Preferred Name

Jack Morris

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7643-7974

Date of Graduation

5-10-2024

Semester of Graduation

Spring

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Department of History

Advisor(s)

Christian S. Davis

Margaret M. Mulrooney

Emily Westkaemper

Abstract

As the Gay Liberation movement spread across the cities of the United States during the 1970s, one institution bolstered it more than any other: the gay press. This thesis examines the role of the gay press in constructing an imagined community of gay men during the 1970s, uncovering the methods in which it fashioned a gay world that both encompassed and reached beyond the temporal and geographic boundaries of the United States. It argues that writers in gay periodicals built gay community and the Gay Liberation movement in numerous ways, such as reporting on gay history, uncovering foreign gay communities and culture, and solidifying the concerns and aspirations of the movement through public discussions of its multifarious struggles. It aims to show how the gay press’ reportage not only built a gay world by mapping the universality of homosexuality across time and space, but also how it fostered harmful divisions within the gay community just as it was pulling it together. By looking at how racist and imperialist thought was expressed in the construction of a global gay community, this work highlights the paradox of gay periodicals rhetorically bringing men from around the world together into a singular gay community, while at the same time stratifying this community through the language of race and empire. In turn, this thesis provides insight into how print cultures can construct social movements and imagined communities through a variety of mechanisms, while also spotlighting how they represent and even foster malignant divisions within the worlds they are building.

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