Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation

by Jim Downs

Overview

With Stand by Me, Jim Downs rewrites the history of gay life in the 1970s, arguing that the decade was about much more than sex and marching in the streets. Drawing on a vast trove of untapped records at LGBT community centers in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, Downs tells moving, revelatory stories of gay people who stood together—as friends, fellow believers, and colleagues—to create a sense of community among people who felt alienated from mainstream American life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820356440
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	02/01/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	278
Sales rank:	1,063,085
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America.

JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Largest Massacre of Gay People in American History
2. The Gay Religious Movement
3. Biography of a Bookstore
4. Gay American History
5. The Body Politic
6. “Prison Sounds”
7. Body Language
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

He has combed through a wealth of archival materials, including gay community publications, the holdings of LGBT religious groups such as the Metropolitan Community Church (a Protestant denomination founded in the late ’60s as a safe worship space for homosexuals), the personal collections of men doing prison work on gay issues, archives of LGBT community centers, and reporting on LGBT life in mainstream publications. These resources have been underutilized by scholars, and Downs’s work is a service both to the historical record and to the gay community.

Boston Review - Michael Bronski

In any history, there’ll always be surprises, facts, and tales that are forgotten or ignored until someone finds and reveals them anew. And that’s exactly what author Jim Downs has done here in Stand by Me. . . . This book is informative, sometimes horrifying, interesting and, unlike your old high school history books, it’s never dry.

Washington Blade - Terri Schlichenmeyer

Downs by no means intends to erase sexuality as a significant factor in the story of gay liberation. Rather, he aims to establish that 'it was not defining, as the received narrative has it.' . . . In Stand by Me, Jim Downs achieves the impressive feat of illustrating that the willingness of homosexuals to be out—among one another, at least—was eased by more than just clubs, bars and bathhouses.

The ARTery/WBUR - Blake Maddux

In sparkling, often moving, prose, Jim Downs rewrites the history of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s. This is an important contribution not only to the history of that struggle but to our understanding of the afterlife of the upheavals of the 1960s.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Fiery Trail - Eric Foner

Downs draws on LGBTQ materials long underrepresented in superficial media accounts of gay life. Past chronicles have defined the gay community by focusing on 'free love' and HIV/AIDS. Downs upends this, detailing more inclusive and representative subjects, tracing the history of gay rights as part of the ongoing battle for civil rights, and covering the gay religious movement. . . . A valuable addition to LGBT and social-change collections.

ALA Booklist - Whitney Scott

In Stand by Me, historian Jim Downs present a compelling revision of the history of gay liberation in the decade before the onslaught of AIDS. Examining gay life in the 70s, Down discovers a diverse array of activists working in the contexts of religious practice, advocacy journalism, and community building. In doing so, he recovers a powerful social and cultural moment in the broader history of the LGBT movement. Stand by Me should be read by anyone interested in the historical and ongoing debates about culture, identity, and sexuality.

Harvard University - Allan M. Brandt

The book exists to highlight the nuance, the richness, and even the messiness of people’s lives by offering an alternate history of gay life in the ‘70s. Though the years leading up to the AIDS epidemic are largely thought of as a sexual free-for-all clearly there was more going on. . . . That’s where Downs comes in. He doesn’t negate the idea that lots of men had lots of sex in the ‘70s, he merely supplements it.

Gawker.com - Rich Juzwiak

Stand by Me brings the 1970s back to life, not as it is imagined to be, but as it actually was. In compelling prose, Jim Downs has recovered the stories of heroic individuals who risked much to come out, to build community, and to fight for social justice. Some of these episodes are tragic and some inspiring. All of them deserve to be remembered.

author of Intimate Matters - John D'Emilio

By capturing the stories of gay people who have been largely silenced by history, Stand by Me shines a bright light on a triumphant moment, and will transform how we think about gay life in America from the ’70s to the present day.

OutSmart - Troy Carrington

Exhaustive, but never exhausting . . . Stand By Me is not duplicative of other accounts. It is to our movement an equivalent to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. . . . Downs challenges our movement not to let the horror of AIDS or the rush to assimilate cloud the memory of our roots. Stand By Me calls us to dig more deeply into the past in order to guide our future.

Lambda Literary Review - Jim Mitulski

Downs capably blends authority and warmth in this thoughtful reexamination of an era.

Boston Globe - Kate Tuttle

The sheer act of Downs' acknowledging that not all gay men subscribed to the popular 'three Big Bs' of the time—'the Bars, Beaches, and Baths'—and found their identity validated and articulated through the communal practices of Christian worship and cultural hubs (like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop) is a refreshing and invigorating experience. Stand By Me proves a deeply moving read, one that passionately and urgently argues for us to acknowledge some of the forgotten history of gay liberation.

San Francisco Chronicle - Nathan Smith

Fom the ashes of a horrific fire that engulfed a gay church in New Orleans in 1973, Jim Downs has rescued the history of gay men in the decade after the Stonewall uprising. As this beautiful, and at times haunting, book makes clear, gay men in this period forged intellectually vibrant, spiritually rich, and nourishing communities that not only sustained them through some harrowing and heartwarming times, but that also grew more powerful as the twentieth century became the twenty-first.

University of Michigan - Heather Ann Thompson

Stand by Me valiantly attempts to correct the historical record and revise the harmful, outdated images of bathhouses and promiscuity that plague both official and non-official accounts of the gay community and its history.

