Okay, it’s a slightly disingenuous post title this week because I actually recently finished this one, but I thought it was worth talking about.

This year, of course, is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and so Pride month was a bigger deal than usual for the community. In the run-up to Pride I realized that — although I’ve read plenty of Queer theory and modern works of biography by Queer authors — I had read very little written by those who were actually there in the community when Stonewall happened. I knew our history by dint of having researched it myself, but I knew it as it was written afterwards. So I picked this up.

I have mixed feelings on this book. On the one hand it’s incredibly valuable for us to read our Queer ancestors in their own words, especially since we lost so many of them in the AIDS crisis. Some of the pieces in this book are incredibly moving and some of them are hilarious, transgressive, or sad. One or two of them are experimental-ish pieces and . . . eh, they did not land for me.

However: because these selections were written in a different era, they’re full of language and attitudes that are . . . uh, challenging. I took a long time reading this and it was partly because I wanted to give myself some time and space to process my discomfort. Lots of the writers featured were in the Mattachine or the Daughters of Bilitis and their narratives are, as a result, very emphatically assimilationist. Some of them speak dismissively of Butch and Femme women, or Trans women, or stereotypically femme gay men. Most of them use terminology that is outdated. I don’t think that makes them less valuable as reading material. It just means they have to be read carefully, with a lot of perspective on how much our community’s use of language and ideals have evolved (and, uh, also how much they haven’t, because we were definitely still quarreling like cats in a bag even in 1960whatever).

On the whole I’m glad that I read this one, but I think it was most valuable to me as a source of names to pursue for future reading (that’s usually how anthologies work, anyway).