The Right Side of History: 100 Years of LGBTQ Activism

by Adrian Brooks

Overview

Before, during and after Stonewall: 100 Years of Heroes and History The Right Side of History tells the 100-year history of queer activism in a series of revealing close-ups, first-person accounts, and intimate snapshots of LGBT pioneers and radicals. This diverse cast stretches from the Edwardian period to today, including first-person accounts of the key protest at the heart of the 2015 movie, Stonewall. The book shows how LGBT folk have always been in the forefront of progressive social evolution in the United States. It references heroes like Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bayard Rustin, Harvey Milk, and Edie Windsor. Equally, the book honors names that aren’t in history books, from participants in the Names Project, a national phenomenon memorializing 94,000 AIDS victims, to underground artists and activitists not yet widely known.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781627781312
Publisher:	Cleis Press
Publication date:	06/09/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	403,984
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Adrian Brooks is an American writer and activist who's been the vanguard of progressive political, spiritual and social movements since the 1960s. An international traveler, poet, performer, playwright, painter and designer, he is, also, a novelist and non-fiction writer. Born in Philadelphia, Brooks was raised Quaker. After graduating Episcopal Academy in 1966, as an early hippie and anti-war protester, he attended the international Friends World Institute—a radical Quaker school intent on its students becoming non-violent "agents of social change." In 1968, he volunteered for Martin Luther King in Washington, DC. Following Dr. King's assassination Brooks did field work in Mexico and East Africa before attending Woodstock in 1969.

In 1970-1972, Brooks was part of the nascent SOHO scene in New York. Here, he knew Andy Warhol, who cast him in an film and invited him to be the front person at 'the Factory,' an offer Brooks declined, choosing, instead, to go to India.

In late 1972, Brooks moved to Inverness, California, and began writing poetry. In 1974, he moved to San Francisco and was prominent in the gay lib movement. He organized what may have been the first public gay poetry reading on September 18, 1974. In late 1974, Harold Norse published Brooks' poetry and drawings with works of Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet and William Burroughs, among others. During this era, Brooks' poems also appeared in: "Gay Sunshine"; "Manroot"; and "Mouth of the Dragon," etc.
Most visibly, Brooks became scriptwriter/star of an iconic free theater: "The Angels of Light." From 1974-1980, he scripted all their epics but one; these included the two smash hit productions: "Paris Sites Under the Bourgeois Sea", in 1975; and in 1979 and 1980, "Holy Cow!"

"The Glass Arcade," Brooks' first novel, was published by Pocket Books in the US and Star Books in the UK. Brooks starred in "Leni Riefenstahl', a trial drama about the 1945 interrogation of the famed German film director by the US Army.n For a decade starting in the 1980s, Brooks left the US. In London, he worked as a designer at Chelsea Harbor. In Holland and Goa, India, Brooks often appeared with "the Amsterdam Balloon Company"- the forerunner of Burning Man festivals. Brooks remains devoted to good works and activism and is a very active member of San Francisco's Castro neighborhood.

Jonathan Ned Katz, is an independent scholar, historian of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and heterosexual American history, and a visual artist.

His historical work has focused on same-sex attraction and changes in the social construction of sexuality and intimate relationships over time. His works stress that the categories with which we name, describe, define and understand human sexuality are historically and culturally specific, along with the social organization of sexual activity, desire, relationships, and sexual identities. In his work, language is studied as one important tool that human beings use to construct different, historically specific sexualities and sex/gender systems.

Katz is that rare bird, a pioneering, innovative historian whose books have helped to create the field of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, and sexual history in general, whose publications have received the highest scholarly accolades, who has taught and organized a historical exhibit at Yale, presented a keynote address at Harvard, and headed a faculty seminar at Princeton, but who lacks any college degrees.

In 2004 Katz returned to visual art, a talent of his childhood, teens and youth. From February 15 to March 31, 2013 the first solo show of Jonathan Ned Katz's art opened at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, in New York, curated by the noted art historian Jonathan David Katz. (The two are not related.)