The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America – Eric Cervini Free Audiobook

Written by Eric Cervini
Read by Vikas Adam
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 15 hours 34 minutes
Date of release: 2020

From a young Harvard and Cambridge-trained historian, the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall.

In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the US Military in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, DC. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny – like gay men and women for generations – was promptly dismissed from the military. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back.

Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and 40,000 personal documents, Eric Cervini’s The Deviant’s War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress, of FBI informants, murder; betrayal, sex, love, and ultimately victory.