First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Queer Identities/Political Realities examines the intersection of political leadership, media coverage, and sexual identity with particular emphasis on the negotiation of meaning between public behavior and private behavior in the United States. Centering on cases that illuminate key issues, each chapter questions assumptions about media coverage and extends current theoretical understanding. Each chapter focuses on a specific case within the broader conceptual fabric of queer theory, media theory, or rhetorical criticism. Varied methodological approaches allow us to gauge public discourse of multifaceted controversies that involve same sex behavior. History reveals frequent occasions when private sexual behaviors surface to attract public interest. While the prejudices and discrimination against same-sex partnerships, whether casual or permanent, remain entrenched in United States culture, there have been occasions when the public discussion is riveted on instances. This book argues that public interest changes when the partners in such relationships are of the same sex. The extraordinary public prejudice against same sex unions and public censure has been well documented in other research reports and continues to receive attention in other scholarly publications. This book will examine the unique intersection of political leadership, media coverage, and same-sex behavior.

The contributors to this volume thoroughly investigate the politics of the gay and lesbian movement, beginning with its political organizations and tactics. The essays also address the strategies and ideology of conservative opposition groups.

Sex is usually assumed to be a closely guarded secret of prison life. But it has long been the subject of intense scrutiny by both prison administrators and reformers—as well as a source of fascination and anxiety for the American public. Historically, sex behind bars has evoked radically different responses from professionals and the public alike. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel tracks these varying interpretations and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity. Historians have held the fusion of sexual desire and identity to be the defining marker of sexual modernity, but sex behind bars, often involving otherwise heterosexual prisoners, calls those assumptions into question. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries—along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners’ rights activism; and the HIV epidemic—Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, correctional administrators, journalists, and prisoners themselves—as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture—Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison. In the process, she deepens and complicates our understanding of sexuality in America.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book re-prints various essays on gay history from around Europe and America. Includes one essay in German and one in Italian.

Computer-mediated communication and cyberculture are dramatically changing the nature of social relationships. Whether cyberspace will simply retain vestiges of traditional communities with hierarchical social links and class-structured relationships or create new egalitarian social networks remains an open question. The chapters in this volume examine the issue of social justice on the Internet by using a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives. Political scientists, sociologists, and communications and information systems scholars address issues of race, class, and gender on the Internet in chapters that do not assume any specialized training in computer technology.