Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, Gay Male World 1890-1940 by George Chauncey
Beyond Survival: Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement
Voting ended onJun 6
Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 by George Chauncey
Endorsement from submitter: "Thoroughly researched from primary sources, goes into great depth and detail, very academic if you're into that kind of thing (which I am). By no means a "pop history," this was a groundbreaking work of rigorous scholarship in the 1990s in the field of queer history. It also presents an interesting argument for the ways that sexuality and gender categories were organized and conceived of differently at the turn-of-the-century, and argues against the narrative of linear progress and the idea that gay life was invisible in the late 19th/early 20th centuries."
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New York forever changed how we think about the history of gay life in New York City, and beyond.
Nonfiction, history, sociology
Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Afraid to call 911 but not sure what to do instead? Transformative justice and other community-based approaches to violence have existed for centuries, yet are often under the radar and marginalized. This is How We Survive focuses on concrete alternatives to policing and prisons. From practical tool-kits and personal essays, to supporting people in mental health crises, to community-based murder investigations, this text delves deeply into the “how to” of transformative justice. Along the way, this volume documents the history of this radical movement, creating space for long time organizers to reflect on victories, struggles, mistakes, and transformations.
[“The crucial questions are: What can you help build? What conversations can you start to increase the safety of your community? What new structures or collaborations will you create to decrease your reliance on the criminal legal system?
Perhaps you want to think about one form of violence to work on and build your knowledge from there. You could start simply by having a dinner with your friends, family, and chosen family to discuss how you all can better support each other. Or you could raise the issue of police violence and harassment at your next tenants’ association meeting and see if there’s a way that your neighbors want to engage with each other rather than with the police. Next, you could research ways people can get emergency medical assistance outside of 911.
The possibilities are endless. No matter how small they are, our experiments should aspire to center the experiences of the most marginalized folks within our communities. One of the major challenges of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s was their inability to fully hold and implement an intersectional analysis. We need to make sure that our bold experiments center the experiences of Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, disabled people, trans people, poor people, low-income people, migrants, and all marginalized people. Starting small gives us the opportunity to collectively imagine community safety responses without telling anyone to wait their turn.”]
Ejeris Dixon, Building Community Safety Practical Steps toward Liberatory Transformation, from Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From The Transformative Justice Movement
In activist and progressive communities, we’re often accustomed to attending one training or reading one essay and then declaring ourselves leaders and educators on an issue. I believe the notion of instant expertise runs contrary to our liberatory values. Safety is not a product that we can package and market. Community safety is not a certification that we place on our résumés. We are invited to practice community safety skills with one of our most precious resources, our lives. In a world that is already trying to kill us with a multitude of oppressive strategies, we must be deliberate and vigilant in honoring where we each are in our journeys.
Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
[“Time and time again, I’ve known people who were saved by the relationships they built. I’ve witnessed people selling drugs address and intervene in transphobic violence because of relationships. I know friends who’ve helped their neighbors escape from violent relationships based on the connections they have built together. If and when violence occurs, the people who live closest are most likely to help us, and vice versa.
Relationship building doesn’t have to involve old-school door-knocking. It can be as simple as attending community events, saying hello and introducing yourself to your neighbors, or inviting your neighbors to events that you organize. It can be talking to your noisy neighbor about calling the cops. It’s about the necessity of meeting the businesses and store owners in your immediate areas and on routes that you frequently use.
This strategy is not without complications. For many people, particularly women, trans, and non-binary people, the act of engaging with strangers can open us up to harassment and even violence. At the same time, these challenges shouldn’t prevent us from building relationships; they may merely shift the ways that we go about doing so. Additionally, we must also be cognizant of the way that class, educational privilege, and gentrification can impact relationship building.
Gentrification is its own form of violence within many low-income neighborhoods. Many gentrifiers/newcomers act fearfully and avoid shopping, attending events, or building relationships within their communities. Gentrifiers/newcomers who are also movement leaders tend to create movements and strategies not grounded in the lived experiences of the people most impacted by violence.
