Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, and: Behind the Mask of Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation (review)

Together, Sears and Meeker contribute to the long history of radical queer politics.1 Scholars interested in media and mass culture outside GLBTQ studies should also be interested in Meeker's route to understanding how reading, writing, and publishing created "sexual communication networks" that have "gone through a radical transformation throughout the course of the twentieth century." (Who knew that pornography photographers escaped obscenity prosecutions in the 1960s by holding erect penises down with tape?) As Meeker's earlier work has argued, the radicalism of the homophiles has been obscured by the more confrontational politics they enabled, and queer people challenged social convention and the law long before Stonewall.2 Mattachine, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), ONE Institute, and the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) adapted swiftly to the changing needs of the people who turned to them for help and prided themselves on delivering practical aid: jobs, housing, and medical care.