Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America.

• Author: Cusack, Anne-Marie
• Position: Review - Brief Article

For those of you who, like me, missed the New York Public Library's 1994 exhibit on lesbian and gay American history, Penguin has just published a large, very pink book by the curators, Molly McGarry and Fred Wasserman: Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America (Penguin Studio, 11998).

The book originated out of the New York Public Library's collection of queer publications, buttons, photographs, and paraphernalia, some of it dating from the turn of the century. For this reason, the book confines its attention primarily to New York. As this Midwestern lesbian knows, there's more to queer American lives than New York City. Still, New York, and especially Greenwich Village, has since the...