It's Not Unusual: A History of Lesbian and Gay Britain in the Twentieth Century

Rating:
Summary: personal accounts of 20th century British gay life
Review: I am always nervous when I pick up a book claiming to present an entire community's history in a fairly slim volume. This book matched and surpassed my nervousness. Coverage of the early part of the 20th century is fairly even handed between lesbians and gay men. While the same lives and experiences are described (Radcliffe Hall, Natalie Clifford Barney, Vesta Tilley for the lesbians), they are done so with humor and interest. My almost immediate suprise while reading Jivani's history was his almost total lack of class analysis - unusual in a British hitory. As I read further, my disappointment only grew. I expected the slight textual disparity between the coverage of gay men and lesbians to diminish as we got closer to present time. I am astounded to report that the opposite happened. Lesbians almost disappeared from the second half of the book, particularly during the 1980s. The feminist movement as an important - however complicated - force in shaping lesbian culture is given a brief few sentences, Greenham Common Women's Peace camp is not ever mentioned, and the lives of any kind of lesbian - left/right/political/professional - is diminished into outright tokenism. Additionally, the absence of a class analysis continues while any race analysis or discussion -- something central to queer organizing in Britain in the 80s and 90s - is absent. I finished this book and wanted to know how Jivani, an editor with Time Out, could have missed so much. I lived and struggled to come out in England in the 1980s, worked for an independent bookstore, and lived for awhile at Greenham Common Peace Camp. While I don't think my experience during those eight years was "typical", it also was not unusual. Reading "It's Not Unusual" made every experience I had -- and the experiences of those around me, lesbian and gay man -- completely invisible. I am truly astounded that this book could be written in 1997. But then again, queer history as told from a singular vantage point is not, in the least, unusual.

Rating:
Summary: another community history book on the male, wealthy & white
Review: I am always nervous when I pick up a book claiming to present an entire community's history in a fairly slim volume. This book matched and surpassed my nervousness. Coverage of the early part of the 20th century is fairly even handed between lesbians and gay men. While the same lives and experiences are described (Radcliffe Hall, Natalie Clifford Barney, Vesta Tilley for the lesbians), they are done so with humor and interest. My almost immediate suprise while reading Jivani's history was his almost total lack of class analysis - unusual in a British hitory. As I read further, my disappointment only grew. I expected the slight textual disparity between the coverage of gay men and lesbians to diminish as we got closer to present time. I am astounded to report that the opposite happened. Lesbians almost disappeared from the second half of the book, particularly during the 1980s. The feminist movement as an important - however complicated - force in shaping lesbian culture is given a brief few sentences, Greenham Common Women's Peace camp is not ever mentioned, and the lives of any kind of lesbian - left/right/political/professional - is diminished into outright tokenism. Additionally, the absence of a class analysis continues while any race analysis or discussion -- something central to queer organizing in Britain in the 80s and 90s - is absent. I finished this book and wanted to know how Jivani, an editor with Time Out, could have missed so much. I lived and struggled to come out in England in the 1980s, worked for an independent bookstore, and lived for awhile at Greenham Common Peace Camp. While I don't think my experience during those eight years was "typical", it also was not unusual. Reading "It's Not Unusual" made every experience I had -- and the experiences of those around me, lesbian and gay man -- completely invisible. I am truly astounded that this book could be written in 1997. But then again, queer history as told from a singular vantage point is not, in the least, unusual.

Rating:
Summary: personal accounts of 20th century British gay life
Review: The previous commentator misunderstands the nature of the book he/she has read - surely its purpose is to record the testimonies of a group of people who participated in an oral history programme devised by the BBC. It does not claim to represent all gay men and lesbians but simply this group. It takes the testimonies of this group of people and makes them alive. And it does so with a lightness of touch and humour that is rare in oral histories which in my experience are rather dry. There are some wonderful anecdotes here such as the service man in WWII and his sexual exploits and the drag queen who when relaying orders always added endearments such as 'Open fire, dears!' I hugely enjoyed the book and found some of the previous commentator's criticism perplexingly obtuse. (S)he says that there is no class analysis but the very first chapter covers the difference between being gay in the East End among the London working class and among the monied set at Oxford and Cambridge. And on the race count, there is a section detailing how gay men and lesbians frequented black blues clubs in London because they were more tolerant and also describes how a black lesbian was caught up in a raid. Each section of the book has a substantial lesbian contribution from the fashionable set in the twenties and thirties, nurses and journalists during the war, housewives during the fifties, proto-feminists in the early sixties, campaigners in the seventies, a nun in the eighties to a schoolgirl in the Nineties. Perhaps the previous commentator's problem is that (s)he didn't see her/himself in it. Neither did I - entirely - but I saw enough of my life reflected in these other people's for there to be a connection. In any case you don't read this sort of book to find out about yourself - you read it to find out what other people's lives are like. I would urge people not to be swayed by this negative opinion but to find out for themselves. It's moving and funny!