This informative, engaging account of GLBTQ lives in the United States over the past 100-plus years documents critical history while providing a fascinating look at how social and political attitudes have influenced and been influenced by individual lives. Alsenas opens his essential work with a look at relationships and attitudes prior to the twentieth century. He then embarks on a chronological account of GLBTQ culture, which both reflected and responded to social attitudes as well as political advances and frustrations in the quest for equality under the law. As he looks at the twentieth and the first part of the twenty-first centuries, his profile includes the earliest organized activism and sweeping public celebrations of pride that are commonplace in large cities today. He also notes how key events spurred new modes of activism, which ranged from quiet quests for acceptance and change from within the social structure to angry wake-up calls for action, especially in response to the AIDS crisis. His volume offers a perspective on sweeping social change while offering glimpses of individual lives that are both testament to how far GLBTQ visibility and activism have come, and how far our society and our laws still need to go to provide equal rights and safety for all. (Age 12 and older)