While histories of queer and trans politics often focus on public activism, the struggle in the domestic realm has been equally crucial in postwar LGBTQ+ life according to Stephen Vider, assistant professor of history. In a Chats in the Stacks book talk, Vider discusses his recently published work The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (The University of Chicago Press, 2021), where he explores the complex histories of LGBTQ+ challenges to conventions of marriage, gendered codes of everyday labor, domestic architecture, and racial and class boundaries of kinship, belonging, care, and cultural inclusion. Vider argues that LGBTQ+ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves, but that in so doing they also redefined the possibilities of homelife for everyone.
