‘Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation’ by Jim Downs
Stand By Me maps the complex cultural and political expressions of the lesbian and gay community in the years before AIDS
‘Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity’ by Robert Beachy
This is an important book, and an impressive feat of scholarship drawing on nearly five hundred sources, with twenty-two pages of notes and sixteen pages of photographs.
‘Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life’ by Vivian Gornick
In Emma Goldman’s day, as in ours, many on the Left saw issues of sexuality, happiness, and what we might generally call the “personal” as peripheral to the class struggle. Yet Goldman herself demurred. She elucidated an anarchism that was a personal as well as a political platform, and, as the subtitle to Vivian Gornick’s book suggests, she lived it out in practice.
