How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization: The True and Heroic Story of How Gay Men Shaped the Modern World

Rating:
Summary: Witty, fascinating and necessary!
Review: It's about time someone is brave enough to dive into the unspoken and into a topic that for so long has been a tabu. This book left me with a new perspective on homosexuality and opened my eyes to the truth that has surrounded me, but I was too blind to see. Society and sexuality is changing at a rapid pace - thanks to this book we can find out why and how.

Rating:
Summary: Waiting for Part 2
Review: Ms. Crimmins has done a huge service for homos and heteros alike. After reading this fun, witty, touching, and ultimately enlightening book, the reader will come away with a newfound appreciation for this latest "immigrant group". Far from being a political tome, Crimmins accomplishes what many have tried and thus far failed. By highlighting the many, and varied, accomplishments of gay men, accomplishments that have ultimately been co-opted by "straight" socieity, the reader is left to question why homosexuals have been unjustly denied the civil liberties afforded "everyone" else. A must read for politicos and pop culture junkies!

Rating:
Summary: I question author's credibility, based on one excerpt.
Review: The title caught my eye in the bookstore, so I picked it up and on the first page I happened to glance at, I saw this (which is pretty close to an exact quote):

"The term 'queer,' formerly a pejorative term, is now ennobled and is used freely by gay and straight alike."

Hardly. "Queer" is still a pejorative term, except in the minds of a small--and I would say radical--minority, and typically younger gays of that minority. By no stretch is the word now "ennobled" except in the minds of those few. "Queer" is not used by the vast majority of gays, and surely everyone knows only a tiny percentage of straights would use it as anything but a putdown.

With just a single excerpt, this author lost her credibility with me. I glanced at the table of contents and then put the book back on the shelf and moved on.

But what irked me enough to bother submitting this testimony is the publisher's claim that Cathy Crimmins is "one of the saviest observers of pop culture"! Maybe she is, but not on this topic. A person with such credentials would be aware that the introduction of the word "queer" (as socially acceptable) by left-leaning gay radicals was met by much resistance in the community at large, such that many movers & shakers in the gay community abandoned the idea of helping it catch on. (For example, writer Gabriel Rotollo initially pushed the word and later had second thoughts in an essay discussing the doomed endeavor titled "The Word that Failed.")

Perhaps Ms. Crimmins knows a lot about a limited segment of the gay community; but adequate input from ordinary people within the culture she was describing would have improved her work. I would have been a most unhappy customer to have purchased this book to discover she is not as qualified as the publisher purports her to be on this topic.

Rating:
Summary: Hip, Breezy & Thought Provoking---A Great Read!
Review: This book is an awesome overview of the way gay men have influenced the straight world over the last 50 or more years. The author is witty and hip. The book is not a boring scholarly tome with dozens of footnotes. It's more of a personal story complete with her observations. The book deserves attention. It will be fascinating to gay people, straight people and everyone in between. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: Great history of our culture as gay men!
Review: This book was easy to read as I read it on a plane ride from California to Michigan. It used humor as it went down memory lane about all the things gay men have contributed to pop culture. I love it! It was very well organized and hardly left anythihg out.
I join her in the concept of making the term "fag hag" something positive and not so insulting. Fag Hags have been, are and always will be so positive in our lives as it seems we are to theirs! Thank you Ms. Crimmins for this book!

Joe Kort
(...)

Rating:
Summary: Full of Surprises, this book delights!
Review: Thought provoking and often laugh-out-loud hysterical, this smart and savvy little book will compel you to finish it in a single sitting! Author Crimmins manages to cover a vast array of anthropological topics and how they have been developed and/or influenced by the homosexual community.

While not all the examples of how gays "saved civilization" will surprise every reader, the book is a delightful look at how present gay culture is (and always has been) in the world. Her writing is bright, frank and instantly engaging. The fact that she is a heterosexual mom with a great affection for her subject matter makes her oh-so charming, where a lesser writer's words might only manage to shock and incite.

This is a book that gay and gay-friendly readers will enjoy. More importantly, it is a book that the unenlightened SHOULD be reading.

Rating:
Summary: Johnny Mathis? Really?
Review: You don't have to be homophilic to recognize the enormous impact of homosexuals on American culture. Homosexuals, especially gay men, are deeply embedded in almost every element of our culture, including theater, movies, music, television, haute couture, food preparation, floristry and hair styling. Cathy Crimmins' thesis is that gay sensibility has long been at the root of much that heterosexuals take for granted in American culture.

"How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization" is no scholarly treatise, but a light and breezy overview of the seeming omnipresence of gays in American cultural life. Crimmins chronicles her own childhood awakening to the existence of gay elements in culture, explaining why she was attracted to the typically campy and over-the-top work of gays. She reminds us that straight America has danced, sung and fallen in love to the work of homosexuals, usually without knowing it. Cole Porter, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Little Richard, Johnny Mathis and Elton John are just a few of the gay artists that Crimmins names as having a deep impact on entertainment, and hence on American experience.

Crimmins covers the "Liberace Effect," in which gays and others deny the gayness of their work; the gay adoration of female divas like Garland, Streisand and Cher; the pre-gay-lib gay sensibility of Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly. Crimmins also describes gay influence on more recent media creations like "Sex and the City," in which gay writers put their own boy-to-boy frank conversations into the mouths of heterosexual women. Even shows like John Stewart's "The Daily Show" flaunt their edginess with references to gay culture and preoccupations. Crimmins also shows how certain trends (earrings and disco, flaunting or shaving of body hair, etc.) originate in the gay or black worlds before moving into the straight world -- usually unbeknownst to its latest practitioners.

While Crimmins celebrates the glitzy, campy, colorful and fabulous side of the gay life, she somewhat glosses over its downside -- AIDS, homophobia, its obsession with sexual experimentation and its not infrequent shallowness and nastiness. While some people are instinctively attracted to gay expressiveness, others are turned off by it. In New England, straights loathed the disco era, to some degree because of its gay-born exuberance. Still, "How Homosexuals Saved Civilization" proves its thesis that gays have enormously affected and benefited American life, saving it from blandness, teaching it to love, to appreciate irony, and giving it something to sing about.

While most of the book is in PG-13 range, the sections on gay sexuality are very frank and deserve a strong R rating.