The Deviant's War

The Homosexual vs. the United States of America

De: Eric Cervini

Narrado por: Vikas Adam

2021 Triangle Awards - Nominee
2021 Pulitzer Prize - Finalist
2020 Triangle Awards - Winner

"Vikas Adam draws the listener in, expertly narrating Cervini's work, which charts the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States...Vikas Adam does an excellent job lending unique voices to real historical figures." (AudioFile Magazine)

A Publishers Weekly most anticipated spring book

From a young Harvard and Cambridge-trained historian, the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall

In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the US Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back.

Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and 40,000 personal documents, Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2020 Eric Cervini (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Absolutely Perfect.

Loved it. It was informative, and inspirational. A story of Pride before we knew what it was.

Required reading

This was an exceptional accounting of an important history too long left untold. Cervini's book should be required reading for everyone in this country and beyond.

An Important Read for All LGBT+

An important read to learn more about our history. Although, it is a very white, male perspective. Still a lot of amazing information, though

History I never knew.

This book was a history that I have never heard. The story was very interesting and flowed well. I would recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn more about the movement.

Nicely done

This book is nicely done, both as an inspiring story and as a reading performance. It is one of those books that are so good that they don't seem to be 15 hours long.

Required Reading for All Humans

I laughed, I cried, I gasped, I cheered, and I learned a lot. This book should be required for all humans. It is a lesson in compassion, in understanding, in challenging one’s beliefs, in understanding that morality is a social construct and laws are man-made, and that we are animals that are meant to grow. This book is a precedent for queer and gender studies. As with all history, if we do not understand and and appreciate it, we are doomed to repeat it. Thank you, Eric Cervini, for what I imagine was years worth of work to compile this history. I appreciate this “warts and all” reflection on the history of the American queer revolution. This epilogue felt like a springboard to future historical studies and the ever-growing progress of the queer community. Please keep writing - you have a fan for life!

a must-read for any American

an amazing journey.
.. thank God for brave people...
you keep asking yourself how could this have happened

The Gay rights struggle in America.

An important detailed review of the long struggle for gay rights in America, how far we have come and the Americans who courageously did the work that got us here.

Well researched, super important

Well researched and super important history about the gay liberation movement. Though it focuses mostly on Frank, many other key players in the push toward LGBTQ+ equality are also included. This should be required reading for all LGBTQ+ people.

Approachable and engaging

The Deviant's War is both a biography of astronomer-turned-activist Frank Kameny and a history of the wider movement against anti-gay policies of the US government. As the book unfolds, it goes further to show how the gay pride movement evolved beyond the original scope of Kameny's legal battles, developing into activism that had infighting, battling egos, and generational differences. As someone who has never read any LGBTQ+ history before, I thought it was an approachable introduction to the topic.

Though Kameny spent decades fighting for gay rights, Dr. Cervini does not paint him as a saint: he was dictatorial, hard to work with, and unable to admit when he was wrong, but this often-unflattering depiction does a service to the overall narrative. It shows that Kameny was not a natural activist, nor did he set out to be. He was practically forced into activism because, unable to obtain government clearance during the space race even as one of the most qualified astronomers in America, his first career choice was uniquely destroyed. He was someone with the mind of a scientist who became involved in politics out of necessity, and in offering numerous sketches of figures besides Kameny, Dr. Cervini shows that this was not uncommon.

The book uses statistics in an interesting way. In the first half of the book, they're thrown around often -- one that is repeated quite a bit is that up to 10 percent of government employees could be gay. These are all presented as figures that Kameny used during his work, and they show the contrast between Kameny's evidence-based approach to homosexual issues and the federal government's own baseless, prejudiced, and absurd policies (in quoting government documents directly, this turns out to be self-evident to modern readers). Something I would have liked to see, maybe in an epilogue or explanatory note, is further discussion of these statistics. It's unclear if that 10 percent figure, or any of the figures cited by Kameny, were ever verified by modern scholarship, and beyond the mention of a sociologist at the beginning of the book, no real discussion is given to how these numbers were acquired or verified. Through anecdotes involving the federal government, Cervini does an excellent job of showing how prejudice towards homosexuals was systemic, but to me it's never clear how many were affected by them, or whether it is possible to get accurate figures at all. Some discussion around these numbers, or the difficulties of estimating them, or whether modern scholarship does agree with the figures Kameny used, would have added to the book.

A note for Audible readers or people with short attention spans like myself: by the end of the book, there are about a dozen or so different organizations referenced throughout, most with their own acronyms, and I found it difficult to keep track of them all (I Googled "NCACLU" because I was unsure why the North Carolina ACLU was so involved, and the earliest result that showed that this stoof for "National Capital ACLU" was the abstract of Dr. Cervini's PhD thesis). In its own way, I think this is a testament to how many fractures evolved in the LGBTQ+ rights movement, which is more the subject of the second half of the book.

Overall, this book is very engaging, and for novices on the subject like me, I'd highly recommend it.