Editorial Review:

The Mattachine is the origin of the contemporary American gay movement. One of the major players in this movement was Hall Call, America's first openly gay journalist and the man most responsible for the end of government censorship of frontal male nude photography through the mail. "Behind he Mask of the Mattachine" travels back to the times before Stonewall and its aftermath, to the beginnings of the modern homosexual movement and the lesser-known individuals who started it. This stunning chronicle gives the unexpurgated history of the activists who organized homosexuals - using the biography of the controversial Hal Call as its springboard.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0

Sex, Politics and Desire:

Sears, James. "Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation", The Haworth Press, 2007.
Sex, Politics and Desire
Amos Lassen
The Mattachine Society is what began the movement for gay rights long before Stonewall. James Sears takes us back to the beginnings of the modern homosexual movement and to those unfamiliar names that were the early heroes of our movement. This is the first history of the activists that organized gay people... more info

Behind the Mattachine Mask:

I'm not sure what Sears thinks he is doing but lumping together profiles of three generations of gay rights activists into his enormous, authoritative study, but if you ask me, I could have done without those heaping helpings of Hirshfield and Manuel Boy Frank.
Be that as it may, nothing will prepare you for the depth of research Sears has performed on the most interesting and still controversial years of gay liberation, the Mattachine Society and its series of constitutional conventions in 1953. After... more info

A vast compendium:

Of an early British historian it was said that "he makes a heap of all he knows." So too James T. Spears in this vast, sprawling volume. However, much of what is in the heap is intensely interesting. The detailed quotations, revealed by Spears' archival research, help us to realize what it was like to be a gay man in the forties and fifties, an era that now seems almost prehistoric.
The blurb says that Hal Call saved the gay movement. I don't think that that is the story this book tells. Instead, it... more info

The REAL Story--Finally!:

This is a GREAT book! Full of behind the scenes stories of the early gay movement that other historians have been too timid or lazy to uncover. Sears does a terrific job in not only writing the biography of Hal Call, one of the key leaders of the Mattachine Society, but of integrating that story with the real story of 70 years of gay organizing before Stonewall. To top it off he does a brilliant job documenting the connection between gay activism and gay sexuality. This book belongs on the bookshelf of any... more info

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