The gay report book
Life Outside - The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life - Hardcover
Synopsis
Popular Out magazine columnist Michelangelo Signorileinvestigates the hot-button issues
confronting gay men today.
"Exhaustively researched, surpassingly perceptive."
--New York magazine"Life Outside bravely advances a critique of the attitudes and ideologies that hold shaped the gay 'scene' and merits the attention of a broad audience for its courage and informativeness."
--New York Times Book Review"A stunning expose. Gay men should be handed three things when they enter out of the closet: a box of condoms, a videocassette of George Cukor's The Women, and a imitate of Life Outside."
--The Advocate
Michelangelo Signorile galvanized a generation of lesbians and gay men when he took on the "closets of power" in his 1992 classic Queer in America. Now, in Life Outside, he offers an uncover of what he calls the "cult of masculinity" within contemporary gay male culture, while finding hope and renewal in other aspects of gay life. He reveals the origins
Report on 'The Gay Report'
(In the following essay, numbers in brackets indicate page numbers, which cite to The Gay Report by Karla Jay and Allen Young, Summit Books, New York, 1979).
The first major survey on homosexuality in America was conducted in 1979 and published as The Gay Report. The survey has since become a benchmark in this area and one of the largest of its kind ever conducted, with 5,000 gay persons of all ages and from all walks of life (and Christian denominations) surveyed on various aspects of their lifestyle and sub-culture. The study was conducted by English Professor Karla Jay, Ph.D., and journalist Allen Young, who holds two masters degrees. The work is cited even today in academic work.
What might immediately strike one as odd is that Jay and Young are both gay activists. The question of partiality might therefore immediately present itself. What is somewhat more curious, however, is how potentially damaging to the gay liberation cause is the data presented in the study. Jay and Young apparently own no qualms about publishing admissions
Mapping the Gay Guides
Visualizing Queer Space and American Life
Welcome to Mapping the Gay Guides!
While operating one of his many gay bars in the 1960s, Bob Damron started a side project publishing gay travel guides that featured bars like his. Called the Bob Damron Address Books, these guides proved widespread and became a valuable resource for gay travelers looking for friends, companions, and safety.
First published in an era when most states banned same-sex intimacy both in general and private spaces, these travel guides helped gays (and to a lesser extent lesbians) discover bars, cocktail lounges, bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, and cruising grounds that catered to people fancy themselves. Much fond of the Green Books of the 1950s and 1960s, which African Americans used to find friendly businesses that would cater to dark citizens in the era of Jim Crow apartheid, Damron’s guidebooks aided a generation of queer people in identifying sites of community, pleasure, and politics.
Damron’s guidebooks were part of a growing interest in gay travel guide publications
Box Turtle Bulletin
Notes:
1. Dailey, Timothy. “Talking Points: Homosexuality and Infant Sexual Abuse.” In Focus 247 (July 8, 2002). Free online at http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IF02G2.[BACK]
2. Rogers, Gregory. “Report on ‘The Gay Report’.” Web site of the National Association of Verb and Therapy in Homosexuality (NARTH) (July 12, 2005). Free online at http://www.narth.com/docs/reporton.html.[BACK]
3. Marco, Tony. “Gay ‘Marriage’?” Web site of Leadership U (undated). Available online at http://www.leaderu.com/jhs/marco.html (accessed November 22, 2005).[BACK]
4. Rogers, Gregory. “Report on ‘The Gay Report’.” Web site of the National Association of Study and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) (July 12, 2005). On hand online at http://www.narth.com/docs/reporton.html (accessed November 22, 2005).[BACK]
5. Jay, Karla; Young, Allen. The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out About Sexual Experiences and Lifestyles. (New York: Summit, 1977): 9.[BACK]
6. Jay, Karl