John Boswell
The LGBTQ+ History Association will award the John Boswell Prize for an outstanding book on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer history published in English in 2023 or 2024. The prize comes with an award of $200.
Work may be submitted in hard copy and/or in PDF form by email. Note that books that will be published after September 15, but before December 31, 2024, will be accepted for submission in page proofs. Hard copies must be postmarked by 11:59pm (Pacific time), 15 September 2024. Emailed submissions must be sent as one PDF file by 11:59pm (Pacific time), 15 September 2024. Please ensure that all materials are sent to all members of the prize committee. Mailing addresses can be requested from the prize committee members directly and questions can be addressed to the CLGBTH, clgbth.cochairs@gmail.com.
Prize Committee:
- Howard Chiang (committee chair), University of California, Santa Barbara, howardchiang@ucsb.edu
- Timothy Stewart-Winter, Rutgers, timsw@rutgers.edu
- Lauren Kaminsky, Harvard, kaminsky@fas.harvard.edu
The John Boswell Prize recognizes an outstanding book on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and/or queer history published in English. It is awarded in odd-numbered years, covering books published in the previous two years.
Click here to learn more about John Boswell.
2021
Winner: David K. Johnson, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement, (Columbia University Press, 2019).
This excellent book argues that commercially-produced physique magazines and related media fostered a nationwide community for queer men in the second-half of the twentieth century. In so doing, Johnson makes a clear case that serious attention should be paid to forms of political activism derived from commercial or capitalist enterprises, pushing us to consider processes of community building that extend far beyond the more familiar activism of homophile and gay liberation groups of the 1960s and 1970s. The book is to be commended for its focus on networks of belonging and community that stretched deep into rural areas and that linked far-flung places into a constellation of queer identities. Johnson shows how an imagined community of readers helped gay men in the mid-twentieth century come to see themselves as connected, even those far outside of urban centers and nascent “gayborhoods.” The committee was especially impressed by Johnson’s handling of primary sources. His interpretations of physique magazines and other seemingly superficial texts show that these sources are critical to fully understanding the history of gay community formation and political activism.
2019
Co-winner: C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
Riley Snorton’s innovative study Black on Both Sides draws together an eclectic archive ranging from early sexological studies to fugitive slave narratives and twentieth-century journalist accounts of Black trans people to make a compelling case for the ways that blackness and transness co-constituted and animated one another in their historical construction. Grounded theoretically in Black feminist literature, the first half of Snorton’s compelling work traces a genealogy of blackness through transness illustrating how both were consolidated and circulated through their shared work to produce fungible bodies within the emergent Transatlantic economy. In the second half, Snorton reroutes twentieth-century trans historiography by returning to and refiguring the well-known cases of Christine Jorgensen and Brandon Teena. Black on Both Sides is necessary scholarship for historians and other intellectuals working to historicize and theorize Black and trans embodiment, history, and social life. Compellingly, Snorton presses scholars to think about identity formations and power as more than simply additive, mapping an innovative mode for thinking and writing queer and trans history.
Co-winner: Zeb Tortorici, Sins Against Nature: Sex & Archives in Colonial New Spain (Duke University Press, 2018)
Combining astounding archival research with a cutting-edge theoretical approach to the archive, Zeb Tortorici’s Sins Against Nature greatly expands our knowledge of the prosecution of sexual acts in colonial New Spain. Tortorici has assembled a vast corpus of evidence of secular and ecclesiastical prosecutions of sexual sins including bestiality, sodomy, masturbation, erotic religious visions, and priestly solicitation of sex, which he shares in a digital archive for the use of future researchers. At the same time, Tortorici offers instruction to those future researchers on how to read the archive as a site for the construction of meaning both in past and present, where visceral reactions like revulsion, seduction, and nostalgia are always operative. Sins Against Nature is a must-read for any scholar conducting archival research into the history of sexuality.
2017
Co-winner: Clare Sears, Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
Grounded in substantial and dynamic archival work, Arresting Dress historicizes the very production of normativity and marginality within the changing political and social climate of 19th century San Francisco and the broader United States. Sears effectively demonstrates how cross-dressing laws constructed nationhood in terms of race, sexuality, and gender and laid the groundwork for the 20th century policing of gender and sexuality. Using a methodology she terms “trans-ing analysis” to focus on the production of normative and non-normative dress practices, Sears highlights the fluidity of such practices rather than the fixed identities of individuals. This monograph is analytical intersectionality at its best, building on and contributing to studies of race, immigration, citizenship, gender, sexuality, and urban history.
Co-winner: Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Especially admirable is Stewart-Winter’s attention to how queer activism in Chicago was always coalitional, involving work across races, genders, and sexual identities. Stewart-Winter deftly examines how the defining moments of queer political ascendancy in Chicago—protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the 1983 electoral victory of Harold Washington as Chicago’s first African American mayor—were collaborative operations built on shared commitments to end police brutality and to overcome political exclusion. Such focus allows Stewart-Winter to rework the somewhat familiar narrative of queer urban history, opening up fresh opportunities for future scholars to examine how the rise of queer political power was a collaborative venture.
2015
Co-winner: Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
Professing Selves is a powerful and skillful history, as well as an ethnography, that provides a sensitive reading of ideas about transsexuality in relation to medical practices over the 20th century, showing the reconfiguration of trans from intersexual to homosexual contexts and then to a post-Revolutionary state-sanctioned independent category. It provides an excellent introduction to both Iranian debates on sexuality and to wider understandings of the self, while considering carefully the limits of both ‘trans’ and ‘queer.’
Co-winner: Phil Tiemeyer, Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
Plane Queer incorporates a wide range of sources to make a very compelling case for why we must consider flight attendants in relation to larger histories of capital, sexuality, civil rights, and queer work. Accessibly and deftly written, the book offers complex interpretations of the intertwining of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Tiemeyer adds an important new narrative to the history of gender and the workplace.
