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Prizes Announcement of Prize Competition Winners: 2005 CLGH 2005 PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT The Committee on Lesbian and Gay History Prize Committee is pleased to announce that the 2005 John Boswell Prize for an outstanding book on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, and/or queer history published in English in 2003 or 2004 was awarded to Jens Rydström for his book, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Winner, John Boswell Award, Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, 2005
A landmark study in queer history, Jens Rydström’s Sinners and Citizens contributes countless new insights to the field, illuminating distinctive sexualities in Scandinavia, examining rural along with urban phenomena, and bringing a needed focus to sexual practices, in addition to sexual identities and cultures. It reminds us that, for hundreds of years, same-sex sexuality and bestiality were a conceptually linked pair, two closely related kinds of unnatural intercourse. Elegantly written, the book argues a principal historical transformation, from a rural penetrative sodomy paradigm to an urban masturbatory homosexual paradigm, dating roughly from the 1920s and 1930s. Rigorously researched, Sinners and Citizens mines government reports, the daily press, scientific journals, forensic psychiatric statements, mental hospital records, church periodicals, and sex reform movement literature, as well as questionnaires from 286 informants born before 1945. Forming the core of the study, the author has unearthed 2,333 court cases of bestiality and same-sex sexuality from Sweden’s eight provincial archives and 84 of its 96 district courts – a massive achievement. With great care and sober reasoning, the multi-lingual Rydström has detected important patterns in the evolution of modern sexuality, while he has delicately narrated lives hitherto beyond the pale of academic inquiry. His book is model of scholarly innovation and daring.
Honorable Mention, John Boswell Award, Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, 2005
Nadine Hubbs has written a powerful transdisciplinary study of the creation of modernist American music and its genesis in queer culture in the mid twentieth century, entitled The Queer Composition of America’s Sound. Much more than a “great queers in history” project, Hubbs’s study theorizes queer, national, and musical identity and demonstrates the Thomson-Copland circle’s connections to and genealogy with Paris, the continent, and both lesbian and gay culture at the time. Hubbs analyzes Virgil Thomson’s and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and its “queer theology,” what “being musical” meant in the 40s and 50s, and the significance of the difference between tonal and atonal music. Supporting her arguments with archival personal letters, music manuscripts, and theory, Hubbs elegantly structures her work around musical tropes--Intermezzo, Coda, Reprise—as she teaches us about music composition, identity, history, and “the sexuality of culture.”
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