UNITED STATES AUTHOR · LESBIANS
Esther Newton
Esther Newton is an American cultural anthropologist best known for her pioneering work on the ethnography of lesbian and gay communities in the United States. She studied history at the University of Michigan and received her BA with distinction in 1962 before starting graduate work in anthropology at the University of Chicago under David M. Schneider.
Americans, for the most part, evaluate a man's social status by his "occupation."
— from Mother camp
Most acclaimed
Mother camp
For two years (1965-1966) anthropologist Newton did field research in the world of drag queens--homosexual men who make a living impersonating women. Newton spent time in the noisy bars, the chaotic dressing rooms, and the cheap apartments and hotels that make up the lives of drag queens, interviewing informants whose trust she had earned and compiling a lively, first-hand ethnographic account of the culture of female impersonators. Mother Camp explores the distinctions that drag queens make among themselves as performers, the various kinds of night clubs and acts they depend on for a living, and the social organization of their work. A major part of the book deals with the symbolic geography of male and female styles, as enacted in the homosexual concept of "drag" (sex role transformation) and "camp," an important humor system cultivated by the drag queens themselves.--From publisher description.
Cherry Grove, Fire Island
For thousands of gay men and lesbians in America, Cherry Grove -- the oldest continuously inhabited resort on Fire Island -- has meant freedom. Not simply the leisure-time freedoms from work and noise and pollution, but the far rarer freedom to socialize in public without risking a beating, to stroll arm in arm without hesitation, to leave the curtains open without fear -- in short, to live the American dream that was denied to gay men and lesbians on the U.S. mainland. In her rich and detailed cultural history of Cherry Grove, Esther Newton tells for the first time the full story of this unique community, the oldest gay and lesbian town in America.
My Butch Career
During her difficult childhood, Esther Newton recalls that she "became an anti-girl, a girl refusenik, caught between genders," and that her "child body was a strong and capable instrument stuffed into the word 'girl.'" Later, in early adulthood, as she was on her way to becoming a trail-blazing figure in gay and lesbian studies, she "had already chosen higher education over the strongest passion in my life, my love for women, because the two seemed incompatible." In this book, Newton tells the compelling, disarming, and at times sexy story of her struggle to write, teach, and find love, all while coming to terms with her identity during a particularly intense time of homophobic persecution in the twentieth century. Newton recounts a series of traumas and conflicts, from being molested as a child to her failed attempts to live a "normal," straight life in high school and college. She discusses being denied tenure at Queens College - despite having written the foundational "Mother Camp" - and nearly again so at SUNY Purchase. With humor and grace, she describes the influence her father Saul's strong masculinity had on her, her introduction to middle-class gay life, and her love affairs - including one with a well-known abstract painter and another with a French academic she met on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Mexico and with whom she traveled throughout France and Switzerland. By age forty, where Newton's narrative ends, she began to achieve personal and scholarly stability in the company of the first politicized generation of out lesbian and gay scholars with whom she helped create gender and sexuality studies.