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Title: Virtual Equality : The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation by Urvashi Vaid ISBN: 0-385-47299-4 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 May, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Valueable 1st Hand Account
Comment: Vaid's account of her experiences in the gay movement is invaluable for the insights and lessons it offers. Should be required reading not only for activists and gays, but for everyone everywhere.
Rating: 1
Summary: Waste of Paper and Ink
Comment: This book is a polemic by an author with a narrow mind. As a gay man, I resent mightily her insistence that if you don't see issues HER way, you have no place in the Gay movement.
On the one hand, Vaid expresses a "sincere" desire to reach out to others in the Gay Lesbian movement. On the other hand, she silences those, like the great Bruce Bower, who disagree with her.
Rating: 3
Summary: Memoir, critique, manifesto
Comment: Vaid, an activist, lawyer, and former head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, provides an ambitious and richly detailed analysis that is equal parts memoir, critique, and manifesto. For Vaid, the "mainstreaming" of the gay rights movement hasn't been a good thing. She questions how much the prevailing paradigm of gay political activism -- the seeking of legal rights and protections by working within the traditional political and judicial systems -- has actually achieved. Vaid worries that the movement will be co-opted by money and a desire for "insider" access. She argues passionately that gays and lesbians, as well as other sexual minorities, must work in coalition with other progressive groups to "supplement the limited politics of civil rights with a broader and more inclusive commitment to cultural transformation."
Vaid's style tends to be chatty and the chapters a little long-winded, though she is always sincere. Her book will resonate most with academic/queer/left types who are persuaded that gays and lesbians form a distinctive subculture in search of "liberation," a subculture united not merely by sexual expression but also by shared sensibilities, political outlook, and experience of oppression. It will be less impressive to those who believe gays should (or already do) exist largely in the mainstream, or to those who suspect that writers like Vaid talk the language of radical democracy while prescribing a specific political and cultural agenda. (Readers in search of lively debate can read Vaid as counterpoint or antidote to the work of Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan, or vice versa.) While I find Vaid's perspective fundamentally limited because it's grounded in the sort of old-style, two-coasts, radical-chic queer politics that's rapidly being driven out of business by the burgeoning, sophisticated, upper-middle-class movement being built by the Human Rights Campaign (exactly, as it turns out, what Vaid feared; think of her as your pioneering little local bohemian co-op up against the Pottery Barn of gay politics), and while the content is getting somewhat dated, this remains a useful, thoughtful, and important book on its own terms.
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Title: The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life by Michael Warner ISBN: 0674004418 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture by John D'Emilio ISBN: 0822330237 Publisher: Duke Univ Pr (Trd) Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Virtually Normal by Andrew Sullivan ISBN: 0679746145 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University by John D'Emilio, John D'Emillo ISBN: 0415905109 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: August, 1992 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Queer Politics, Queer Theories) by Shane Phelan ISBN: 1566398282 Publisher: Temple Univ Press Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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