Books

In a galvanizing sweep through the Twentieth Century, award-winning historian Stuart Timmons chronicles the story of the man who founded the modern gay movement. After decades of searching and struggle, Harry Hay created the Mattachine Society in 1950, the nation’s first gay political group. Today, LGBT activism is taken for granted. But over a half century ago, it required a visionary and courageous spirit to organize a stigmatized and closeted class of people. Buy on Amazon

Drawing upon untouched archives of documents and photographs and over 200 new interviews, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons chart L.A.’s unique gay history, from the first missionary encounters with Native American cross-gendered “two spirits” to cross-dressing frontier women in search of their fortunes; from the bohemian freedom of early Hollywood to the explosion of gay life during World War II to the underground radicalism sparked by the 1950s blacklist; from the 1960s gay liberation movement to the creation of gay marketing in the 1990s. Buy on Amazon