Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall

About this book

In Men without Maps John Ibson uncovers the experiences of men after World War II who had same-sex desires but few affirmative models of how to build identities and relationships. Though heterosexual men had plenty of cultural mapsprovided by nearly every engine of social and popular culturegay men mostly lacked such guides in the years before parades organizations and publications for queer persons. Surveying the years from shortly before the war up to the gay rights movement of the late 1960s and early 70s Ibson considers male couples who balanced domestic contentment with exterior repression as well as single men whose solitary lives illuminate unexplored aspects of the queer experience. Men without Maps shows how in spite of the obstacles they faced midcentury gay men found ways to assemble their lives and senses of self at a time of limited acceptance.