Introduction: An Invisible People -- Awakening -- A Fight at a Bar -- Los Angeles -- New York -- Climbing the System -- First Stirrings -- Sisters and Brothers -- A Place at the Table -- Kameny for Congress -- A Voice in the Statehouse -- The Fifth Column -- San Francisco: Coming to Power -- In Our Mothers' Names -- New Orleans: Fire UpStairs -- Ordinary People -- A Question of Sanity -- Elaine -- Minneapolis: The Coat Check -- Ordinary Things -- Citizen Goodstein -- Brothers and Sisters -- The Backlash -- The Governor of Georgia -- A Voice in the White House -- Miami: The Fundamentalists Awake -- A Very Bad Year -- An Uneasy Victory in San Francisco -- Money in the Hills of Bel Air -- A Black-Tie Affair -- California: The Main Event -- A Friend in City Hall -- Colliding Forces -- The Pink Invitation -- Until the Party Ended -- Out of Anger -- After Disco -- Swept Away -- Little to Celebrate -- For the Public Good -- Cop at the Door -- Requiem
Summary:
"This is the definitive account of the last great struggle for equal rights in the twentieth century. From the birth of the modern gay rights movement at the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, through 1988, when the gay rights movement was eclipsed by the more urgent demands of AIDS activists, this is the remarkable and until now untold story of how a largely invisible population of men and women banded together to create their place in America's culture and government. Told through the voices of gay activists and their opponents, filled with dozens of colorful characters, Out for Good traces the emergence of gay rights movements in cities across the country and their transformation into a national force that changed the face of America forever." "Out for Good contains vivid portraits of dozens of unheralded figures who founded and shaped the movement, often at great personal risk: Franklin Kameny, the Harvard astronomer fired from his government job who first sued for homosexual rights and ran for Congress from Washington; Martha Shelley, who shouted the gay rights movement into shape in New York: Rev. Troy Perry, who founded the first gay church in Los Angeles; David Goodstein, the autocratic millionaire who bought a gay newspaper to try to put his stamp on the movement: Virginia Apuzzo, the ex-nun who battled at two Democratic National Conventions to get homosexual rights included in the party platform; Del Martin, whose public repudiation of gay male sexism captured the early depths of the difficulties between lesbians and gay men; Ivy Bottini, who was expelled from leadership in the women's movement after her lesbianism became known; Arthur Evans, the philosophy graduate student who drew on the United States Constitution in writing a constitution for the first mainstream gay rights movement founded in New York after Stonewall: and Steve Endean, who built a gay rights movement in Minneapolis and then in the nation's capital before losing a fight for leadership, then his life to AIDS."--BOOK JACKET.