While I don’t believe that we can separate ourselves from our privileges, we can leverage them toward justice. My educational privilege and relationships mean that I know a lot of lawyers and know about our rights during police encounters. I’ve made sure to share “know your rights” information with my neighbors, to observe the cops alongside my neighbors, and to give legal referrals. Through these moments I’ve strengthened relationships with my neighbors and deepened trust.”]
Ejeris Dixon, Building Community Safety Practical Steps toward Liberatory Transformation, from Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From The Transformative Justice Movement
[“The Safe OUTside the System Collective started from the audacity of a small team of people who believed that we could prevent and intervene in violence without the police. For over a year, through weekly meetings, we discussed our experiences of violence and brainstormed responses. During these times, LGBTQ people of color were reporting physical attacks to us at least once a month, and two or three people were murdered each year in Central Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the NYPD was operating like an occupying army. It was common to walk home from the subway and see officers stationed on every block or large groups of police officers walking down the street. We had no choice but to create a community safety campaign. Our campaign recruited local businesses and organizations and trained them to recognize, prevent, and intervene in violence without relying on law enforcement. At first, we had no idea how to work on this, but we researched, experimented, and talked with the business owners themselves to understand how they already addressed violence and then worked with them to ensure that their strategies included LGBTQ people of color. At the time, we did not think we were doing something innovative. We just knew we needed to build new structures for our ultimate survival.
(…) When we make judgment into one of our primary organizing strategies, we reduce the trust needed to create safety. Some of the people with the most practice working on violence are deeply embedded within the criminal legal system or other punitive structures. I’ve had enlightening conversations about trends in homophobic and transphobic violence with prosecutors. I’ve also learned about de-escalating violence from bouncers and from school counselors.
I deeply wanted to learn from people who had held down more incidents than I had. This new experience expanded my knowledge and deepened my practice. I coordinated organizers in their efforts to implement advocacy and community-organizing strategies in response to more than forty murders of queer and trans people. I had the opportunity to refine my process developing and presenting community-organizing options to recent survivors of violence and to surviving family members. Through this intense practice I created a process of rapid-response organizing in the aftermath of violence. I was able to use all the skills I had developed while doing community safety campaigns, and I gained a deeper, more nuanced understanding of organizing around trauma.
The ability to work with survivors of intimate-partner violence, sexual violence, homophobic and transphobic violence, and police violence was invaluable, as was my experience working with survivors and organizers around the country. I also want to acknowledge that in these times, taking time to practice can feel like a luxury. The urgency is real. We are dying.
As a Black queer woman, I live and love in communities of survivors. But we will not create, implement, and achieve the measured and nuanced community safety systems we deserve through shoddy and rushed attempts. Instead, we must collectively weave our stories into strategies based on sharing what worked and what failed. Therefore, let me ask you: What has kept you alive so far? What are the lessons and themes and patterns that you can draw from? How can you practice safety? Where can you deepen your knowledge? And what unlikely allies can you recruit as learning partners?”]
Ejeris Dixon, Building Community Safety Practical Steps toward Liberatory Transformation, from Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From The Transformative Justice Movement
For organizer and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, it was her time in Alcoholics Anonymous that helped her transform her practice of listening. “The main thing that I learned,” Gilmore told us, “especially in the first couple years that I was going to meetings, was the beauty of the rule against crosstalk. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, that I couldn’t say shit to anybody. I had to listen, and I had to learn to listen.”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore quoted in an article by Kelly Hayes and Miriame Kaba in The Boston Review. How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?
Movement building requires a culture of listening—not mastery of the right language.
The essay is adapted from Kelly Hayes's and Miriame Kaba's book Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care
The Boston Review's Summer 2023 issue is On Solidarity
Musicians are particularly vulnerable to anti-gay sentiment because, says Ejeris Dixon of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, they "become representations of their communities. When people are attacking public figures, it's a way of sending a broader message of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and all these forms of discrimination that can be a way of really fostering a homophobic and transphobic culture. They're attractive as targets as a message to our community."
