For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it.
Jason Baumann coordinator of humanities and LGBT Collections at the
New York Public Library, where he develops and promotes literature,
philosophy, and religion collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman
Building. Baumann coordinates the Library's LGBT Initiative, for
which he has curated two exhibitions--1969- The Year of Gay
Liberation and Why We Fight- Remembering AIDS Activism. Baumann
will curate a major Stonewall exhibit at NYPL for 2019.
Edmund White is the author of A Boy's Own Story (1982), The
Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997). He
received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Genet- A
Biography. He won the 2018 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in
American Fiction.
“This window into the daily lives of activists and ordinary people
fighting passionately against injustice is illuminating and
inspiring.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Through his skillful curation, [editor Jason Baumann] offers a
corrective for what is too often a sanitized, homogenous, and
whitewashed portrayal of academics and professionals about the
event sometimes termed 'the hairpin drop heard around the world.'
... The first-person narratives collected here effectively
spotlight the social inequalities surrounding the LGBTQ community,
many of which persist today. A bold rallying cry that should help
in the continuing fight for LGBTQ rights.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This masterful collection is perhaps one of the most exhaustive
looks at the events surrounding Stonewall from the LGBTQ
perspective and provides a wonderfully diverse cast of voices.”
—Library Journal
“…Excellent compilation of first-person accounts from before,
during, and after the pivotal 1969 riot…THE STONEWALL READER
features a diverse array of voices—folks from across the LGBTQ
spectrum telling their stories over decades in essays and
interviews and letters.”
—The Atlantic
“This significant book does welcome justice to an event that author
Edmund White, who wrote the foreword, says sparked 'an oceanic
change in thinking.'”
—Booklist
“The Stonewall Reader gives us a richer, messier, more dangerous
picture of the Stonewall uprising, its foreground, and aftermath.
The book wonderfully reflects how revolutionary moments rarely get
portrayed accurately through single voices, and Baumann has
produced here a history worth revisiting again and again.”
—Lambda Literary
“An excellent companion to those famous bricks the patrons threw at
police that night in June 1969 (…) aims to correct a narrative that
has so often excluded LGBTQ people of color. (…) The book
de-gentrifies the narrative, returning the street-smart stories of
the original protesters to history. The inclusion of Sylvia
Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson in the “During” and “After”
sections also subtly underlines the role of transgender people, as
they tell the story first of that night and then of how their
abandonment by the movement began almost immediately. The book’s
mix of familiar and unfamiliar didn’t just re-contextualize the
riots for me. I came to understand myself and my life differently.
I didn’t even know what I’d lost or gained from these stories and
their contexts. The Stonewall Reader seems designed to be widely
adopted in classrooms and should be, but, to be sure, it is for
anyone, even those who think they know this history.”
—Alexander Chee, The New Republic
“An essential read for any member of the community who wants to
learn about those who paved the way before us.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“Brush up on your LGBTQ history with this definitive collection of
first-hand accounts, diary entries, periodic literature, and
articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented the
years leading up to and immediately following the Stonewall
riots.”
—Queerty
“The Stonewall Reader, a collection featuring works by figures such
as the writer Audre Lorde and the activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya,
demonstrates this expansiveness in the variety of experiences it
chronicles. The book is named for one of history’s most powerful
displays of queer protest, but focuses instead on intimate
self-reckoning. The pieces in it ponder visibility,
self-understanding, and the development of queerness as an
identity.”
—The Atlantic
“A compilation of first-person accounts and diary entries from
activists and participants, along with news articles, essays and
more, this work tells the story of events that surrounded the 1969
Stonewall riots, largely seen as the start of the nation’s LGBT
civil rights movement.”
—CNN.com
“To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot, Jason
Baumann, New York Public Library coordinator of humanities and
LGBTQ collections, edited a volume drawing from the NYPL archives
that includes first accounts, diaries, newspaper articles, and more
chronicling the years leading up to the riots and documenting the
fight itself. It also spotlights iconic activists who were pivotal
to the movement, giving room and space for the forgotten figures of
the fight. It features a ton of diverse voices and interviews and
helps to paint a crucial moment in queer history in the voices and
contexts of the people who were there.”
—Book Riot
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