Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City by Gregory Samantha Rosenthal

To my knowledge, this is the first queer history of an Appalachian city – Roanoke, Virginia. Based on the author’s forty interviews with LGBTQ elders and leadership in a community-based queer history project, this combination memoir and ethnography tells the story of the author’s coming out and then transitioning as a transgender woman. “A brilliantly blended book that, much like queerness itself, transcends genre and blurs boundaries. Using memoir to look outward and history to look inward, Rosenthal makes theory concrete, finds the past in the present, and brings Roanoke's overlooked queer demimonde to beautiful life.” --Samantha Allen. “Carefully attentive to the ways in which race, ethnicity, class, and gender (among other identities and power systems) speak to and with LGBTQ identities of various stripes, the book delivers a persuasive challenge to continuing presumptions that the South has never been a space or place in which LGBTQ people or cultures or communities could emerge,