Gay History

The Evening Crowd at Kirmser's

It is better. I just discovered this little book in the Library at the GLCC in Pittsburgh. It's a well written, poignant, memoir and history of gays in St. Paul, MN in the mid-1940s. Kirmser's is a straight bar by day and a gay bar at night where St. Pauls men and women can come together for a few hours to be themselves. If you don't have any idea what life for a gay man in the Midwest right after World War II, Brown paints a great portrait. The book tells a vivid story of the closed, double lives gays and lesbians were forced to live during this time. This is Brown's autobiography but it's a great story of the time and place. In 2011, we really don't know how well we have it.

This is a great companion books to Gay Bar: the fabulous, true story of a daring woman and her boys in the 1950s by Will Fellows and Helen P. Branson that came out in 2010. If you like Gay Bar you will definitely like this one. If you have any interest at all in gay history you will want to read both.

While I would not describe this work as "well written" I will say I found it engaging and fascinating in that it gave me insights into gay life in this era. Very personal. For those of us that came along decades later this book is an involving and inspiring personal history.

I just discovered An Evening at the Garden of Allah: a Gay Cabaret in Seattle . It's another gay bar history. The Garden of Allah in Seattle, was in it's hey day during and right after World War II. It's an interesting history of drag shows and their importance in creating a gay community in the 1940's and 1950's. It's not as well written as Gay Bar but it's well worth reading if you can find it. I had no idea the role that drag shows and drag performers play in helping to create a place for gay men and lesbians during that time.

With Gay History month starting on Saturday it's a good time to look for any of the titles listed in this thread. They all do a good job of describing what life was like for gay men between WW II and Stonewall. We've come a long way baby, to get where we got to today. I can't overstate how important it is to understand our past in order to make the future better.

Has anybody seen We Were Here? Very curious about this film:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/movies/we-were-here-a-documentary-about-aid...

Haven't seen We Were Here yet but hope to on Saturday. It's playing during the L&G Film Fest here in Pittsburgh this coming weekend.

I just finished reading Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. I was never into the 1970s disco scene and didn't really know too much about it or how huge it really was socially or economically. It's a great look at the music and the effects on and by the gay and African-American communities. Two interesting companion books are Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. Both of these books offer a very good look at life in the 1970s. Hot Stuff takes a broad national look but both books center in on NYC. Russell was a minimalist, but serious composer of contemporary classical music but wrote a couple of disco hits including "Is It All Over My Face?".

Both books are very well researched and have extensive indexes. (I wish Echols had included a bibliography) In Hot Stuff, Echols quotes several times from Dancer from the Dance and The Farewell Symphony. I read Dancer many years ago and she's got me reading the Edmund White book now.

Since October is LGBT History month read one or all of these books. You won't be disappointed.

I read this quite a few years ago, shortly after it came out, I guess. I had come out about 1958 while in college at Syracuse Univ., and then went to live in NYC during the worst of the Wagner crack-down on gay life, so I was hardly unfamiliar with an atmosphere of skulking around and looking over your shoulder. But the era of Kirmser's bar sounded far, far bleaker.

For those who are interested in what gay life was like in the Fifties through the late Eighties, I have a website that might interest you: www.nycnotkansas.com. It is mostly focused on gay life in NYC, but there is a fair amount about the earlier years in Western New York state, and a bit about Chicago in the Sixties. It has quite a few links to gay-related articles and books.

Caco_Velho,

I have visited your website "nycnotkansas" and have spent a wonderfully good time there. Thank you. Having grown up as a gay person in NYC (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens) during the late 40s, 50s and 60s your website has stirred up a lot of wonderful memories. I have a copy of Gay New York by George Chauncey and have partially read it. i could not relate as much to that book as I have to the history of the City which you so excellenty tell on your website. Living now in Oklahoma, I could not be farther away (even more so than you in Europe) from the spirit of that outrageous but marvelous city.

Glad that you enjoyed it. I'm still waiting for George's second book (post-WW II), he interviewed me late in the 90s. But it has already been more than a decade in the writing and I don't think I'll live long enough to see it at that rate.

Caco Velho

In England it is gay history month, or lgbt or lgbtq* and I noticed library thing has also a lgbt history group, so history seems to pop up in lots of places.

I've just discovered the class A39 at UCL... all this is London code speak. I'm using melicertus on library thing to document the month's learning.

Just found

Penney Queer

dated 2014 in London so starting a thread on queer theory. But happy to have that within history.

Here is an interesting QT thing

http://www.librarything.com/work/13540638

which appears on search lt QT but then is in library but can't be found.