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Anarchism And The Politics Of Homosexuality, Terence S. Kissack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From the mid-1890s through the 1920s activists in the American, English-language anarchist movement carried on a spirited debate on the ethical, social, and cultural status of same-sex desire. Among Americans they were alone in doing so; no other political movement or notable public figure of the period dealt with this issue. By making same-sex desire a topic of political discourse the anarchist sex radicals helped shift the sexual, cultural, and political landscape within which all Americans operated. While the contemporary homosexual rights movement is not the lineal descendant of the turn-of-the-century anarchist movement, the activists examined in this dissertation addressed …