There's a marvelous moment in an old Jack Wrangler flick from the late 1970's, A NIGHT AT THE ADONIS, when one of
Jack's co-stars, Malo, a handsome bodybuilder, is reading GAY AMERICAN HISTORY wearing nothing but a jockstrap. At
some point Malo closes the book, puts it down, and reflects to himself out loud: "Gay history. Gay ancestors. Now there's a
paradox!"

Indeed it is, but Jonathan Ned Katz proves the existence of such in this massive and important piece of pioneering research.
Going back to America's colonial days, Katz traces the presence of gay men and lesbians (Katz would say "lesbians and gay
men")in all phases of American history. He divides the book into several sections. The first, "Trouble", shows us the various
ways gay men and women were punished for their "abnormality." There's even an appearance here by none other than Thomas
Jefferson, who, enlightened thinker that he was, thought "sodomites" should be castrated for their crime against nature rather
than executed. In "Treatment" we are shown the sad, pathetic, outrageous ways gays sought to "change" their orientation,
sometimes not voluntarily, through hypnosis, shock treatment, and lobotomy. If you have any conscience at all, this section will
make you shake your head in sadness and shame. "Passing Women" is a fascinating survey of women who dressed and acted
as men, some even serving as soldiers and doctors in the Civil War. We get to meet the indomintable Dr. Mary Walker here,
among other women individualists. In "Gay Americans/Native Americans" we see how American native peoples were often
vastly more tolerant of "alternative lifestyles" than whites. Finally "Love" shows us men and women caught in the thrall of same
sex passion. Among those highlighted here are Walt Whitman, John Addington Symonds, Emma Goldman and her fascinating
lover Almeda Sperry, Dorothy Thompson, and the psuedonymonous "Mary Casals."

There is much to absorb and learn from in this book, almost sometimes to the point of tedium. Do not try to take it all in at one
time but read it and enjoy it slowly and leisurely. Katz does an admirable job navigating us through these largely unknown
waters, although his stridently leftist point of view (he likes the word "oppression", folks)is sometimes distracting and
(endearingly) anachronistic. His inclusion of SO much lesbian material is also often off-putting and may have deserved its own
volume (sorry, Mr. Katz, it's a biological thing with me - men are just more interesting than women).

Read this and be prepared to be astonished.

What's striking about the hundreds of stories documented here is how much we're like these people of centuries ago, and how much they're like us today. Often they faced oppression too horrible for us to imagine (imprisoned, put to death, kidnapped, hospitalized, drugged, lobotomized, castrated, and those were just for starters), but they responded much as we might have in their shoes: usually with courage, but sometimes with cowardice; usually with great faithfulness to their loved ones, but sometimes willing to betray them; often defiantly, but sometimes meekly; they generally lived with a great deal of personal integrity, though some turned to crime and others went crazy. These are people we recognize! And in them we see ourselves.

More than anything, this book shows the existence of a shared Gay and Lesbian culture across the centuries (despite the claims of today's ignorant cynics). If these shadowy figures from the past could time-travel to our own era, they would be shocked at our freedom -- then they'd shout for joy and fit right in.

Don't be the least concerned about the book's length or turn away because it's about "history." The vignettes Katz assembled are usually brief, often only a page or two, which makes the book easy to put down when you need a breather, and easy to pick up again, without having to go back and refresh your memory; you'll always know what he's talking about. These are people you will be proud of. Their stories' cumulative effect gives this volume its power, and makes it, in my view, the most important Gay book of the 20th century.

I read "Gay American History" when I was coming out and it was a revelation. Though some of the concepts are outdated, and the facts have been superseded by later research, it remains the basic text book for gay (and lesbian) American history. Katz paved the way for John Boswell, John D'Emilio, Allan Berube, George Chauncey and many, many other historians. Katz has his biases, and he does go overboard to provide "gender balance", but all in all his book is very educational and extremely entertaining. You can't go wrong with this one.

