And Then I Danced
Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A gay-rights pioneer shares his stories, from Stonewall to dancing with his husband at the White House, in a memoir full of “funny anecdotes and heart” (Publishers Weekly).
On December 11, 1973, Mark Segal disrupted a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News when he sat on the desk directly between the camera and news anchor Walter Cronkite, yelling, “Gays protest CBS prejudice!” He was wrestled to the studio floor by the stagehands on live national television, thus ending LGBT invisibility. But this one victory left many more battles to fight, and creativity was required to find a way to challenge stereotypes. Mark Segal's job, as he saw it, was to show the nation who gay people are: our sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers.
This is a memoir of one man’s role in modern LGBT history, from being on the scene of the Stonewall riots, to getting kicked off a 1970s TV show for dancing with another man—and then, decades later, dancing with his husband at a White House event for Gay Pride.
“[Segal] vividly describes his firsthand experience as a teenager inside the Stonewall bar during the historic riots, his participation with the Gay Liberation Front, and amusing encounters with Elton John and Patti LaBelle....A jovial yet passionately delivered self-portrait inspiring awareness about LGBT history from one of the movement's true pioneers.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The stories are interesting, unexpected, and witty.”—Library Journal
“Much this book focuses on his work, but the more telling pages are filled with love gained and lost, raising other people’s children, finding himself, and aging in the gay community. A must-read.”—The Advocate
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Segal, the founder and publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News and former president of both National Gay Press Association and the National Gay Newspaper Guild, provides an enticing frontline account of the fight for equal rights for LGBTQ people in the U.S. Segal is modest and, at times, even self-deprecating about his leading role in this historic fight, from the "zaps" he engineered in the '70s (he infamously crashed Walter Cronkite's CBS Evening News program in 1973) to the award-winning journalism he fostered at the helm of the Philadelphia Gay News. He describes a courageous and increasingly successful battle to oppose discrimination, raise visibility, and educate straight and cisgender people by putting a human face on LGBTQ communities. His optimistic viewpoint doesn't gloss over the painful moments of that trajectory, either the personal humiliations and losses or broader devastation such as the AIDS epidemic, but the reader can clearly see how Segal's fearless determination, cheerful tenacity, and refusal to attack his opponents made him a power broker in Philadelphia and a leading advocate on the national level. Segal fills his book with worthy stories, but the structure is uneven at times, and he sometimes awkwardly reintroduces people who appeared earlier as if readers are encountering them for the first time. What the book lacks in polish, it makes up in funny anecdotes and heart. Photos.