Men Without Maps

Men Without Maps Synopsis

John Ibson uncovers the experiences of men after WWII who had same-sex desires but few affirmative models of how to build identities and relationships. Though heterosexual men had plenty of cultural maps - provided by nearly every engine of social and popular culture - gay men mostly lacked such guides in the years before parades, organisations, 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. This title 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.