Charles Kaiser

Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis, the landmark history of gay life in America, which is now available in a new, updated edition from Grove. An excerpt from the new edition appeared in The New York Observer.

Kaiser is an expert on the media, politics, the ’60’s, and gay life in America. Here are some of his TV and lecture appearances.

The Gay Metropolis

This compelling social and political history begins with World War II, when the United Stars Army acted as the “great, secret, unwitting engine of gay liberation in America” — by creating the largest concentration of gay men and lesbians inside a single institution since the founding of the republic.

By melding the personal stories of people as famous as Leonard Bernstein and as little known as Sandy Kern, a Brooklyn girl who first heard the word “lesbian” when a neighbor spied her with her arm around her girlfriend at the end of a wartime blackout, Kaiser provides his readers with the sights, sounds, scents, thoughts and feelings of gay life in America since 1940. He also analyses the most significant social and political events to shape gay culture — everything from the original production of “West Side Story” (the creation of four gay, Jewish men) to the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Lawrence v. Texas, in 2003, the most important legal victory in the history of the gay movement in America.

The book also includes:

The most dramatic account to date of the Stonewall Riot, the seminal event in the gay rights revolution.
An insider’s account of the successful battle to convince the American Psychiatric Association to reverse its longstanding view of homosexuality as an illness.
How everything in the ’60s — from the Civil Rights Movement to the Pill, the emergence of the Beatles and even the psychedelic revolution — contributed to the gestation of the gay liberation movement.
The transformation of The New York Times from one of the most homophobic institutions in America to one of the best places in the world for a gay journalist to work in the 21st century.
Tantalizing new material on everyone from John Kennedy to Alec Baldwin, who at 21 was a waiter at Studio 54. “I was a very popular ‘cigarette snatcher’ in the balcony,” said Baldwin. “I was the Rick Blaine of well-heeled homosexual balcony dwellers at Studio 54.”

Newsweek called it “required reading.” The Sunday Times of London said it was “absolutely mesmerizing.”

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Lambda Literary Award winner.

You’re welcome to read the introduction to The Gay Metropolis.
You can purchase a copy of the new edition from Amazon.
You can search inside The Gay Metropolis here.
An electronic version of the new edition is available here.

1968 In America

First published in 1988, 1968 In America remains one of the definitive texts about the culture and politics of the ’60’s. “It is about the people of all ages who believed that fundamental change was possible and necessary in America in 1968, and about the culture that shaped that conviction.” (From the introduction.)

A compelling work of popular history, is it used in college courses across the country. The book covers the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in depth, as well as the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the riots at Columbia University in the spring of 1968, and the eruptions in the streets outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Bob Dylan granted an exclusive interview for this book. 1968 In America includes extensive material about everyone from the Beatles to John Hammond, the greatest musical talent scout of the 20th Century, who discovered everyone from Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. It also covers everything from the Tet Offensive, which transformed America’s attitude toward Vietnam, to the C.I.A’s extensive experiments with LSD. (The intelligence agency called the drug a “potential new agent for conventional warfare.”)

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called 1968 “a splendidly evocative account of a historic year — a year of tumult, of trauma, and of tragedy.”

You’re welcome to read the introduction to 1968 In America.
To read the chapter of 1968 In America about the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 go here.
You can purchase a copy of 1968 In America from Amazon.
You can search inside 1968 in America here.

Broadcast Appearances

The Colbert Report, July 25, 2007 (above)
The Rachel Maddow Show: Kaiser and Maddow discuss Newsweek’s torture cover, “What would Dick do?”
Counterspin with Steve Rendall: more on torture coverage in Newsweek and The New York Times
On the Media: Kaiser on NBC News and Gen. McCaffrey
On the Media: Kaiser on “Obama Nation”
1968, CBS Reports, based on Kaiser’s book.
The Sixties, The Years That Shaped A Generation (PBS)
Behind the Music, 1968 (VH1)
Also, Charlie Rose, Newsnight with Aaron Brown, and Today.

About Charles Kaiser

Charles Kaiser was born in Washington D.C. and grew up there and in Albany, N.Y., Dakar, Senegal, London, England, Windsor, Conn., and New York City.

He started writing for The New York Times while still an undergraduate at Columbia College. He spent five years there as a reporter on the Metro staff, covering City Hall, the environment, and State Supreme Court, among other beats. He then became the press critic at Newsweek for two years. After a brief stint writing about media and publishing for The Wall Street Journal, he wrote his first book, 1968 In America, which was published in 1988. The Gay Metropolis was first published in 1997. Both of them are available from Grove Press. He is completing The Cost of Courage, about a French family in the Resistance in Paris during World War II, also to be published by Grove.

His writing has appeared in New York, The New York Observer, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Manhattan,inc. among many other publications.

Kaiser was a founder and former president of the New York chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton, where he was the Ferris Professor of Journalism.

He is an avid bike rider. A few years ago he biked 1,000 miles in three weeks over the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia and Kentucky. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Selected Articles and Reviews

NEW

Personal Appearances

To arrange for a lecture by the author, call (877) 442-0048. His subjects include the media, national politics, and gay issues.

First Editions

Signed and inscribed copies of the original hardcover of 1968 In America are available. First Edition / Mint Condition
$49.95 plus $5 shipping and handling
Send request to charles@charleskaiser.com

Charles Kaiser / charles@charleskaiser.com
http://www.facebook.com/charles.kaiserI

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