Leila J. RuppA Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America

This is an historical essay but nevertheless engaging like a romance. Reccomended to whom wants their stories to be history.

good book, interesting to look at the topic of same sex over history. needed this for a college class but ill be keeping it for suture reference

revealing and informative.a good read.

Leila Rupp has done a competent job of examining same-sex relationships in American life, beginning with colonial attitudes, all the way through the "coming out of the closet"era of our own time. She has laid aside her historian's objectivity to tell us bits of her own life story. I hadn't realized that many same-sex involvements were looked upon more tolerantly in earlier times. The entrenched positions, pro and con, that are present today, are anomalies, considering the history she provides. One comes away from the book, also, with an appreciation for the confusions and mysteries that still cloud our view of same-sex attachments. No one has the answers, and no research thus far has explained why things happen this way. As a hetero wife and mother of four, I must admit that I have very little understanding of the feelings of gays and lesbians, especially since my own view of female sexuality is not limited to just the male-female attraction, and copulation. To me, female sexuality is that and much more---it is bound up also with maternity, with conceiving, bearing, and raising one's children, with breast-feeding one's babies, with nurturing a family, with holding grandchildren in your arms. Rupp makes one weak reference to "diffuse female sexuality." Yes, it is diffuse, compared to male behavior. I can understand "romantic friendships" as Rupp describes them. Most girls go through this stage as young adolescents, and throughout their lives, most women treasure their female friends, who often are able to provide more necessary emotional support than their husbands. Yet somehow it seems sad to me that lesbians live their lives outside the fulfillment of diffuse female sexuality, which involves a male partner, pregnancy, nursing---a rich, heterosexual family life.

This fall semester (2001), I will be teaching a course in Lesbian and Gay history at my community college. In preparation for this course, I looked at many different books, hoping to find an ideal survey text for an introductory course in GLBT history. Alas, Rupp's book falls short of the ideal -- but is nonetheless the best brief introduction to the history of same-sex sexuality available on the market today. I will be using her book in my class this fall.What I appreciate about this text is her almost seamless interweaving of personal experience with historical narrative. I realize that traditionalists tend to find this practice either unprofessional or self-indulgent (or both), but I delight in it. More importantly, I have noted that my students respond very well to history texts that do not shy away from the highly personal.Rupp does a good job of giving a quick overview of the "essentialist" and "constructionist" schools of thought among the historians of sexuality. Perhaps best of all, she insists on the use of the term "same-sex sexuality" rather than Lesbian or Gay, recognizing that the latter terms are perhaps too easily associated with the essentialist argument.All in all, a brief but well-constructed text, ideal (I hope) for the classroom and for the curious general reader.