Los Angeles and the Closing of the Gay Historical Frontier

Chauncey was not the first gay historian to adopt the "urban case study" methodology to recover the lost history of gay men and lesbians, but Gay New York's success influenced scholars in LGBT history to widely adopt the same approach. Since the early 1990s, scholars have produced studies describing the gay pasts of Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, Fire Island, Washington D.C., Chicago, Memphis, Lexington, Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco, as well as regional histories of the South and the Pacific Northwest.2 Los Angeles represents the last frontier in this historiography. [...] it is time to declare an end to the gay historiographical frontier for local urban case studies and write histories at the national and international levels that focus around themes such as gender construction, public and private space, elite and popular culture, labor, and family life.