AustLit

'Dennis Altman's long obsession with the United States began when he went there as a graduate student during Lyndon Johnson's Presidency. His early writing stemmed from the counter-culture that developed in the States in the mid-1960s. Altman was involved in early Gay Liberation, and his 1971 study Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation is regarded as a classic work in its field. Since then, Altman's writings have touched in various ways upon the shifting terrain of sexual politics, including the AIDs epidemic, which he witnessed from the onset while living in New York.

'Altman's memoir, Unrequited Love, is as wide-ranging and remarkable as his career, moving between Australia, the United States, Europe and parts of Asia, and influenced by encounters with intellectuals and writers including James Baldwin, Gough Whitlam, Dorothy Porter, Christos Tsiolkas, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag.

'Written through the lens of recent activism and the global rise of authoritarianism, this is a story of a half century of activism, intellectualism, conflict and friendship.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'We all love redemption movies. The twist in Boy Erased is that redemption comes by escaping religion rather than discovering it. Garrard Conley is a nineteen-year-old college student who grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist family in Arkansas. When his parents discover his homosexuality, they pressure him into attending a Christian conversion camp, where he lasts twelve days before fleeing. In 2016, Conley published a memoir (Boy Erased) which detailed his experiences.'  (Introduction)

'Is Nikki Gemmell right and if so, how does this relate to the 'sexual revolution' we spoke of in the liberationist days of the early 1970s?' (Publication abstract)

'In The End of the Homosexual? – part memoir/part politics – Dennis Altman connects what has happened within the changing queer world over the past forty years to larger social, political and cultural trends. This is a case study of both local and global change, yet one told from personal experience.

'Written engagingly, this timely new book explores the idea that major changes in the understanding of sexual and gender diversity reflect larger social and cultural shifts. For example, the internet has changed patterns of sexual behaviour as widely as did the contraceptive pill forty years ago. In both cases the changes were neither foreseen nor intended, and in both cases the impact of new technologies partly depended on political and ideological controls.

'Homosexuality has become a faultline for debates about western influence, and human rights. In this riveting and personally revealing work, Altman reflects on decades of cultural and political change and considers the future of sexuality: is this the end of the homosexual that gay liberationists predicted forty years ago?' (Publisher's blurb)