We Are Everywhere

"Amazon.com Review : The discovery and uncovering of lesbian and gay history is a process that has, historically speaking, just begun. While historians like Blanche Wiesen Cook and Allan Berube have reinterpreted the past in a new, gay light there is still more work to be done. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan have compiled We Are Everywhere, an incredibly useful and important volume of primary source material that will help both the academic historian as well as the common reader. Manuscripts ranging from 18th-century legal documents to contemporary essays and analysis are used in We Are Everywhere to chart how life has changed for gay people as well as how gay people themselves have forced and created change."--from amazon.com. "An important and original new contribution to lesbian and gay studies, We Are Everywhere brings together the key primary sources relating to the politics of homosexuality. Presenting political, historical, legal, literary, and psychological documents which trace the evolution of the lesbian and gay movement, it includes documents as diverse as organization pamphlets, essays, polemics, speeches, newspaper and journal articles, and academic papers. We Are Everywhere includes writings from the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement in the 19th century by Karl Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, and John Addington Symonds; legal and government studies concerning rights of gay and lesbian citizens; articles from the early US liberation movement publications such as Mattachine Review, The Ladder and ONE ; documents from the first days of the AIDS epidemic to current activism; statements and writings from the movements within "the movement" (bisexuals, S/M, conservatives); and finally, a look at the future of lesbian and gay politics. Together the documents allow readers to examine a diverse set of issues: the concept of gay love before "homosexuality," the development of political movements based on homosexual identity, the history of government persecution of homosexuality, the impact of feminism on the modern lesbian and gay rights movement, and the emergence of queer theory."--from ://philpapers.org/rec/BLAWAE.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, LGBTQ+, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.