Manhattan Book Review - Glenn Dallas

"Downs has an instinct for historically relevant stories and he tells them well.... In the chapter 'Prison Sounds,' Downs offers similarly invigorating detective work, digging up aspects of LGBT activism that have eluded most historians."—Boston Review

"Downs capably blends authority and warmth in this thoughtful reexamination of an era."—Boston Globe

"Intelligent and thought-provoking."—Kirkus Reviews

"The sheer act of Downs' acknowledging that not all gay men subscribed to the popular 'three Big Bs' of the time—'the Bars, Beaches, and Baths'—and found their identity validated and articulated through the communal practices of Christian worship and cultural hubs (like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop) is a refreshing and invigorating experience. Stand By Me proves a deeply moving read, one that passionately and urgently argues for us to acknowledge some of the forgotten history of gay liberation."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Downs infuses great passion and intent in every paragraph, striving to the raise the level of discourse even as he's tossing outmoded ideas aside left and right. This is history as it should be told, as complex and as personal as possible."—Manhattan Book Review

"Stand by Me includes massacre and tragedy; its opening chapter is an emotional rehashing of the 1973 arson attack—the most lethal targeting of gay people in American history until the June 12 massacre at Orlando's Pulse club—took the lives of 32 men during a religious service.... The passages that grab you most...address the 'usable past,' which Downs defines as the facets of history that provide gay people with 'legitimacy, meaning, and, most of all, a genealogy to their plight.' And his passion is infectious."—Public Books

"Stand By Me is not duplicative of other accounts. It is to our movement an equivalent to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States."—Lambda Literary

"Stand By Me is a laudable, thoroughly researched corrective to the prevalent idea of gay people in the 1970s as uninvolved, unengaged sex-crazed hedonists."—A & U Magazine

"Downs makes a good case for us to remember that the zeal for liberation in the '70s was deeply and directly informed by feminist politics, and thus was only ever in part, primarily or even strongly, about sexual liberation.... [A] diverting book with considerable virtues."—Gay & Lesbian Review

"This book is informative, sometimes horrifying, interesting and, unlike your old high school history books, it's never dry."—Washington Blade

"A valuable addition to LGBT and social-change collections."—Booklist

"In sparking, often moving, prose, Jim Downs rewrites the history of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s. This is an important contribution not only to the history of that struggle but to our understanding of the afterlife of the upheavals of the 1960s."—Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Fiery Trial

"From the ashes of a horrific fire that engulfed a gay church in New Orleans in 1973, Jim Downs has rescued the history of gay men in the decade after the Stonewall uprising. As this beautiful, and at times haunting, book makes clear, gay men in this period forged intellectually vibrant, spiritually rich, and nourishing communities that not only sustained them through some harrowing and heartwarming times, but that also grew more powerful as the twentieth century became the twenty-first."—Heather Ann Thompson, University of Michigan

"Stand by Me brings the 1970s back to life, not as it is imagined to be, but as it actually was. In compelling prose, Jim Downs has recovered the stories of heroic individuals who risked much to come out, to build community, and to fight for social justice. Some of these episodes are tragic and some inspiring. All of them deserve to be remembered."—John D'Emilio, author of Intimate Matters

From the Publisher

02/01/2016
In popular imagination, the 1970s were a time of wanton hedonism and licentiousness among gay men. That narrative is only part of a picture that Downs (Sick from Freedom) wants to make complete by looking at the many ways in which the gay political movement progressed during the decade. What Downs demonstrates is how social institutions such as the Metropolitan Community Church and other religious organizations grew. It was also a foundational period for research into gay history and culture, the monument being the publication of Jonathan Ned Katz's Gay American History in 1976. Downs uses that work and the example of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York to portray the intellectual growth of the community. He begins with the tragedy of the arsonist attack at the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans in 1973, documenting the hatred of the time, and concludes by saying, "one of my goals in this book has been to shift the focus of the discussion of gay culture from sex to religion, and from intimacy to community." VERDICT Downs's highly recommended and necessary corrective to the mythology of gay life in the 1970s will appeal to both academic and general readers.—David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia

Library Journal

2015-12-17
Downs (History/Connecticut Coll.; Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction, 2012, etc.) aims to dispel the misconception that gay liberation in the 1970s was primarily focused on sexual freedom. In this slim though well-documented history, the author provides vivid accounts of noteworthy movements and issues that surfaced during this decade, each playing a vital role in advancing meaningful change within the gay community. He examines how the rise of gay churches and gay bookstores helped to foster a sense of community; how the establishment and expanding influence of gay newspapers (with particular attention devoted to the Toronto-based publication The Body Politic) heightened awareness; and how certain reforms alleviated the abuse and sexual mistreatment of gay prisoners. The author also explores how the emergence of the "macho clone" redefined gay male culture and identity, in many ways disrupting the progress. "The popularity of this image erased women and people of color from the gay community," writes the author. While Downs successfully asserts a grounded claim that gay life in the 1970s was by no means only about sex, it can be argued that for many it was also about sex, in profoundly more complex and defining ways than he allows here. "There is little question that sex shaped, informed, and mattered to gay people throughout this decade, but it was not defining, as the received narrative has it," he writes. In his earnest endeavor to sustain his argument, the author gives negligible attention to this facet of the history, leaving his overall conclusion unbalanced. The book would have also benefited from a more expansive perspective, relating how these various efforts specifically helped to shape progress leading up to the present. By applying such a narrow lens to just the '70s, the broader impact of this decade within the history of the movement feels underserved. An intelligent and thought-provoking though somewhat limited addition to the historical record of the gay liberation movement.

Kirkus Reviews