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Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917 Terence S. Kissack Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008; 252 pages. $17.95, ISBN 978-1-90-485911-6.
In Free Comrades, Terence Kissack ably brings together two issues that have all too often been considered separately in existing historiography: the growth, development, and decline of anarchism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and evolving discourses about homosexuality during this era. Scholars of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) people and movements, Kissack argues persuasively, have all too often overlooked anarchism as a movement profoundly concerned with homosexuality. And by the same token, Kissack maintains, historians of anarchism have not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which sexuality was a core concern for many anarchist writers and thinkers during this era.
Kissack considers a broad range of topics in his monograph, commencing the volume with a valuable overview of English-speaking anarchists' writings and speeches about homosexuality from 1895 to 1917. Effectively contending that anarchists were the only activists during this time period to place the emancipation of gay and lesbian people at the heart of both their thought and their practice, Kissack nonetheless skilfully avoids the pitfall of idealizing anarchist thinkers. Even the most progressive of anarchists held views...