Queer History and Domestic Possibilities

Abstract

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• Queer History and Domestic Possibilities
• Rebecca L. Davis (bio)

Stephen Vider, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.00.

Stephen Vider’s poignant addition to the history of sexuality in the United States begins with an invitation to domestic familiarity. He vividly renders a scene from the 1990 documentary, We Care: A Video for Care Providers of People Affected by AIDS, centering the voice of Marie, a fifty-five-year-old, HIV–positive African American woman living in Brooklyn, as she welcomes the filmmakers into her apartment. Although Black women are not the primary focus of the book, Marie’s invitation into her home highlights several of the book’s intersecting themes: the importance of home-making to HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ political activism; the significance of oft-overlooked primary sources, such as video (as well as cookbooks, architectural plans, and family albums); and “how performances of domesticity” shaped post–World War II LGBTQ political movements, ideals, and identities (p. 26).

Vider excels at interpreting material objects of domesticity for insights into cultural and political history. He argues that although historians of post-World War II domesticity have tended to frame those decades as a period of normative (and often oppressive) heterosexuality and conformist gender ideals, LGBTQ people during the same period created alternative spaces—real and imagined—of queer domesticity. “Home” offered LGBTQ activists resources for resistance and assimilation, Vider finds; “they adapted, challenged, and reshaped domestic conventions at the same time they reaffirmed the home as a privileged site of intimate, communal, and national belonging” (p. 3). The resulting study provides a two-fold narrative: “a private counterhistory of LGBTQ liberation and rights in the United States” and “a queer counterhistory of American domesticity” (p. 26). This intervention stands as an important reminder that scholars in a field premised in part on the disruption of binary categories, such as public/private, must be vigilant not to recreate those binaries in their work.

The Queerness of Home additionally speaks to the importance of privacy as a central theme in LGBTQ history and the history of sexuality more broadly [End Page 258] in the United States. Recent books, such as Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History (2021), a collection of essays edited by Nancy Cott, Margot Canaday, and Robert Self, as well as books such as Anna Lvovsky’s Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall (2021), demonstrate how privacy became a privilege of racialized heterosexuality in the twentieth century. The intensification of the policing of queer spaces and queer people subjected same-sex-desiring and gender-nonconforming people to unprecedented degrees of public exposure and government regulation of their sexual and gender identities. Vider adds to these works new insights about how queer activists shifted from viewing the home as an area that they wanted to protect from state interference to viewing the state “as an ally in protecting the everyday practices, privileges, and rights that domestic space was presumed to secure” (p. 4).

In making this case, Vider asserts a historiographical intervention: if most histories of American domesticity have presumed the home’s normative heterosexuality, most histories of LGBTQ activism have located that activism in public and commercial spaces, such as bars, community centers, churches, courtrooms, and city streets. Vider somewhat overstates the absence of domestic spaces and home-making from queer history, as his excellent introduction tacitly acknowledges in its review of prior scholars. That said, it is Vider’s emphasis on the political valence of queer domesticity that distinguishes this book from other studies.

The book has three sections—Integrations, Revolutions, and Reforms—each with two chapters. Taken as a whole, they present an impressively wide coverage of topics ranging from homophile organizations’ support for lesbian and gay marriage (as proof of psychological “adjustment”) in the 1950s to shelter activism for unhoused queer youth in the 1970s and for people living with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s.

“Integrations” opens with homophile activists in the 1950s, who, Vider shows, prioritized queer domesticity because...