The Public Eye THE PUBLIC EYE SUMMER 2001 13 Arlene Stein The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001) hb, 267 pp, with appendices, notes, and index. Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Touchstone Books, June 2001) pbk, 716 pp., with notes, bibliography, and index. Holly J. Pruett Holly  J.  Pruett  is  a  freelance  writer  and organizational  consultant  who  served  as deputy campaign manager to defeat the Ore- gon Citizens Alliance’s 1994 antigay Ballot Measure 13. How  do  we  tell  our  own  history? The answer that emerges from Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America is: often, not very well. Authors  Dudley  Clendinen  and  Adam Nagourney, journalists with the NewYork Times, describe Out for Good as the defin- itive—yet “not intended to be compre- hensive”—history  of  the  modern  gay rights movement. Rich with scene-setting details and engaging, gossipy portraits of their cast of characters, their 716 pages are devoid of reflection and analysis. Their edi- torial choices say perhaps as much about the politics, class, gender, and race of a dominant segment of the national move- ment as their undeniably commanding narrative does. Sociologist Arlene Stein, in The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle  over  Sex,  Faith,  and  Civil  Rights, takes a different approach to considering the same movement. Both sets of authors draw  on  extensive  field  research. The Clendinen/Nagourney team spent 7 years conducting 700 interviews with 330 sub- jects; Stein interviewed 50 people over the course of 2 years. Both rely also on archival materials, secondary sources, and media reports. But while Clendinen and Nagour- ney attempt to cover 20 years across an entire country, Stein focuses on one small town at one moment in time. In some ways, despite the differences in framework and focus, Stein picks up where Clendinen and Nagourney leave off. Out for Good, begun in 1992 as an article that served as “kind of a coming out piece” for Clendinen, covers the 20 years between the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the full-blown impact of AIDS, symbolized by the death of   Sheldon   Andelson,   a   wealthy Los Angeles “A-Gay” who is eulogized by Ted Kennedy and Jerry Brown in the book’s closing pages. One year later, in 1989, the Christian  Coalition  was  founded. The implications of this, entirely absent from Out for Good,  are examined in intimate detail by Stein. Clendinen  and  Nagourney  promise  to reveal “the great shaping tensions of the movement.”  Out  for  Good  delivers  ten- sions aplenty. At times a virtual flowchart of who slept with whom and which drugs were consumed where, the book depicts the brutally  personal  nature  of  the  debates, alliances, and power grabs that mark the movement. Beyond the personality politics, certain themes recur. Sexual liberation ver- sus civil rights. Men versus women. Top- down, corporate-style organization versus rowdy street activism. Impatient new orga- nizers—”not  building  on  history  but discarding it”—ousting their movement elders who’d been established such a very short  time  themselves.  Assimilation  or social change. These themes form the discreet scaffolding of a story constructed on a few, ultra-urban sets: New York, San Francisco, Los Ange- les, Washington D.C., with brief forays into a handful of other cities. There are very occasional detours into lesbian organizing: the rise and fall of the Furies collective, the battle over lesbian inclusion in the National Organization for Women, the battle over transsexual inclusion at the first West Coast Lesbian Conference. Otherwise, this is the story of major political milestones in what proves to be Clendinen and Nagourney's primary, though unacknowledged, inter- est: the development of a “gay vote.” The epilogue of Out for Good, written in 1998, finds Bill Clinton at the Palace The- ater in Hollywood, May 1992, in front of a crowd of 500 gay men who would raise $100,000 for him that night. At that time the gay rights movement chronicled by Clendinen  and  Nagourney  was,  they believe, “in eclipse, overtaken by the ruder and  more  urgent  AIDS  movement.  It would return later,…by the end of the 1990s.” While the losses exacted by the AIDS  epidemic  remain  incalculable, Clendinen and Nagourney's assertion that “No other movement, certainly, has paid so  heavy  a  price  for  the  freedom  won” reflects the same self-referential perspec- tive that allows them to ignore the move- ment that was forming outside the major cities,  and  indeed,  grew  stronger  there during the 1990s. Book Review