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The Deviant's War by Eric Cervini
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The Deviant's War

The Homosexual vs. the United States of America

$34.64

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Vikas Adam
Length 15 hours 34 minutes
Language English
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"Vikas Adam draws the listener in, expertly narrating Cervini's work, which charts the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States...Vikas Adam does an excellent job lending unique voices to real historical figures." -- AudioFile Magazine

A Publishers Weekly most anticipated spring book


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 U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back.

Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Eric Cervini is an award-winning historian of LGBTQ+ culture and politics. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar. He is the Creator and Executive Producer of The Book of Queer, which airs on Discovery+. The Deviantโ€™s War is his first book.

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