Language Before Stonewall

William L. Leap is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at American University and Affiliate Professor in the Center for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University, USA.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: A Not-So-Secret "Secret Code".- Chapter 2: Discretion.- Chapter 3: Surveillance.- Chapter 4: Learning a Language of Sexuality.- Chapter 5: Circulation, Accumulation and Superdiversity.- Chapter 6: Conclusions.

“In Language Before Stonewall, Leap uses novel methods to elucidate a varied but thematically and affectively coherent archive. This archive reconstructs queer US history before Stonewall as a temporal location … that afforded agency to queers as expressive subjects. In doing this, Leap both gives his reader a productive method they may employ in their own queer linguistic studies if they so choose and, in a sense, prepares the US before Stonewall as a fertile site for queer linguistic scholarship.” (Jack Maginn, Journal of Language and Sexuality, Vol. 11 (2), 2022)