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Heather Murray. Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America. Politics and Culture in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. xvii + 289 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-8122-4268-3).
The history of medicine has been the starting point for many scholars determined to explore the gay past in the modern United States. Deeply implicated in the punishing equation between homosexuality and disease, medicine has also promised enlightenment and incubated powerful ideas about sexual toleration. In Not in This Family, Heather Murray makes roughly the same claim about the paradoxical place of the family, an institution that has thus far been surprisingly marginal to the field of gay history.
To become subjects of history, the standard narrative goes, gay men and lesbians had to escape their families of origin and become symbolic orphans. Whether they were banished or went into exile voluntarily, what really mattered was their journey to a new place-typically a large city-whose distance from home made homosexual culture, commerce, and consciousness possible. Pioneering historians have concentrated on gay New York, San Francisco, and other "queer" destinations. When these studies considered kinship at all, it was as something achieved rather than...