Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation

With Stand by Me, Jim Downs rewrites the history of gay life in the 1970s, arguing that the decade was about much more than sex and marching in the streets. Drawing on a vast trove of untapped records at LGBT community centers in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, Downs tells moving, revelatory stories of gay people who stood together—as friends, fellow believers, and colleagues—to create a sense of community among people who felt alienated from mainstream American life.

About the Author :
JIM DOWNS is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America.

Review :
Downs capably blends authority and warmth in this thoughtful reexamination of an era. The sheer act of Downs' acknowledging that not all gay men subscribed to the popular 'three Big Bs' of the time—'the Bars, Beaches, and Baths'—and found their identity validated and articulated through the communal practices of Christian worship and cultural hubs (like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop) is a refreshing and invigorating experience. Stand By Me proves a deeply moving read, one that passionately and urgently argues for us to acknowledge some of the forgotten history of gay liberation. Downs draws on LGBTQ materials long underrepresented in superficial media accounts of gay life. Past chronicles have defined the gay community by focusing on 'free love' and HIV/AIDS. Downs upends this, detailing more inclusive and representative subjects, tracing the history of gay rights as part of the ongoing battle for civil rights, and covering the gay religious movement. . . . A valuable addition to LGBT and social-change collections. Exhaustive, but never exhausting . . . Stand By Me is not duplicative of other accounts. It is to our movement an equivalent to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. . . . Downs challenges our movement not to let the horror of AIDS or the rush to assimilate cloud the memory of our roots. Stand By Me calls us to dig more deeply into the past in order to guide our future. He has combed through a wealth of archival materials, including gay community publications, the holdings of LGBT religious groups such as the Metropolitan Community Church (a Protestant denomination founded in the late ’60s as a safe worship space for homosexuals), the personal collections of men doing prison work on gay issues, archives of LGBT community centers, and reporting on LGBT life in mainstream publications. These resources have been underutilized by scholars, and Downs’s work is a service both to the historical record and to the gay community. The book exists to highlight the nuance, the richness, and even the messiness of people’s lives by offering an alternate history of gay life in the ‘70s. Though the years leading up to the AIDS epidemic are largely thought of as a sexual free-for-all clearly there was more going on. . . . That’s where Downs comes in. He doesn’t negate the idea that lots of men had lots of sex in the ‘70s, he merely supplements it. In any history, there’ll always be surprises, facts, and tales that are forgotten or ignored until someone finds and reveals them anew. And that’s exactly what author Jim Downs has done here in Stand by Me. . . . This book is informative, sometimes horrifying, interesting and, unlike your old high school history books, it’s never dry. Stand by Me valiantly attempts to correct the historical record and revise the harmful, outdated images of bathhouses and promiscuity that plague both official and non-official accounts of the gay community and its history. Downs by no means intends to erase sexuality as a significant factor in the story of gay liberation. Rather, he aims to establish that 'it was not defining, as the received narrative has it.' . . . In Stand by Me, Jim Downs achieves the impressive feat of illustrating that the willingness of homosexuals to be out—among one another, at least—was eased by more than just clubs, bars and bathhouses.