This is a book about a man and his mission in life: to blunder around and sing a little bit in between shows. Filled with lyrics about things that describe how, I think, we all feel when sitting in a bathtub. This book is humourful, and yet it is a tragically accurate depiction of modern culture and one man caught in the frenzy of it all. This is a book that speaks to the heart, and it screams out "I'm lonely". Read this while your drunk, it's better that way. You'll cry, you'll, um, chuckle, but you'll love "Me at a Glance"

This book opened my eyes to a different approach of psychotherapy, but they quickly shut soon afterwords and I fell asleep. Any book that can put you to sleep while riding a roller coaster, impresses me. All kidding aside, I feel that Dr. Katz has struck an above the belt blow for humor. Witty, intelligent, and intensely funny are some of the words I would use to describe my review. "Enough already" as Jonathan would say. The book was great and I plan on reading it again. I will recomend it to my friends, family, coworkers, and even my evil enemies

I loved this book. it is the best book I have ever read Dr. Katz A.K.A Mr. every thing is hilarous. I reccomend this book to anyone whoes anyone

The more you read, the more you can enter into Duchamp's world! This one must definitly be one in your Duchamp's collection. Make yourself "READY MADE"

The book needs more detailed describtions

Ohh' Ya Better pictures

On the other hand this is the only book that reviews Maximum Carnage. Most book companies think that the game is a waste of Ram.

good not ba

If you've seen the show, chances are you've seen these bits.

These are the sessions that made me love that show in the first place. An excellent collection. This thing is dang funny. Just buy it.

A great tape for the 'Katz Cult'. I liked this because it has Katz actually doing a diagnosis on the patients after he finishes his session. It also has the best material of the first couple seasons.

Though I confess to some sympathy towards the "queer essentialist" side of the ledger, Katz's "Invention of Heterosexuality" is a clever, daring, and wonderfully readable account of the construction of heterosexual identity. This is a fine text for undergraduates new to the study of historical sexuality, perhaps so much so because it is both scholarly and accessible.

Katz does a fine job of skewering Foucault for "his highly abstract level of discourse, his elusive prose, and his unwillingness to clarify his meaning with sufficient concrete examples." As a historian of sexuality who is a bit tired of our late French friend, Katz's words elicited a hearty "amen" from me!

All things considered, a worthy (and brief) contribution to the field, with a daring new angle.

For those who believe that heterosexuality and homosexuality are timeless orientations, this book is a useful eye-opener. Katz traces the development of the idea of a homosexual identity, paying attention to the role played by psychoanalysis and sexology. This is a readable book, not off-puttingly jargon-filled.

Jonathan Katz is a scrupulous, witty historian who gets better with every book. In "The Invention of Heterosexuality," Katz takes up one of the most neglected tasks in scholarship on sexuality, which is to look directly at what is considered 'normal', how it got to be considered normal, and how that norm has changed over time. This book is deceptively easy to read, given how challenging it is to dominant assumptions about sexuality. I recommend it highly!

For someone completely ignorant on the making of "homosexuality" or the arguments between essentialists and constructionalists, et al. this may be a eye opening and engaging read. I was certainly intrigued many of the stories, particularly in their letter fragments to describe their attachements to each other. However, Katz, really is quite repetitive, with almost every chapter failing to build beyond his initial arguments. There are many overwrought suppositions and readings into the many different texts, particularly Whitman. In fact, I feel that Katz's "readings" distracted from what I really desired, actually getting to read the letters for myself and make my own decisions. I felt many times that it is hard to feel that Katz is anything but an untrustworthy or unwitting guide.

I think a much more interesting and better written book on the same topic is "Same-Sex dynamics between 19th Century Americas: A Mormon Example" by D. Quinn.

..and then was very disappointed in the content. When I bought the book, I assumed it was truly about "sex between men before homosexuality." Instead, I found a thinly veiled biography of Walt Whitman and his writings. Nowhere on the cover does it indicate this. Only way in the back in the acknowledgments, is this "acknowledged." When I started the book, the section on Abraham Lincoln was fascinating and I'm glad Katz advocates ensuring we look at relationships within their own context of society and culture. But he spends too much time on Whitman and hyperanalyzing every word he wrote. I am not interested at all in poetry or Walt Whitman, so it was a shame that I bought this hardcover and had to try and pick out the parts without Whitman. The only time this became interesting was toward the end where the focus was more on Whitman's life.
The best part of the book, and I have to agree with another reviewer, are the wonderful vintage photographs.
While I believe Katz is an expert and writes fairly well, I would not recommend this book to someone looking for a wide range of subjects.

