Bad Girls details how young women and girls in the 1940s and 1950s pursued new sexual freedoms.
Author Interviews
Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific
Interview by Justin Bengry Yorick Smaal’s recent book Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (Palgrave, 2015) looks to the dynamics of wartime to consider how sex and sexuality was affected by global conflict. Massive influxes of American servicemen transformed sexual communities, and […]
J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the “Sex Deviates” Program
Interview by Christopher Michael Elias For nearly four decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation used the so-called Sex Deviates Program to investigate and badger gay men and women in the United States. That harassment was justified by the belief that homosexuals posed a security risk in two ways: their behavior […]
The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation: An Interview With Jim Downs
Interview by Rachel Hope Cleves While attending Gay American History @40, a conference held this past May to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History, I took a walk with Jim Downs and interviewed him about his new book, Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation. The circumstances felt propitious. […]
Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights
Interview by David K. Johnson Historians who study sexuality in the 20th century United States have largely worked from the premise that secular forces shaped the formation of sexual identities, communities and regulation. Religion, in this paradigm, is framed as a residual and conservative force—the province of the fanatical and the ignorant. […]
The Religious Right and the Politics of Sexuality: An Interview with Neil J. Young
Interview by Kevin M. Kruse In his path-setting book, We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, Neil J. Young upends the widely-believed myths about the political origins and motivations of the Religious Right. This right-wing religious movement was made up of Mormons, conservative Catholics, and […]
The Calendar of Loss: Dagmawi Woubshet on Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS
Interview by Dan Royles Dagmawi Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss (Johns Hopkins, 2015) examines the politics of mourning in the early years of the AIDS epidemic both in the United States and Ethiopia. The book details the ways in which early AIDS mourners used poetry, obituaries, visual art, and direct action protest both to commemorate […]
Recent Posts
Understanding Zika & the Abortion Debate in Brazil: A View from 1940
Naming & Shaming Women: Reporting on VD Trials During WWI
Syphilis Onstage: Eugène Brieux’s Damaged Goods
The Catholic Church and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Reverend Anna Garlin Spencer and the Rise of “Family Life” in Early Sex Education