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A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America. By Leila J. Rupp. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xii, 232 pp. $22.00, ISBN 0-226-73155-3.)
Critiques of survey texts often lament what is under- or overemphasized. Encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries of historical subfields come to be judged by a calculus of who's in and who's out. Most extraordinary about Leila J. Rupp's indeed short, two-hundred-page history of "same-sex love and sexuality" is not that it manages to account for such a variety of individuals, races, and classes or take in such a broad chronological and thematic range, but rather that it does all this with such verve, lucidity, and analytical rigor. Moreover, A Desired Past exemplifies and benefits from an engaged, feminist personal writing and a useful demystifying of scholarly...