Charles Kaiser - The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America & Perry N. Halkitis - Out in Time: The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation
Originally published in 1997 and now reissued in an updated edition to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rising, Kaiser’s landmark history is a comprehensive decade-by-decade account of the progressive rise and acceptance of gay life and identity in the U.S. Starting just after World War II, Kaiser, a former journalist and author of 1968 in America, chronicles the major social, cultural, and political events that have changed the nation, from the making of West Side Story and the American Psychiatric Association's reclassification of homosexuality to the first use of “gay,” the AIDS crisis, RuPaul and the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Halkitis follows his award-winning The AIDS Generation with a portrait of gay male life drawn from three different generations. Interviewing five men each from among those who came of age in the Stonewall (1950s-‘70s), AIDS (1980s-‘90s), and Queer (2000s-‘10s) eras, Halkitis outlines the social, political, and legal contexts that shaped each group’s experience and explores how they all grappled with similar questions of identity and otherness. Letting the men tell their own stories, Halkitis, dean and professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and an advocate for LGBTQ health, creates a rich intergenerational conversation that illuminates how much both has and has not changed for the gay community.
