Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now.    Queer Newark charts a history in which working-class people of color are the central actors and in which violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire. Drawing from rare archives that range from oral histories to vice squad reports, this collection’s authors uncover the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches. Exploring the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, they offer fresh perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community relations with police, Latinx immigration, and gentrification, while considering how to best tell the rich and complex stories of queer urban life. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey’s largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America.   

Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now.    Queer Newark charts a history in which working-class people of color are the central actors and in which violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire. Drawing from rare archives that range from oral histories to vice squad reports, this collection’s authors uncover the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches. Exploring the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, they offer fresh perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community relations with police, Latinx immigration, and gentrification, while considering how to best tell the rich and complex stories of queer urban life. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey’s largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America.   

ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay covers a variety of angles, using queer, feminist, historical, and close textual reading methods to grapple with the complicated and contradictory politics and meanings of this pioneering culture-worker. Chapters examine Findlay's marketing strategies, the gender politics of her exploitation and hardcore films, 1980s horror productions, and several case studies of key individual films, in addition to a new interview with Findlay reflecting on her life and career.

While America is not alone in its ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the preferences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. This pattern has grown even more pronounced since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the "floodtide of filth" that was supposedly sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right's political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the "family values" agenda that shifted the country to the right.

"Perversion for Profit" traces the anatomy of this trend and the crucial function of pornography in constructing the New Right agenda, which has emphasized social issues over racial and economic inequality. Conducting his own extensive research, Whitney Strub vividly recreates the debates over obscenity that consumed members of the ACLU in the 1950s and revisits the deployment of obscenity charges against purveyors of gay erotica during the cold war, revealing the differing standards applied to heterosexual and homosexual pornography. He follows the rise of the influential Citizens for Decent Literature during the 1960s and the pivotal events that followed: the sexual revolution, feminist activism, the rise of the gay rights movement, the "porno chic" moment of the early 1970s, and resurgent Christian conservatism, which now shapes public policy far beyond the issue of sexual decency.

Strub also examines the ways in which the left failed to mount a serious or sustained counterattack to the New Right's use of pornography as a political tool. As he demonstrates, this failure put the Democratic Party at the mercy of Republican rhetoric. In placing debates about pornography at the forefront of American postwar history, Strub revolutionizes our understanding of sex and American politics.

While America is not alone in its ambivalence toward sex and its depictions, the preferences of the nation swing sharply between toleration and censure. This pattern has grown even more pronounced since the 1960s, with the emergence of the New Right and its attack on the "floodtide of filth" that was supposedly sweeping the nation. Antipornography campaigns became the New Right's political capital in the 1960s, laying the groundwork for the "family values" agenda that shifted the country to the right. Perversion for Profit traces the anatomy of this trend and the crucial function of pornography in constructing the New Right agenda, which has emphasized social issues over racial and economic inequality. Conducting his own extensive research, Whitney Strub vividly recreates the debates over obscenity that consumed members of the ACLU in the 1950s and revisits the deployment of obscenity charges against purveyors of gay erotica during the cold war, revealing the differing standards applied to heterosexual and homosexual pornography. He follows the rise of the influential Citizens for Decent Literature during the 1960s and the pivotal events that followed: the sexual revolution, feminist activism, the rise of the gay rights movement, the "porno chic" moment of the early 1970s, and resurgent Christian conservatism, which now shapes public policy far beyond the issue of sexual decency. Strub also examines the ways in which the left failed to mount a serious or sustained counterattack to the New Right's use of pornography as a political tool. As he demonstrates, this failure put the Democratic Party at the mercy of Republican rhetoric. In placing debates about pornography at the forefront of American postwar history, Strub revolutionizes our understanding of sex and American politics.

For some, he was "America's leading smut king," hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling obscene publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of "Roth v. United States" were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationship of obscenity to the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision in "Roth" for the first time tried to definitively rule on the issue of obscenity in American life and law--and failed. In this first book-length examination of the case, Whitney Strub lays out the history of obscenity's meaning as a legal concept, highlights the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly obscene materials that he sent through the mails. Strub then unwraps the events that produced "Roth v. United States," placing the trial in the context of its times--the Kinsey Reports, the Kefauver hearings, free speech debates--by using Roth's own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices.

The significance of "Roth," as Strub reveals, lay in the two faces of Justice William Brennan's majority opinion--which on the one hand reflected the liberalizing attitude toward sexual matters in mid-century America, but on the other kept "obscene" expressions beyond First Amendment protection. Because that ruling points up the contradictions of a society where the prurient and repressive commingle uncomfortably, Strub shows how Roth says much more about American sexual values than Brennan's written words necessarily acknowledged.

In our era of internet pornography and "Fifty Shades of Grey," it may be difficult to imagine a time when obscenity was a matter for the courts. As Strub tracks the legacy of "Roth" and obscenity law through the ongoing policing of acceptable sexuality into the twenty-first century, his riveting narrative brings those times to life and helps readers navigate the fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is criminally obscene.

For some, he was "America's leading smut king," hauled into court repeatedly over thirty years for peddling obscene publications through the mail. But when Samuel Roth appealed a 1956 conviction, he forced the Supreme Court to finally come to grips with a problem that had plagued both American society and constitutional law for longer than he had been in business. For while the facts of "Roth v. United States" were unexceptional, its constitutional issues would define the relationship of obscenity to the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision in "Roth" for the first time tried to definitively rule on the issue of obscenity in American life and law--and failed. In this first book-length examination of the case, Whitney Strub lays out the history of obscenity's meaning as a legal concept, highlights the influence of antivice crusaders like Anthony Comstock and John Sumner, and chronicles the shadowy career that led Roth to spend nearly a decade of his life imprisoned for the allegedly obscene materials that he sent through the mails. Strub then unwraps the events that produced "Roth v. United States," placing the trial in the context of its times--the Kinsey Reports, the Kefauver hearings, free speech debates--by using Roth's own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices.

The significance of "Roth," as Strub reveals, lay in the two faces of Justice William Brennan's majority opinion--which on the one hand reflected the liberalizing attitude toward sexual matters in mid-century America, but on the other kept "obscene" expressions beyond First Amendment protection. Because that ruling points up the contradictions of a society where the prurient and repressive commingle uncomfortably, Strub shows how Roth says much more about American sexual values than Brennan's written words necessarily acknowledged.

In our era of internet pornography and "Fifty Shades of Grey," it may be difficult to imagine a time when obscenity was a matter for the courts. As Strub tracks the legacy of "Roth" and obscenity law through the ongoing policing of acceptable sexuality into the twenty-first century, his riveting narrative brings those times to life and helps readers navigate the fine line between what is socially acceptable and what is criminally obscene.