2013
Allan Bérubé, John D’Emilio, and Estelle Freedman, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, & Labor History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
My Desire for History elegantly surveys the pioneering work of the late Allan Bérubé and makes clear his genius as a public historian. The essays themselves—part history, part memoir—are wide-ranging, accessible, and powerful, and include several selections from Bérubé’s unpublished manuscript on the history of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. Taken together, the pieces offer not only a retrospective of where the field has been, but an agenda for the future in terms of bringing race and class more centrally into LGBT history. D’Emilio and Freedman’s skillful introduction situates Bérubé’s journey within a broader story about the origins of LGBT history in community history projects. It is a moving reminder of the generosity and interdependence that have sustained this field from its earliest days.
2011
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)
Canaday’s stunning analysis of the U.S. state during the twentieth century carves out a bold new place for sexuality at the center of political and legal history. Through a compelling series of case studies, The Straight State tells a story about the bureaucratic regulation of sexual and civic identities that are made problematic through their interaction with state actors and processes. Canaday’s insights about how federal power made homosexuality increasingly visible over time are sure to inspire fresh directions in work not only in GLBT history, but on citizenship and state-formation in history and beyond. This is a truly original book.
2009
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel combines cultural, social, and intellectual history to produce a work of grand scope and great originality. Through a careful and finely textured analysis of the writings of prison officials, inmates, reformers, and academic investigators, Kunzel places the prison right in the middle of the history of sexuality in the United States. She argues convincingly that attention to sexual relationships in prison dramatically complicates any simple straight-line theories about the historical evolution of sexual identities. And she suggests that the prison is a good place to look if one wants to understand the tensions, anxieties, and contradictions that have swirled around sex across the last century or more.
2007
Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)
In this rich and densely researched book, Meeker explores how young women and men learned more about their homosexuality, particularly if they were living in small and isolated places where gays and lesbians were not openly visible or apparent. He argues that three innovations in communication helped individuals to see themselves as members of larger sexual communities: the rise of a homophile movement in the 1950s, broad public interest in homosexuality created by the media in the late 1950′s and early 1960s, and the emergence of gay and lesbian self-published guides, gossip sheets, and magazines that circulated broadly and help forge a sense of large community and eventually of its political possibilities. In sum, this book marvelously charts the connections among desire, identity, and community.
2005
Jens Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
A landmark study in queer history, Jens Rydström’s Sinners and Citizens contributes countless new insights to the field, illuminating distinctive sexualities in Scandinavia, examining rural along with urban phenomena, and bringing a needed focus to sexual practices, in addition to sexual identities and cultures. It reminds us that, for hundreds of years, same-sex sexuality and bestiality were a conceptually linked pair, two closely related kinds of unnatural intercourse. Elegantly written, the book argues a principal historical transformation, from a rural penetrative sodomy paradigm to an urban masturbatory homosexual paradigm, dating roughly from the 1920s and 1930s. Rigorously researched, Sinners and Citizens mines government reports, the daily press, scientific journals, forensic psychiatric statements, mental hospital records, church periodicals, and sex reform movement literature, as well as questionnaires from 286 informants born before 1945. Forming the core of the study, the author has unearthed 2,333 court cases of bestiality and same-sex sexuality from Sweden’s eight provincial archives and 84 of its 96 district courts – a massive achievement. With great care and sober reasoning, the multi-lingual Rydström has detected important patterns in the evolution of modern sexuality, while he has delicately narrated lives hitherto beyond the pale of academic inquiry. His book is model of scholarly innovation and daring.
Honorable mention: Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)
Nadine Hubbs has written a powerful transdisciplinary study of the creation of modernist American music and its genesis in queer culture in the mid twentieth century, entitled The Queer Composition of America’s Sound. Much more than a “great queers in history” project, Hubbs’s study theorizes queer, national, and musical identity and demonstrates the Thomson-Copland circle’s connections to and genealogy with Paris, the continent, and both lesbian and gay culture at the time. Hubbs analyzes Virgil Thomson’s and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and its “queer theology,” what “being musical” meant in the 40s and 50s, and the significance of the difference between tonal and atonal music. Supporting her arguments with archival personal letters, music manuscripts, and theory, Hubbs elegantly structures her work around musical tropes–Intermezzo, Coda, Reprise—as she teaches us about music composition, identity, history, and “the sexuality of culture.”
2003
Jonathan Katz, Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (Columbia University Press, 2001)
Each was excellent in its own right; together they made for interesting parallels and contrasts. In one case a historian relied on sources normally used by literary scholars; in the other, a literary scholar plunged into the kind of documents historians customarily work with. In Love Stories, Katz spans a whole century; in Fashioning Sapphism, Doan zooms into a key moment in English history. Katz explores a topic badly understudied by historians and throws light on a neglected aspect of history; Doan steps into a much-investigated episode and offers a provocative revisionist view of Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness. Together these books demonstrate the value of a history grounded in meticulous research, careful sifting of evidence, and the imaginative reading of sources.
2001
Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)
Sapphic Slashers examines the 1892 trial of Alice Mitchell in Memphis, Tennessee, for the murder of her lover, Freda Ward. Duggan sets the trial in the social, intellectual, and cultural context of the period, connecting the emergence of American modernity to the appearance of the lesbian as subject in both the popular press and the medical literature of the time. Duggan juxtaposes the “lesbian love murder” narrative with the contemporaneous narrative of lynching in order to interrogate the overlapping categories of race, gender, and sexuality. The result is a creative, original, and fascinating work based on solid empirical research and informed by queer theory.
Honorable mention: Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
1999
Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
1997
Richard C. Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)
1995
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic, 1994)
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