Out in Central Pennsylvania

Out in Central Pennsylvania: The History of an LGBTQ Community is a carefully researched study of the politics and culture of a place that has been otherwise overshadowed by not only queer histories of major cities but also of state histories of Pennsylvania. Brent D. Glass, director emeritus of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, notes in the book’s foreword that Pennsylvania State University Press, the same publisher of this volume, published a more-than-700-page book on the history of the state that “barely mentioned LGBTQ history and gay and political activism” (vii).Written by William Burton with Barry Loveland, Out in Central Pennsylvania aims to fill in the missing gaps. The book chronicles a range of issues, most especially the rise of political mobilization in the state. The authors trace how the emergence of gay publications, like the Lavender Letter and the Gay Era newspaper in Lancaster, provided gay readers with an opportunity to connect with each other. They also pay particular attention to the significant role that fledgling gay churches played in providing queer people a place to congregate. When doing research for my own book, Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016), I also found evidence of how gay churches and the press became important political incubators for the gay civil rights movement. While I feel awkward mentioning my own book, I do so to contextualize the authors’ findings since few books on the rise of gay politics in the 1970s highlight these critical aspects of how the fight for gay civil rights began.Burton with Loveland further explain how the founding of HOPS (Homophiles of Penn State) accelerated the LGBTQ community’s entrance into state politics. The book culminates with the pioneering organization of the Pennsylvania Gay Caucus, which created an influential network of organizations that reached rural and urban queer communities in the central part of the state. After establishing LGBTQ people’s robust political presence in central Pennsylvania, the authors explain how the movement tackled a range of issues from the HIV crisis in the 1980s to the fight for antidiscrimination laws in the 1980s and 1990s and the subsequent battles against racism and sexism in the 2000s to the rise of trans visibility in the more recent past.While this is itself a major contribution, Out in Central Pennsylvania opens with compelling biographical portraits of the gay community in the twentieth century. The authors provide moving accounts of how gay men and lesbians came to understand themselves as queer; how they fled from homophobic households and questionable marriages; how they drove for hours to find refuge in bars in Lancaster and Harrisburg; how they found romance and friendship; and how they organized dinner parties, private cocktail parties, and annual picnics. Once at a picnic in Reading, a lesbian arrived on the back of an elephant with two tigers marching by her side that she borrowed from the local circus. These rich narratives provide a deeply profound intimate portrait of a group of queer people whose stories would have otherwise gone unnoticed and undocumented.By meticulously piecing together newspaper articles, conducing oral histories, and mining through the ephemera housed at the LGBT Center of Central PA History Project at Dickinson College, Burton with Loveland provide a comprehensive overview of gay people’s political activism in central Pennsylvania. Out in Central Pennsylvania: The History of an LGBTQ Community is a warm, moving, and, most of all, necessary contribution to Pennsylvania history, gay history, and the social, cultural, and especially political history of the United States. It offers an inspiring account of how the LGBTQ community embodied the promise of American freedom and fought for a place not only in their state but in the nation

Geography · European history and politics · German Social Sciences and History · History · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy