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 scarching, 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 particular: 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.
About the AuthorMartin Meeker is a historian at the Regional Oral History Office of the University of California, Berkeley.
Reviews"Martin Meeker's vivid account of the first gay guidebooks, newspapers, and publishing companies and of how early activists worked to change the mass media's representation of gay life provides an innovative new framework for analyzing the early gay movement and helps explain how San Francisco became the promised land to so many lesbians and gay men. This is a revelatory and utterly fascinating book." - George Chauncey, author of Gay New York"
Book InformationISBN 9780226517353
Author Martin MeekerFormat Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint University of Chicago PressPublisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 510g
Dimensions(mm) 23mm * 16mm * 2mm