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Prizes Announcement of Prize Competition Winners: 2000 10 May 2000 The Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, an affiliated society of the American Historical Association, is pleased to announce the winners of its 2000 prize competitions. The Audre Lorde Prize for outstanding article on lesbian/gay history written in English by a North American has been awarded to Joanne Meyerowitz for "Sex Change and the Popular Press: Historical Notes on Transsexuality in the United States, 1930-1955," GLQ 4 (1998): 159-187. The Gregory Sprague Prize for outstanding paper or chapter on lesbian/gay history written in English by a graduate student at a North American institution has been awarded to Kevin Murphy for "Socrates in the Slums: Homoerotics, Gender, and Settlement House Reform," in Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone, eds., A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 273-296. The Sprague Prize is generously endowed by the Gerber/Hart Library in Chicago. Two works received "honorable mentions" for the Sprague Prize: Chad Heap, "The Queer Craze in Black and White," the final chapter of a dissertation titled "‘Slumming’: Race and Urban Commercial Leisure, 1900-1940," currently being completed at the University of Chicago; and Michael J. Murphy, "Arrow’s Eros?: Homoeroticism and J. C. Leyendecker’s Arrow Collar Ads," a seminar paper written at Washington University. The 2000 Prize Committee was chaired by Ellen Herman and included James Green and Victoria Thompson. The Committee prepared the following commendations: Audre Lorde Prize: "In this remarkable article, Joanne Meyerowitz demonstrates that transsexuality had a history long before the famous Christine Jorgensen case. She suggests that the popular consciousness elicited by newspaper and magazine items publicizing European cases created the key condition for an American transsexual identity in an era before any sex reassignment surgery was done in the United States. Meyerowitz reveals how attentive some Americans were to developments across the Atlantic, where physicians were considerably more open to considering hormonal and surgical solutions than were their American counterparts. And she traces a number of individuals, as early as the 1920s and 1930s, who tenaciously sought the medical help they wanted in Europe. This article illustrates how determined historical sleuthing can locate new historical subjects. In addition to the major contribution it makes to the history of transsexuality, this article also offers fresh insight into central issues in the history of medicine and journalism, the complex relationship between doctors and patients, and between communities of experts and their popular audiences." Gregory Sprague Prize: "In his illuminating article about the settlement house movement, Kevin Murphy opens a new area of historical inquiry by highlighting the world of male friendships. Considering the attention that has been lavished on the female friendships that proliferated in the homosocial universe of female reform, it is remarkable that this topic has been ignored until now. Murphy examines the cases of Charles Stover and John Lovejoy Elliott, whose lives and ideological commitments illustrate how themes of class mobility and exchange joined the history of social reform to the urban sexual communities then emerging in the United States. According to Murphy, Stover and Elliott sought to play "socratic" roles in the lives of the young working-class men they instructed and mentored. Though they framed their ideals of "social brotherhood" in Whitmanesque terms, these male bonds came threateningly close to pederasty in a society fearful of the sexual corruption associated with urbanism and immigration. By showing that the reconsideration of masculinity and male/male relationships were as relevant to settlement as their female counterparts, Murphy adds a new chapter to gay and lesbian history at the same time that he provokes readers to think about how this reform milieu made new kinds of relationships between men and women possible." For further information on CLGH and CLGH prizes, please contact rar/8.13.00
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