Ideas for Power: The Invention of Gay Community, 1953-1969

My book project Ideas for Power: The Invention of Gay Community, 1953-1969 presents the first detailed study of the early history of ideas of ‘gay community’ in North America. Contrary to widely held beliefs, the notion did not emerge naturally or inevitably from an expanding mid-century gay culture. ‘Gay community’ had to be invented – theorized, defended, disseminated, and actively summoned into being. Ideas for Power uses a diverse archive of drag performances, photographs, oral histories, legal documents, gay bar rags, newsletters, and other sources to reconstruct this process. It follows it across three distinct phases: origins; coinage and early pluralism; consolidation and continental dissemination. At each step, the project recovers the debates the so-called ‘homophile’ activists of the 1950s and 1960s – lesbians, gay men, street youth, and their allies – held over the nature, membership, and scope of ‘community,’ sets them within the context of their wider political projects, and shows how homophile notions of community were always ‘ideas for power’: concepts purposefully carved and wielded to achieve collective power. 
 

Research coming out of this project has appeared or is forthcoming in The Historical Journal, the British Association for American Studies’ (BAAS) Historical Perspectives on Gendered State Violence project, and an edited collection by Uta Balbier, Emily Brady, and Megan Hunt. 

Ideas for Power builds on my doctoral thesis ‘Community Before Liberation: Theorizing Gay Resistance in San Francisco, 1953-1969’, which received honourable mentions for dissertation awards from both the American Political Science Association and the Organization of American Historians. I completed my thesis in October 2022 at New College, Oxford, under the supervision of Dr Sophie Smith. It passed without corrections.