"Love Stories" is about a struggle for men who love men to find a place for themselves within their own imaginations. Katz examines the 19th century intellectual nexus where same-sex male lust, emotional intimacy between men and, to a lesser extent, male femininity meet and from which the origins of contemporary gay male identity are found. This book gives context to those who believe the "gay community" as it is popularly thought of today is not a point of arrival, but a temporary and, in the history of same-sex attraction, relatively short-lived form. In a time when being gay is a commodified identity analagous to rooting for a sports team, Love Stories gives substance, history and meaning to those seeking to understand where we come from. Love Letters reads easy, in parts like a Vanity Fair-style social history, with famous names and well-known historical circumstances. I hope Jonathan Ned Katz lives, researches and writes forever.

Make way for Lesbian Pulp fiction! Ann Bannon is the queen of the genre and she serves up a very tasty dish here. While "shocking" 40 years ago it pales in comparison to todays anything goes literary environment, still it is insightful into the history of lesbian fiction, because there were hardly any voices to be heard back then and yet a vast audience was looking for stories about themselves. At times I found the whole social order (men are always right, women just need to follow them) so funny that I was luaghing out lound. I look forward to reading the other books in the Beebo Brinker series and thankful that I didn't live in the era that Bannon writes so well about.

Bannon's classic romance focuses on Laura, who's attending university in the 1950s. She meets the alluring Beth, who helps her get into a sorority. Laura is drawn to Beth and slowly falls in love with her. Beth has been dating a slew of guys, looking to awaken her heart, and soon finds herself torn between the burgeoning love she feels for Laura and the deep desire she feels for Charlie, a man. It's a compelling story and reflective of the attitudes in the 1950s, although with a twist: the lesbian character has a hopeful ending instead of a sad one. It's wonderful to see this work back in print because of its historical value.

Thank heaven for Cleis Press and its resolve to re-publish this lesbian classic. Bannon's novel, a lesbian college romance set (circumspectly) at the University of Illinois in the '50's, was one of the first novels in which the central lesbian character was not utterly destroyed (by suicide, homicide, or insanity) as a consequence of her sexuality. While its prose may not strike you as lilting or even vigorous, the novel's charm lies in its unflinching depiction homoerotic attraction and burgeoning lesbian identity in the heavily surveilled atmosphere of a 1950's college social scene. Laura and Beth, the central characters, resurface in Bannon's later (sequel-ish) novels. *Beebo Brinker*, one of these later books, is also republished by Cleis. We should applaud Cleis press for its willingness to publish this important lesbian artefact. (Cleis, after all, was the daughter of Sappho; and Cleis Press seems to take its responsibility for publishing our mothers' work quite seriously.) At the same time, we should remind ourselves that dozens (perhaps hundreds) of lesbian pulp novels are languishing and, in fact, decaying. Pulp fiction was printed on the worst, acid-filled paper. It is only by reprinting them that we can guarantee continued access to these sometimes bizarre, frequently haunting representations of mid-twentieth century lesbians.

This would have been an excellent and very enjoyable book except for two major problems: the author's irrational bitterness against NASA and his resentfulness concerning the review process for scientific publications. The author does his usual whining about how it is all NASA's fault that more work in Gamma Ray Burst research is not being done. He provides a vast diatribe about how evil and conspiratorial NASA is. It leaves the reader with the impression that he cannot be objective about other subjects as well and that he may have had one of his own pet projects rejected so he couldn't buy the Porsche with first draw. Everything returns to normal for a while, and then he goes into another fit about the Scientific Peer Review Process, obviously revealing his own bitterness that one of his papers may not have been published. With these kind of emotional outbursts and losses of objectivity, it is no surprise that NASA and the Scientific Peer Process may lose some respect for the author. It ruined an otherwise enjoyable and interesting book for me and the editors should have removed these two sections before printing as they subtracted from rather than added to the book.

