Linda Hirshman has written a pungent history of how gay and lesbian Americans transformed themselves, in less than half a century, from a despised minority that dared not speak its name—or did so on pain of bashing in Greenwich Village, assassination in San Francisco, crucifixion in Laramie, Wyoming, snickers and agonized death everywhere—into the vigorous core of a new moral majority that occupied American culture (not without opposition), changed pharmaceutical testing, became an electoral bloc and spawned new specialties in wedding planning.