GAH40 Program

WELCOME
On behalf of OutHistory.org, we are pleased to invite you to the Gay
American History @ 40 Conference held at The New School from
May 4th to 6th, 2016. This conference marks the fortieth anniversary
of Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay
Men in the USA (1976) and will highlight the ways in which theories,
categories, research methods and priorities have been constructed,
challenged, and reconstructed over the last forty years of historical
research on sexuality and gender.
image courtesy Curtis Ryan
As a founding text of LGBTQ history, GAH appeared before the
modern institutionalization of such studies, when such research was
actively discouraged in universities, and it was not clear that such
scholarship had any future. Drawing together an unprecedented
collection of documents produced since 1566, GAH anticipated and
inspired many aspects of the LGBTQ history research that followed.
This anniversary provides an opportunity for reflecting on earlier work
on sexual and gender history and the growth of the field since 1976.
Our keynote speaker, Susan Stryker, is Director of the
Institute for LGBT Studies and Associate Professor of
Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of
Arizona. She is founding co-editor of the Duke
University Press journal TSQ: Transgender Studies
Quarterly, co-editor of the Lambda Literary Awardwinning
Transgender Studies Reader and Ruth
Benedict Book Prize-winning Transgender Studies
Reader 2, author of the Alan Bray Book Prizenominated
Transgender History, and co-writer/director/producer of
the Emmy Award-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The
Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria. She has been honored with both the
David Kessler and Eric Brudner Awards for lifetime contribution to
LGBTQ Studies.

PANEL LOCATIONS (THURSDAY & FRIDAY)
A. THERESA LANG COMMUNITY AND STUDENT CENTER
ARNHOLD HALL
55 WEST 13TH STREET • I202
NEW YORK, NY 10011
B. KLEIN CONFERENCE ROOM
ALVIN JOHNSON/J.M. KAPLAN HALL
66 WEST 12TH STREET • A510
NEW YORK, NY 10011
C. STARR FOUNDATION HALL
UNIVERSITY CENTER
63 FIFTH AVENUE • UL102
NEW YORK, NY 10011

SCHEDULE
WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 2016
PANEL LOCATION:
MOOT COURT ROOM
ROOM 6.68
JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
524 WEST 59TH STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10019
6:00–8:00 P.M.
REGISTRATION
6:30–8:00 P.M.
JOINT EVENT: CLAGS PUBLIC EVENT + PRE-CONFERENCE
ROUNDTABLE: FROM WOMEN’S LIBERATION TO THE
GENDER TURN: THE POLITICS OF LESBIAN HISTORY
• Featuring Claire Bond Potter, Cheryl Clarke, Caroll Smith-Rosenberg,
and others.
8:00–9:30 P.M.
WELCOME RECEPTION

THURSDAY, MAY 5, 2016
8:00 A.M.–6:00 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
REGISTRATION
8:45–9:00 A.M. Theresa Lang Center
WELCOME RECEPTION
9:00–10:00 A.M. Theresa Lang Center
OPENING KEYNOTE: SUSAN STRYKER
“1973: Remembering Queer History Otherwise”
10:00–10:30 A.M. Theresa Lang Center
MORNING TEA
10:30 A.M.–12:30 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
HISTORICIZING SEXUALITY AND GENDER
• Sarah Schulman “Writing Queer Historical Fiction: Sex and Race in
1950’s Working-Class New York in ‘The Cosmopolitans’”
• Jim Downs “‘Father Knows Best’:
The Marxist Roots of Gay American History”
• Holly Hughes “A Home for Wayward Girls”
• Michael Roberson “The Trans Sounds of Black Freedom”
• Chair and comment: Ricardo Montez
12:30–1:30 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
LUNCH
1:30–2:50 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
EARLY AMERICAN HISTORIES
• Richard Godbeer “Growing Up with Nicholas Sension:
Same Sex Intimacies in Early America”
• Jen Manion “Me and Deborah Sampson”
• Elizabeth Reis “Bodies in Doubt”
• Chair and comment: Kathleen Brown

3:00–4:30 P.M. Parallel Panels (Locations vary)
Theresa Lang Center
GENDER, SLAVERY, PERFORMATIVITY, AND SODOMY
IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
• Thomas A. Foster “Enslaved Men and Same-Gender Intimacy”
• Alexandria Griffin “The Publick Universal Friend,
Gender, and ‘Earliness’ in Early America”
• Charles Upchurch “Denouncing the Sodomy Law
in Early Nineteenth-Century America”
• Caroline Radesky “The Erotics of History: The Embodiment of
History in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century America”
• Chair and comment: Marc Stein
Starr Foundation Hall
WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS?
• Carmen Acosta “Queer Power and Union Clout: Campaigning for Equity”
• Anne Balay “On the Road with T-Girls”
• James Halleman “Working People and Trans People”
• Miriam Frank “Does Queer Labor History Have a Future?”
• Chair and comment: Zeb Tortorici
4:30 P.M.–5:00 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
AFTERNOON TEA

5:00–6:30 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
QUEER TOURISM AND GENTRIFICATION: HERITAGE,
NEOLIBERALISM AND AFRICAN AMERICAN URBANITY
• Kevin McKenna “Making Capitol Hill Safe for Consumption:
The Greater Seattle Business Association and the City of Seattle
in the Gentrification of a Gay-Identified Neighborhood”
• Nan Alamilla Boyd “Queer Tourism and Late Capitalism:
San Francisco’s Fillmore and Castro”
• Kwame Holmes “Planning Around Queer Time: D.C.’s African
American Heritage Trails, and the Maturation of Black Urbanity”
• Chair and comment: Christina Hanhardt
6:30–7:30 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
EVENING PERFORMANCE AND DISCUSSION
Queer Inversion in Nath Ann Carrera and Amber Martin’s
Witch Camp, with Sean F. Edgecomb