In the late 1960s the U.S. military discovered gamma-ray bursts: intense bursts of radiation coming from random points in the sky. Over the next thirty years these bursts remained one of the most mysterious astrophysical phenomena. Very little was known about them. This changed in 1997 when Paul Vreeswijk discovered an optical flash at the location of one gamma-ray burst. This discovery made it possible to determine that gamma-ray bursts are at cosmological distances and involve energies that are usually only seen in exploding stars. Jonathan Katz gives the history of gamma-ray bursts and provides a clear explaination of how astronomers have come to understand what they are and how they work. Unfortunately most of the book is devoted to what happened before 1997. Only four of the seventeen chapters cover the time after the discovery of the optical flashes. This is unfortunate because it has been since 1997 that science has been able to understand gamma-ray bursts. The book would have been much better if it had treated the two eras equally instead of concentrating on the early history of the field. The book also suffers from a slighly biased view of who contributed what to our understanding of gamma-ray bursts. The field is competetive, and rival researchers often refuse to give credit where credit is due. It is unfortunate that Katz chooses to continue this trend in a popular work. Gamma-ray bursts are a hot topic in astronomy, and the story of their discovery is worth telling. However, "The Biggest Bangs" is not that story.

The Biggest Bangs is really two books in one. The first book is an entertaining popular account of astronomical gamma-ray bursts. It tells how they were accidentally discovered (by satellites launched to monitor the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty), how (through the development of better instruments) we gradually learned more about them, how the right ideas were sifted from the wrong ideas (there were plenty of wrong ideas), and how astronomers finally arrived at their present understanding. The picture is still rather cloudy, so there are likely many surprises yet to come. This is straightforward popular science writing, uncontroversial and rather well done.

The second book hiding inside The Biggest Bangs is an account of the human side of science, warts and all. This is reminiscent of The Double Helix (although Katz is only one of many contributors to understanding gamma-ray bursts, and his own name doesn't even appear in his index, in contrast to The Double Helix, in which Watson was the biggest player as well as the author). In both books the human side is often ugly. Good ideas are rejected for funding, scientists can be real backstabbers (they're human beings with the usual share of jealousy and more than the usual share of ambition), and credit doesn't always go to the most deserving (the Soviet contributors seem to have received particularly short shrift). NASA comes in for severe criticism (well-deserved, according to most scientists who have dealt with that agency). NASA apparatchiks and people who believe that science is a never-never land populated by goody-goodies above mere human failings have not been pleased.

This second book within The Biggest Bangs is really a book about the history and sociology of science, using gamma-ray bursts as a source of illustrations. It occupies only a small fraction of the text, a paragraph or a page here and there. Yet it may the most interesting part, especially for readers who don't begin with a great interest in astronomy. If the people who run science read it and pay attention it might do some good. Science could be more efficient and productive, if it were run a little differently.

I've seen Jonathan Katz interviewed on TV, and he is really really funny. Unfortunately, this book offers more "guffaws" than real laughter. The to-do lists have a *high* groan factor, such as these gems: Jim Henson: Try talking without socks on my hands; Norman Rockwell: Submit painting of severed head to "Saturday Evening Post," just to see their reaction; or Dwight Einsenhower: Rework "I'm Fond of Ike" campaign slogan. I bought this as a bathroom book that we could read for a while, and I read the whole thing in less than half an hour. Kind of a drag, I was expecting much more from him. I guess this could be a good $10 office grab bag gift, but that's about it.

If you're wondering what Jonathan Katz has been doing since Dr. Katz -- you'll have to keep on wondering because this book couldn't have taken more than a few hours to write. I'm usually a huge fan of Katz's work, but this one isn't quite up to his usual standards. Katz tries to carry the book on what is essentially a one-joke premise, which quickly wears thin. Don't get me wrong - it is a funny book, just a little insubstantial. If you're looking for the wit and offbeat humor you usually get from Katz, this light volume may disappoint. Still, (as one reviewer noted) it's not a bad way to waste a Sunday afternoon.

This is a very enjoyable book, short and funny. It covers dead celebrities and others, and shows a dry wit. Not a howler of a book, but a great laugh nonetheless.