Download or read book A Desired Past written by Leila J. Ruppe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-05-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this book, Leila J. Rupp accomplishes what few scholars have even attempted: she combines a vast array of scholarship on supposedly discrete episodes in American history into an entertaining and entirely readable story of same-sex desire across the country and the centuries. "Most extraordinary about Leila J. Rupp's indeed short, two-hundred-page history of 'same-sex love and sexuality' is not that it manages to account for such a variety of individuals, races, and classes or take in such a broad chronological and thematic range, but rather that it does all this with such verve, lucidity, and analytical rigor. . . . [A]n elegant, inspiring survey." —John Howard, Journal of American History