Queer History and Domestic Possibilities

• Published in: Reviews in American History Vol. 51; no. 3; pp. 258 - 261
• Main Author: Davis, Rebecca L
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: Acquired immune deficiency syndrome; Activists; AIDS; Davis, Rebecca L; Families & family life; Gays & lesbians; Gender; Group homes; Heterosexuality; HIV; Human immunodeficiency virus; LGBTQ history; LGBTQ people; Political activism; Privacy; Revolutions; Same sex marriage; Sexuality; Stereotypes; World War II; United States > US
• ISSN: 0048-7511; 1080-6628; 1080-6628
• DOI: 10.1353/rah.2023.a917240

Recent books, such as Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History (2021), a collection of essays edited by Nancy Cott, Margot Canaday, and Robert Self, as well as books such as Anna Lvovsky’s Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall (2021), demonstrate how privacy became a privilege of racialized heterosexuality in the twentieth century. By framing these presentations of domestic alternatives within the context of the queer domesticity discussed in the book’s first section, Vider situates gay liberationist activism as a response not only to the heteronormativity of the white middle-class American ideal of the time but to the queer domesticity evidenced in the book’s first section. Because nearly all the individuals represented in these chapters were white, the book’s structure, more than its argument, might leave the reader with the impression that white gay men and lesbians drafted the blueprint for queer domesticity in the United States. In the book’s final chapter, Vider offers a brilliant analysis of the “buddy program” run by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), which connected healthy volunteers to homebound people living with AIDS, and the production of amateur educational videos about HIV/AIDS for public access television.