{"product_id":"the-deviants-war","title":"The Deviant's War","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"field\"\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"field-value\"\u003eIn 1957 the Pentagon fired Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer, on the grounds that it had reason to believe he was a homosexual. Kameny sued. He lost. Then he founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, the first organization to directly protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees — and spent the next two decades fighting the US government in what became one of the most consequential civil rights battles of the 20th century. Cervini, a Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, built this book from forty thousand personal documents and recently declassified FBI files — the research rigor is absolute. What he found is the secret infrastructure of a state terror campaign: the Lavender Scare running parallel to McCarthyism, gay employees surveilled and purged, the American Psychiatric Association classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, and one man's methodical, decades-long campaign to dismantle every piece of it. Kameny is a complicated figure — his obsession with respectability and his failure to fully acknowledge race and class within the movement are part of the record and Cervini doesn't hide them — but his victories are real: the APA decision, the security clearance changes, the foundation laid for everything that followed. The most important queer history book on the See Through It shelf — and the one that shows most clearly that the systems oppressing LGBTQ+ people were not cultural attitudes but deliberate government policy, documented in writing, and that they can be fought.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Punk and Pedagogy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45976446140614,"sku":null,"price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0706\/9066\/8742\/files\/the-deviants-war.jpg?v=1782346698","url":"https:\/\/punkandpedagogy.com\/products\/the-deviants-war","provider":"Punk and Pedagogy","version":"1.0","type":"link"}