens, and cross-dressers comprise the fascinating mosaic of historical and imaginative figures unearthed in Queer Iberia. The essays in this volume describe and analyze the sexual diversity that proliferated during the period between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries when political hegemony in the region passed from Muslim to Christian hands. To show how sexual otherness is most evident at points of cultural conflict, the contributors use a variety of methodologies and perspectives and consider source materials that originated in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, Catalan, and Galician-Portuguese. Covering topics from the martydom of Pelagius to the exploits of the transgendered Catalina de Erauso, this volume is the first to provide a comprehensive historical examination of the relations among race, gender, sexuality, nation-building, colonialism, and imperial expansion in medieval and early modern Iberia. Some essays consider archival evidence of sexual otherness or evaluate the use of “deviance” as a marker for cultural and racial difference, while others explore both male and female homoeroticism as literary-aesthetic discourse or attempt to open up canonical texts to alternative readings. Positing a queerness intrinsic to Iberia’s historical process and cultural identity, Queer Iberia will challenge the field of Iberian studies while appealing to scholars of medieval, cultural, Hispanic, gender, and gay and lesbian studies.
	Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 Higgs, David Routledge, 1999 A history of gay space in seven of the world’s major cities from the early modern period to the present. Describing gay space as an area with a significant gay/lesbian population, this collection of essays focuses on the changing nature of queer experience in London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Paris, Lisbon and Moscow. The contributors, leading scholars in gay history, span a rich variety of disciplines and make extensive use of source material to examine the transition from the sexual furtiveness of centuries when male homosexual behavior was criminal, to the open affirmation of gay identities in the 1990s. This book reveals the differences between the American model of gay male life and that of cities in other societies. By concentrating on the importance of the city and varied meeting places such as parks, river walks, bathing places, the street, bars and even churches, the book explores the extent to which gay space existed, the degree of social collectiveness felt by those who used this space and their individual histories.
	Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages Mills, Robert University of Chicago Press, 2015 During the Middle Ages in Europe, some sexual and gendered behaviors were labeled “sodomitical” or evoked using ambiguous phrases such as the “unmentionable vice” or the “sin against nature.” How, though, did these categories enter the field of vision? How do you know a sodomite when you see one? Challenging the view that medieval ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form, this book demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period—and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took. Arguing that we need to take account of the role played by translation—whether visual, verbal, or cultural—in endowing sodomy with a pictorial or textual form, the book also considers the extent to which medieval materials can be re-visioned in light of twenty-first-century categories of thought. Also, the book advances discussion by showing how greater attention needs to be paid to motifs of gender slippage and to notions of imitation and derivation in medieval encounters with sex. Among the topics covered are depictions of the practices of sodomites in illuminated Bibles; motifs of gender transformation and sex change as envisioned by medieval artists and commentators on Ovid; sexual relations in religious houses and other enclosed spaces; and the applicability of modern categories such as “transgender,” “butch” and “femme,” “queer,” and “sexual orientation” to medieval culture.