Reviews

"Brisk, splashy, dishy...Kaiser is a gifted popular historian who manages to suggest something of the flavor of gay life in different decades and to convey effectively the gradual changes in gay peoples' self-images and social status...Kaiser has brought all these materials together quite skillfully, shaping them into a dramatic, often affecting account of the emergence of gay people from fear and self-hatred into uncloseted, self-confident participation in society... it is a welcome addition to the annals of a subculture whose story might well have been lost to history."

"Charles Kaiser aims to convey not only what happened during the period but what it felt like at the time . . . A summoning up of traumas past, a lament for paradise lost."

"Kaiser's book on the evolution of the American gay community is a monumental work...at once expansive and specific, willing to draw cultural, historical and judicial correspondences previous reporters and historians avoided...the decade-by-decade breakdown of people and events provides an excellent portrait of the urban gay community."