Böcker av Lillian Faderman

As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "e;no constants with regard to lesbianism,"e; except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.

An acclaimed writer on her mother's tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in LatviaA story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York's Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother's Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler's deadly path. The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman's mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a ';good-time gal.' They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life. Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York's garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover's angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family. Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores.

A lively and engaging biography of the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, a man fiercely committed to protecting all minorities

Born in 1940, Lillian Faderman is the only child of an uneducated and unmarried Jewish woman, who, along with her sister, left their shtetl in Latvia to seek a better life in America. However, her mother's family were murdered by Nazis and their home destroyed in the war. Her mother, racked by guilt at having left her family behind, suffered from a terrible psychosis. The only relief she had from this, and her brutal sweatshop job, was her daughter, Lilly.Lilly grows into Lil, a beautiful young woman who learns that her deepest erotic and emotional connections are with other women, and who finds herself in a dangerous but seductive world of addicts, pimps, prostitutes and sham-marriages.Desperately seeking to make her life meaningful and to redeem her mother's suffering, she studies at University of California, Berkeley; paying her way by working as a pin-up model and burlesque stripper, and hiding her lesbian love-affairs from the outside world. At last she becomes Lillian, a brilliant student and the woman who becomes a loving partner, a devoted mother, an acclaimed writer and ground-breaking pioneer of gay and lesbian scholarship.Told with wrenching immediacy and great power: Naked in the Promised Land is the extraordinary story of an exceptional woman and her remarkable, unorthodox life.

The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rightsbased on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, and members of the entire LGBT community who face these challenges every day: This is the history of the gay and lesbian movement that weve been waiting for (The Washington Post).The fight for gay and lesbian civil rightsthe years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heart-breaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneersis the most important civil rights issue of the present day. In the most comprehensive history to date of Americas gay-rights movement (The Economist), Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the dramatic accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling. The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality. A compelling read of a little-known part of our nations history, and of individuals whose stories range from heart-wrenching to inspiring to enraging to motivational (Chicago Tribune), The Gay Revolution paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movement. A defining account, this is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind.