(Ebook) Encyclopedia of Homosexuality I (A-L) by Wayne R. Dynes, Warren Johansson, Stephen Donaldson, William A. Percy ISBN 9781138946415, 9781315670782, 9780824065447, 0824065441, 1138946419, 131567078X

(Ebook) Encyclopedia of Homosexuality I (A-L) by Wayne R. Dynes, Warren Johansson, Stephen Donaldson, William A. Percy ISBN 9781138946415, 9781315670782, 9780824065447, 0824065441, 1138946419, 131567078X

The love that dared not speak its name is now, in spite of or because of ADDS, shouting it from the rooftops, and in many voices. Almost as much scholarship on homosexuality has appeared since 1969 as in the previous hundred years, even in the wake of Freud and Hirschfeld, and with each passing year the volume increases. This encyclopedia is the first attempt to bring together, interrelate, summarize, and synthesize this outpouring of controversial and often contradictory writings and to supplant the pseudoscholarship, negative or positive propaganda, and apologetics that are still appearing.As recently as the 1960s, dearth of research and the widespread Western taboo on public discussion of homosexuality even in the world of academia would have prevented publication of such a work as this. A society that sought for many centuries to suppress the very existence of homosexuality, and to exclude all mention of it from literary and historical documents and from public discourse, could not have welcomed the issuance of this encyclopedia. Indeed, even now some may seek to entomb it in silence because remnants of that taboo still persist.As anyone who has sought information from them knows, general encyclopedias and histories offer only meager information on homosexuality, usually couched in outdated clinical or judgmental terms. Biographies of gay men and lesbian women discuss their orientation only when unavoidable, as with Oscar Wilde. There have been several encyclopedias and dictionaries of sexuality (beginning with a German one of 1922, the Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaft), but this work is the first to treat homosexuality in all its complexity and variety.