Bert Hansen

​​      Although my personal essay is more a document of history than of scholarship per se, the book itself was, as its title proclaimed, an intervention of the gay experience into the academic world.  My work on this self-published book included collecting and editing the presentations, designing the book, typesetting all galleys, doing paste-up of all pages, contracting with the printer, selling copies at the second annual conference, and fulfilling mail orders.

 

 

“Book review: G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (1976),” The Body Politic (a monthly gay-community newspaper, Toronto, Ontario), October 1976 (3 pages in reprint).

 

“Essay Review: The Historical Construction of Homosexuality: Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the 19th Century to the Present (1977),” The Radical History Review 20 (Spring/Summer 1979), 66‑71.

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“Book review: Vern Bullough, Homosexuality: A History (1979),” The Body Politic (a monthly gay-community newspaper, Toronto, Ontario), March 1980, p. 31.

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“American Physicians’ Earliest Writings About Homosexuals, 1880-1900,” The Milbank Quarterly 67 (1989), Supplement 1, pp. 92-108.

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“New York City Epidemics and History for the Public,” in  AIDS and the Historian: Proceedings of a Conference at the National Institutes of Health ed. Victoria A. Harden and Guenter B. Risse (Bethesda, MD: NIH, 1991), pp. 21-25.

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“American Physicians’ ‘Discovery’ of Homosexuals, 1880-1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society,” Chapter 6 in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet L. Golden (Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 104-133; second printing, 1996.

      This expanded version of the 1989 Milbank Quarterly article sets the medical literature into the

context of social history.

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“American Physicians’ ‘Discovery’ of Homosexuals, 1880-1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society,” Chapter 1 in Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), third edition, pp. 13-31. 

      This chapter in a widely used teaching anthology reprints the prior item.  In “De-medicalizing the Medical Humanities” (The European Legacy 16:3, May 2011, 317-326), Otniel E. Dror of The Hebrew University discusses this chapter as his primary tool in using history to challenge the thinking of medical students. Link to Dror’s article .

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