Why yes, yes I do have some other books to recommend. So glad you asked! I'm a historian of 20th c. Mexico, rather than the US, but gender history is what I do (or part of what I do) and I know this literature fairly well. And there is nothing I like better than recommending books! ... OK almost nothing. Not a lot, anyway.
OK, first, the reason everyone cites Berube and Chauncey - especially Chauncey - is that nobody's better. That said, if you want more and different, you could look at Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold which is about working-class lesbian life in Buffalo, New York from 1930 through 1970. Marc Stein's City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love as the title hints, is about Philadelphia. It's slightly more focused on politics than Chauncey's book and it isn't as good (which I can only say here behind my pseudonym because Marc is a colleague, neighbor, and friend. Great guy - just not Chauncey. He also has a new book out, a short account of GLBTQ politics in the US from the 1950s to the present, which I haven't read yet but which I expect is terrific.) For family and sexuality in the US in the 1950s, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound is indespensible. For heterosexuality in the US, try From Front Porch to Back Seat: A History of Dating in the Twentieth Century by Beth L. Baily. For sexuality more broadly, I suggest John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, which is a bit outdated now but nothing better has come along in my opinion.
Finally, for a look at a completely different way of thinking about the intersections of gender identity, sexual identity, pleasure, material realities and power, I strongly recommend Travesti, by Don Kulick, a linguistic anthropologist. It's an extremely careful ethnography of a group of transgender sex workers in present-day Salvador do Bahia, Brazil, and it completely changed how I thought about the history of sexuality. Everyone should read this book. A lot.
Sorry, I'm sure that's way more than you bargained for. Let me know if you would also like to know about some excellent work on prostitution in colonial Nairobi ... okay, shutting up now ...
ETA: OMG! I forgot Martin Duberman. He wrote a terrific book about the Stonewall riot, based in oral histories, that gives a clear idea of how bad things were for gay people - legally, socially, and economically - in that moment (as well as an uplifting account of how they mobilized to do something about it.) I'm not a big fan (as everything I've written here will show you) of versions of history which say "every was one way until this big event and then everything was another way" but this is an extremely good version of that kind of history-writing - what we call a discontinuity narrative.
ETA #2: I've been thinking about what GLBTQetc history you could access online easily and it occurred to me that Chauncey led a group of historians (including also Freedman, D'Emilio, and others) in writing an amicus curiae brief for the Supreme Court in, I think, 2003 - maybe 2004? - when it decriminalized sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas (and it might be spelled Laurence?) which the court leaned on pretty heavily in writing the majority opinion. It was the majority's use of this brief which, as the minority opinion put it, "opened the door" to marriage equality in the sodomy decision. Anyway, if I remember right, the not-so-brief brief was a pretty good summary of the history of sex and discrimination against sexual minorities in the US, and it probably could be accessed through the Supreme Court website, which is where I found it back when the decision was first made public.
no subject
OK, first, the reason everyone cites Berube and Chauncey - especially Chauncey - is that nobody's better. That said, if you want more and different, you could look at Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold which is about working-class lesbian life in Buffalo, New York from 1930 through 1970. Marc Stein's City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love as the title hints, is about Philadelphia. It's slightly more focused on politics than Chauncey's book and it isn't as good (which I can only say here behind my pseudonym because Marc is a colleague, neighbor, and friend. Great guy - just not Chauncey. He also has a new book out, a short account of GLBTQ politics in the US from the 1950s to the present, which I haven't read yet but which I expect is terrific.) For family and sexuality in the US in the 1950s, Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound is indespensible. For heterosexuality in the US, try From Front Porch to Back Seat: A History of Dating in the Twentieth Century by Beth L. Baily. For sexuality more broadly, I suggest John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, which is a bit outdated now but nothing better has come along in my opinion.
Finally, for a look at a completely different way of thinking about the intersections of gender identity, sexual identity, pleasure, material realities and power, I strongly recommend Travesti, by Don Kulick, a linguistic anthropologist. It's an extremely careful ethnography of a group of transgender sex workers in present-day Salvador do Bahia, Brazil, and it completely changed how I thought about the history of sexuality. Everyone should read this book. A lot.
Sorry, I'm sure that's way more than you bargained for. Let me know if you would also like to know about some excellent work on prostitution in colonial Nairobi ... okay, shutting up now ...
ETA: OMG! I forgot Martin Duberman. He wrote a terrific book about the Stonewall riot, based in oral histories, that gives a clear idea of how bad things were for gay people - legally, socially, and economically - in that moment (as well as an uplifting account of how they mobilized to do something about it.) I'm not a big fan (as everything I've written here will show you) of versions of history which say "every was one way until this big event and then everything was another way" but this is an extremely good version of that kind of history-writing - what we call a discontinuity narrative.
ETA #2: I've been thinking about what GLBTQetc history you could access online easily and it occurred to me that Chauncey led a group of historians (including also Freedman, D'Emilio, and others) in writing an amicus curiae brief for the Supreme Court in, I think, 2003 - maybe 2004? - when it decriminalized sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas (and it might be spelled Laurence?) which the court leaned on pretty heavily in writing the majority opinion. It was the majority's use of this brief which, as the minority opinion put it, "opened the door" to marriage equality in the sodomy decision. Anyway, if I remember right, the not-so-brief brief was a pretty good summary of the history of sex and discrimination against sexual minorities in the US, and it probably could be accessed through the Supreme Court website, which is where I found it back when the decision was first made public.