Come Out Fighting

Chris Bull
November 2001     ISBN: 1560253258

This definitive anthology brings together the groundbreaking writings that provoked and promoted the gay movement's social and political breakthroughs.

Selections from Andrew Holleran, Randy Shilts, Eileen Myles, Edmund White, George Stambolian, Adrienne Rich, Charles Ortleb, Meredith Tax, Dennis Altman, Sarah Pettit, Jeffrey Escoffier, John Weir, John Gallagher, Audre Lorde, Chris Bull, Richard Goldstein, Barbara Smith, John Rechy, E.J.Graff, Martin Duberman, David Sedaris, Carole Maso, Seymour Kleinberg, Paul Rudnick, Gore Vidal, Jewelle Gomez, Allan Berube, Boze Hadleigh, Sarah Schulman, Masha Gesson, Walt Odets, Cathy Cohen, Douglas Crimp, Tony Kushner, Donna Minkowitz.

Come Out Fighting is an anthology of the last century's essential writing on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues from the U.S. independent and alternative progressive journals. Included are the bellwether essays, letters, reportage, and manifestos chronicling the movement and its leaders by progressive media, especially those like Christopher Street, The Advocate and Out/Look, devoted exclusively to gay and lesbian writing.

"One can correctly assume from the presence of Susan Sontag, Huey Newton, Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Bronski in its pages that this is a leftist anthology.... the sublimely independent Gore Vidal is a two-time contributor and introduces the book, endearing himself to leftists by reviling monotheism ('profoundly totalitarian') and the Greatest Generation ('manipulated pawns'), of which he is a World War I-veteran member (presumably unmanipulable). That said, it must be added that the book lives up to its billing: these are the touchstone writings of gay liberation, from Havelock Ellis on sexual inversion and Kinsey and colleagues on homosexual play to Carl Wittman's 'Gay Manifesto' and Merle Miller's 'On Being Different' to Harvey Milk's 'Hope Speech' to the majority opinion in Romer v. Evans by Supreme Court justice Kennedy (almost the only nonleftie contributor). The bible of gay lib!"
--Ray Olson, American Library Association

"A diversity of voices from 'brave and useful souls,' as Gore Vidal calls them in the foreword, that attest to the rich, and mostly recent, literature of gay and lesbian politics compiled here by Bull.... Each of these 46 pieces has the political crunch of a broadside. The material is arranged chronologically, starting with a great inclusive hug from Walt Whitman, jumping 52 years to Emma Goldman's recognition of 'various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life,' and proceeding through the clinical pathways of Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud until offerings start coming in thick and fast with the 1950s.... Fertile minds at work, pulling the political out of the personal, challenging gay discrimination from every angle-a body of writing all movements ache for."
--Kirkus Reviews

Chris Bull, Washington correspondent for The Advocate, is co-author of Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s and, with Candace Gingrich, The Accidental Activist.