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The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America cover

The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America

Eric Cervini

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awards won

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The Deviant's War won the 2021 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction and was a New York Times bestseller. In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back. Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory.

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Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN-13
9780374721565
Genre
History
Topics
LGBTQ rights movementGay rights activism in AmericaGovernment persecution of homosexuals

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