Society and the Healthy Homosexual by George Weinberg, Ph.D., was hailed as a landmark when first published. It is the book that pioneered the concept of widespread prejudice against homosexuals--homophobia. It explores the psychological factors underlying that prejudice and offers advice to help individuals overcome the prejudice and accept their sexuality.

Homosexual societies have always been secret for the simple fact that one could lose one's head ... if lucky, lucky because the usual means was the far more painful burning at the stake. If beheading was found too soft, a miscreant's hands and feet could first be lopped off. Another highly popular method had a man hanged until nearly dead, then lowered and disemboweled before his very eyes, and finally beheaded and the body cut into four pieces (drawn-and-quartered). He could also be castrated just before being gutted, and a popular variation, right up to this day, is having the castrated remains stuffed into his mouth, chocking him to death. Even when one escaped death, the consequences of boy-love were serious, the Oscar Wilde tragedy an example (fully covered herein), and more men than one chose suicide over scandal, from the richissime Alfred Krupp to General Hector MacDonald. The only sanctuary that existed was boarding schools, boys literally locked in their dormitories at night, totally free to practice hard-core Lord of the Flies sexual acrobatics and fag-inspired masochism, an experience that certainly started out in pain for many, but for most it was the imperishable, never to be regained, always wistfully regretted time-of-their-lives, as only first love can be. Boys left these schools for the secret Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury Set, where under the likes of the economist Maynard Keynes they were chosen for their beauty and sexual receptivity. This fully-illustrated book begins with the Templars that flourished, homosexually, despite the sheath of lead imposed by Christianity, although in Rome popes and cardinals had access to vagrant lads so numerous as to beggar the imagination of sultans and their boy harems. Until the Stonewall Riots of 1969 American secret societies were far more muted, especially the Mattachine Society, its roots in California where they refused to rock the boat because busloads of lads were arriving in Hollywood daily, and until they were ''discovered'' they made themselves available at cut-rate prices, as stars have done since DeMille. A major section of the book concerns the Chaeronea Order, based on the Theban Sacred Band, the history of which will bring us full circle to that happier time where a Greek man and his boy could gain ultimate honor--before men and gods alike--by defending one another to the death.

This groundbreaking work draws on a vast range of research into human sexuality to demonstrate that homosexuality is not a phenomenon limited to a small minority of society, but is an aspect of a complex sexual harmony that the human race inherited from its animal ancestors. Through a survey of the patterns of sexual expression found among animals and among societies around the world, and an examination of the functional role homosexual behavior has played among animal species and human societies alike, the author arrives at some provocative conclusions: that a homosexual or bisexual phase is a normal part of sexual development, that same-sex relations play an important balancing role in regulating human reproduction, that many societies have institutionalized homosexual traditions in the past, and that the harsh condemnation of homosexuality in Western society is a relatively recent phenomenon, unique among world societies throughout history. This well researched and meticulously documented book is the first that integrates into a coherent picture the startling revelations about human sexuality coming from the recent work of sexual researchers, psychologists, anthropologists and historians. The view that emerges, of an ambisexual human species whose complex sexual harmony is being thwarted by the imposition of an artificial understanding of nature, represents a new way of thinking about sex.

Bruce Bawer exposes the heated controversy over gay rights and presents a passionate plea for the recognition of common values, "a place at the table" for everyone.

As recently as the 1970s, gay and lesbian history was a relatively unexplored field for serious scholars. The past quarter century, however, has seen enormous growth in gay and lesbian studies. The literature is now voluminous; it is also widely scattered and not always easily accessible. In Toward Stonewall, Nicholas Edsall provides a much-needed synthesis, drawing upon both scholarly and popular writings to chart the development of homosexual subcultures in the modern era and the uneasy place they have occupied in Western society. Edsall's survey begins three hundred years ago in northwestern Europe, when homosexual subcultures recognizably similar to those of our own era began to emerge, and it follows their surprisingly diverse paths through the Enlightenment to the early nineteenth century. The book then turns to the Victorian era, tracing the development of articulate and self-aware homosexual subcultures. With a greater sense of identity and organization came new forms of resistance: this was the age that saw the persecution of Oscar Wilde, among others, as well as the medical establishment's labeling of homosexuality as a sign of degeneracy. The book's final section locates the foundations of present-day gay sub-cultures in a succession of twentieth-century scenes and events--in pre-Nazi Germany, in the lesbian world of interwar Paris, in the law reforms of 1960s England--culminating in the emergence of popular movements in the postwar United States. Rather than examining these groups in isolation, the book considers them in their social contexts and as comparable to other subordinate groups and minority movements. In the process, Toward Stonewall illuminates not only the subcultures that are its primary subject but the larger societies from which they emerged.

This essay focuses on the possibility of social and personal transformation which was opened up by the gay liberation movement in France, which the author terms a "revolution of desire."