POETRY & LITERATURE

Home > POETRY & LITERATURE > Author Fred Fejes

• Tweet
• Outlook
• ICAL
• PRINT
• Email
• Feedback

• RSS

• Official Website
• Buy Tickets
• Add to My Favorites

Author Fred Fejes

Presented by Stonewall Library and Archives at Stonewall Library and Archives

July 19, 2011

Add Review/Comment

Fred Fejes, author of Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America's Debate on Homosexuality comes to The Stonewall National Museum & Archives.

Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America's Debate on Homosexuality tells how in 1977-1978 voters across the county went to the polls in a series of referenda to decide whether lesbians and gay men were citizens deserving equal protection under the law-or perverts and outcasts.

The books starts with an in-depth account of the campaign in Miami led by Anita Bryant and ends with the defeat of the Briggs amendment in California depicted in the academy-award winning film Milk.

The book gives a lively and detailed report of these battles which pitted the civil rights claims of America's lesbians and gay men against society's powerful beliefs and fears about homosexuality.

These contests served as the first national debate about gay rights, and set the pattern that still shapes the controversy today.

Featured at the 2008 Miami International Book Fair, Gay Rights and Moral Panic has received praise both from scholars and the popular press as being the definitive account of these anti-gay campaigns that both introduced the issue of gay rights into American politics and helped create a national lesbian and gay community.

Originally published in 2008 as a scholarly monograph with limited distribution, the book was re-issued in January 2011 in a trade paperback edition available in bookstores and on Amazon.

The author Fred Fejes writes about South Florida lesbian and gay history. Since 1986 when he moved to South Florida, he has been a professor at Florida Atlantic University where he has taught courses dealing with LGBT history and media.

He spent five years researching and writing this book, visiting archives and collections in cities across the US and Canada and interviewing individuals involved in the campaigns.