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Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917. By Te r enc e S . Ki s s ac k . Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008. Pp. 229. $17.95 (paper).
The word "anarchism" prompts thoughts of the Haymarket Riot or the assassination of William McKinley, not anarchists' intellectual contributions to gay and lesbian liberation. Terence Kissack's richly textured and thoroughly researched Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917 successfully links the two movements and complicates our understanding of sex radical anarchism in the turn-ofthe- century United States. Growing out of a dissertation written under the direction of Martin Duberman, Free Comrades represents an invaluable addition to the historiography of radicalism and homosexuality and belongs in the library of anyone who collects works of GLBTQ history, the history of radicalism, and American intellectual history.
Kissack, who previously served as executive director of San Francisco's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, explores in six chapters the ideas and writings of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American sex radical anarchists. After an introduction that establishes the historical context in which sex radical anarchists lived and wrote, he examines their responses to the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, the treatment of same-sex desire in Alexander Berkman's prison memoirs, Emma Goldman's lectures on homosexuality, and the fate of anarchist discourse on homosexuality in the post-World War I era. As the...