FRIDAY, MAY 6, 2016
8:00 A.M.–6:00 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
REGISTRATION
9:00–10:30 A.M. Theresa Lang Center
HISTORY TENDS TO BURY WHAT IT SEEKS TO REJECT:
CONVERSATION WITH BLANCHE WIESEN COOK
• Featuring Blanche Wiesen Cook, Kelly Anderson, and
Marcia M. Gallo.
• Chair and comment: Nan Alamilla Boyd
10:30–11:00 A.M. Theresa Lang Center
MORNING TEA
11:00 A.M.–12:00 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
U.S. HOMOPHILE INTERNATIONALISM:
AN ONLINE ARCHIVE AND EXHIBIT OF THE 1950S AND 1960S
• Featuring Marc Stein, Tamara de Szegheo Lang, Marva Milo, Healy
Thompson, Carly Simpson, Dasha Serykh, and Shlomo Gleibman.
• Chair and comment: Rachel Cleves
12:00–1:00 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
LUNCH
1:00–2:30 P.M. Parallel Panels (Locations vary)
Theresa Lang Center
LEGACIES OF THE 1950S? CLASS, ORGANIZATION, SEXUALITY
AND POLITICS
• David K. Johnson “The Physique Era: Building and
Consolidating a Gay Consumer Market, 1951–1967”
• Aaron Lecklider “The Material World: Reframing Homosexuality and
the Left in the Shadow of the Cold War”
• Elizabeth Alice Clement “Queer Reactions to the Myth of Pedophilia”
• Rachel Hope Cleves “Gay American Food History:
Sex and Cookery in the Twentieth Century”
• Chair and comment: Tim Retzloff

Klein Conference Room
HISTORICIZING ACTIVISM & SOCIAL LIFE
• Jackie Gronau “A Double Erasure from the French Women’s
Movement and Scholarship”
• Rachel Gelfand “Oral History as Queer Practice:
Documenting the Atlanta Lesbian/Feminist Alliance”
• Simon D. Elin Fisher “Pauli Murray’s Peter Panic: Perspectives
from the Margins of Race and Gender in Jim Crow America”
• Harrison Apple “A Social Member in Good Standing:
Sexuality and Citizenship in Pittsburgh’s Working-
Class Gay and Lesbian Social Clubs 1960–1990”
• Chair and comment: Tim Stewart Winter
Starr Foundation Hall
LESBIAN RESISTANCE AND LOVE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY
AMERICAN HISTORY: RESTORING MORE STORIES
• La Shonda Mims “Lesbian Resistance and the Southern Belle”
• Alix Genter “‘Playing Straight’: Butch Discretion in Postwar America”
• Margaret Galvan “Grassroots Dykes, Alison Bechdel,
and the Histories of LGBTQ Print Media”
• Julie R. Enszer “The C.L.I.T. Papers: From Lesbian Separatism
as an Imagined Intervention to Lesbian Militancy”
• Chair and comment: Esther Newtown
2:40–4:10 P.M. Parallel Panels (Locations vary)
Theresa Lang Center
CAPTURING, PRESERVING, CREATING: 40 YEARS OF LESBIAN
• Morgan Gwenwald “TK (is for Lesbian Herstory Archives)”
• Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz “TK (is for Lesbian Herstory Archives)”
• Bonnie J. Morris “The Disappearing L:
Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture”
• Rebecca L. Davis “Heterosexuality: A Cultural History”
• Chair and comment: Miriam Frank

Starr Foundation Hall
ONLINE/DIGITAL QUEER HISTORIES
• Sarah Prager “Apps to Wikis:
The Digital Revolution in the Queer History Space”
• Orla Egan “Cork’s LGBT Community:
Creating an LGBT Digital Archive”
• Eric Nolan Gonzaba “Wearing What You Preach:
Making an LGBT Digital Archive”
• Chair and comment: Claire Bond Potter
Klein Conference Room
QUEER YOUTH HISTORIES
• Daniel Marshall “Gay American History’s Children”
• Beans Velocci “‘A Temptation to Children’: Sex, Money, and
the Meaning of Morality in Turn-of-the-Century New York.”
• Amanda Littauer “‘The Date of His Choice’: Queer Teens’ Fight for
Prom and the Persistence of High School Heteronormativity in the U.S.”
• Kevin McGruder “Sex and the Church: The Powells’ Efforts to
Maintain a Heterosexual Standard for Black Americans”
• Chair and comment: Regina Kunzel
4:10–4:30 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
AFTERNOON TEA
4:30–630 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
MAKING HISTORY PRACTICE AND THEORY
• Featuring Jonathan Ned Katz, John D’Emilio, Carole Vance,
Esther Newton, and Lisa Duggan.
• Chair and comment: Kevin Nadal
6:30–6:45 P.M. Theresa Lang Center
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND CLOSE
7:00–9:00 P.M.
CLAGS CLOSING RECEPTION
THE CENTER
208 WEST 13TH STREET | #301
NEW YORK, NY 10011

We wish to thank our sponsors: The Arcus Foundation, The
Digital Humanities Initiative, Historical Studies and Gender
Studies at The New School, CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ
Studies at CUNY Graduate Center, and OutHistory.org for their
generous donations to GAH@40!
GAH@40 CONFERENCE TEAM
Kevin Q. Ewing Associate Director, OutHistory.org
Daniel Marshall Senior Lecturer, Deakin University
Kevin Nadal Executive Director, CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies
Claire Potter Co-Director, OutHistory.org
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Nan Alamilla Boyd, John D’Emilio, Daniel Marshall, Kevin Nadal,
Claire Bond Potter, Steven Seidman, and Randall Sell.