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Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s
Whether one thinks homosexuals are born or made, they generally are not born into gay families, nor are they socialized to be gay by their peers or schools. How then do people become aware of homosexuality and, in some cases, integrate into gay communities? The making of homosexual identity is the result of a communicative process that entails searching, listening, looking, reading, and finding. Contacts Desired proposes that this communicative process has a history, and it sets out to tell that story.
Martin Meeker here argues that over the course of the twentieth century, a series of important innovations occurred in the networks that linked individuals to a larger social knowledge of homosexuality. He points to three key innovations in the emergence of the homophile movement in the 1950s; the mass media treatments of homosexuals in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and the popularization of do-it-yourself publishing from the late 1940s to the 1970s, which offered bar guides, handmade magazines, and other materials that gay men and lesbians could use to seek one another out. In the process, Meeker unearths a treasure trove of archival materials that reveals how homosexuals played a crucial role in transforming the very structure of communications and urban communities since the postwar era.
" Contacts Desired is a valuable and enduring work of scholarship, surely the best book in gay and lesbian history this year."-- Gay and Lesbian Review
Martin Meeker here argues that over the course of the twentieth century, a series of important innovations occurred in the networks that linked individuals to a larger social knowledge of homosexuality. He points to three key innovations in the emergence of the homophile movement in the 1950s; the mass media treatments of homosexuals in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and the popularization of do-it-yourself publishing from the late 1940s to the 1970s, which offered bar guides, handmade magazines, and other materials that gay men and lesbians could use to seek one another out. In the process, Meeker unearths a treasure trove of archival materials that reveals how homosexuals played a crucial role in transforming the very structure of communications and urban communities since the postwar era.
" Contacts Desired is a valuable and enduring work of scholarship, surely the best book in gay and lesbian history this year."-- Gay and Lesbian Review
321 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 18, 2023
Meeker's book looks the history of early communication between gay & lesbian groups in the United States in post-war America. It is a fascinating look at how queer individuals reached out across the country to help make connections while also facilitating the growth of new identities.
“The emergence of gay male and lesbian communities in twentieth-century United States was in very large part the result of massive changes in the way that individuals could connect to knowledge about homosexuality. As homosexuals have struggles to claim an identity, build communities, map out their world, and secure equality, they have had to overcome many hurdles including but not limited to the actions of police, the diagnoses of psychologists, the sermons of ministers, the sentences of judges, the stamp of censors, and the surveillance of parents. But perhaps the most stubborn problem face by homosexuals over the course of the twentieth century has been one of communication. Before people who erotically and emotionally preferred the same sex could organize to confront and challenge their antagonists, they have had to coalesce around an identity and gather themselves into collectivities, into communities, into specific places, and around certain idea.” 1
“Contacts Desired traces this history of connecting to the gay male and lesbian world through an exploration of a series of innovations that helped to transform the structure of homosexual communication networks from the 1940s into the 1970s. Furthermore, Contacts Desired seeks to recover communications as a central, perhaps the central, thread that makes queer history a recognizable and unified phenomena. Communication networks, as I will show, not only were at the heart of the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s but were also a major preoccupation of lesbian authors in the 1950s, gay liberationists and lesbian feminists in the 1970s, and gay men and lesbians who simply wanted to locate bars throughout the period covered in this book.” 2
“The emergence of gay male and lesbian communities in twentieth-century United States was in very large part the result of massive changes in the way that individuals could connect to knowledge about homosexuality. As homosexuals have struggles to claim an identity, build communities, map out their world, and secure equality, they have had to overcome many hurdles including but not limited to the actions of police, the diagnoses of psychologists, the sermons of ministers, the sentences of judges, the stamp of censors, and the surveillance of parents. But perhaps the most stubborn problem face by homosexuals over the course of the twentieth century has been one of communication. Before people who erotically and emotionally preferred the same sex could organize to confront and challenge their antagonists, they have had to coalesce around an identity and gather themselves into collectivities, into communities, into specific places, and around certain idea.” 1
“Contacts Desired traces this history of connecting to the gay male and lesbian world through an exploration of a series of innovations that helped to transform the structure of homosexual communication networks from the 1940s into the 1970s. Furthermore, Contacts Desired seeks to recover communications as a central, perhaps the central, thread that makes queer history a recognizable and unified phenomena. Communication networks, as I will show, not only were at the heart of the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s but were also a major preoccupation of lesbian authors in the 1950s, gay liberationists and lesbian feminists in the 1970s, and gay men and lesbians who simply wanted to locate bars throughout the period covered in this book.” 2
December 15, 2022
This book was very valuable for providing a national framework for my research on the LGBTQ communities in Fargo and Moorhead during the mid-1950s to early 1980s. I am relying on local newsletters and the interviews we have done for the Breaking Barriers oral history project and Meeker's work was quite helpful. It's also an interesting book.
January 4, 2023
Very valuable for my research but mostly descriptive and covering the usual suspects.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews