This essay explores how the Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to a tremendous reorganization of how Americans thought about identity, especially queer identity. The author discusses the activism of homosexual organizers who worked against state repression and then traces the shifting ways Cold War-era novels, plays, and poetry take up the subject of queerness and re-imagine the social possibilities for the homosexual citizen. The work of Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin portrays same-sex desire as a social problem and records an overwhelming anxiety about the characters who are aligned with such desires. Later texts by writers such as Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga situate same-sex desire as a means of radical critique and as a site of connection. They make legible the active repression of gender and sexual nonconformity. This essay illustrates how ideas of queer freedom arise and transform in the shadow of repression.

Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure on stage as conductor, composer, pianist, and media persona, and off stage, too, in his physicality, sociality, charisma, and sensuous engagement with the world. His artistic and celebrity status granted wide berth to Bernstein’s ‘bohemian’ sexual and relationship practices, but he was not exempt from contemporary social expectations and anxieties. Indeed, Bernstein’s life and career illustrate the pivotal effects of twentieth-century sociosexual norms and homophobia on US musical modernism. A gay man in a heterosexual marriage, Bernstein was both a victim and beneficiary, and a sometime agent, of homophobia. In Bernstein the forces of twentieth-century homophobia converged with talent, ambition, and repression, yielding momentous results for his family, intimates, colleagues, and rivals, and for US and international arts and culture. Bernstein’s life and career were fatefully shaped by prevailing social forms and mores, and ultimately his social and cultural influence would contribute to their reshaping.

Chapter 2 focuses on what Ilf and Petrov astutely identified as the American strategy of disparaging communism by associating it with ethnic and racial minorities. Focusing on the story of Alexander Gumberg, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian empire who helped to facilitate Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the chapter analyzes how in the wake of the post-World War I Red Scare, Jewish immigrants negotiated the popular and official tendency to conflate “alienism” and “radicalism.”

Nativism, racism, and sexism are leading characters in this chapter, as are the songs for and against them. The Ku Klux Klan leads the way in musical contemptibility, but there are others, such as the xenophobes of the Spanish Flu epidemic and the songwriting purveyors of the postwar “Red Scare” against peace activists, labor activists, Germans, and suspected Bolsheviks. The immigrant community is under siege in the atmosphere of “100% Americanism,” and their songs – in the Cantonese opera houses, on the German and Italian vaudeville stages, in the Yiddish musical theaters, and in the ethnic recording studios – aim to fight back. The Indigenous peoples of Alaska and the lower 48 continue to resist the eradication of their song heritage, and the Mexican corridistas continue to sing of their border-crossing struggles. On the vaudeville stage, Eva Tanguay shows her contempt for conservative gender expectations, while the as-yet-unknown composers Florence Price and Ruth Crawford lay the groundwork for their own emergence.

It seemed that men faced two threats in the post-World War II era: one from global communism with its tentacles spreading into US society and the other from postwar consumerism which inspired fears of losing one’s masculinity in a cold, corporate world. The contours of these Cold War anxieties were expressed clearly in adventure magazines. Working-class readers confronted changing sexual norms, fears of being left behind as the US economy grew, and, it appeared, the boredom of suburban life. Thus, the magazines sold images of a “new American man,” one that was muscular, sexually aware, and able to overcome his working-class limits by following through on advertisements that promised easy money. Still, a sense of deep anxiety pervaded these magazine stories – and, arguably, Cold War America as a whole. The “Red” menace was cultivating unseen enemies capable of invading the body politic, even the US military according to some accounts. Fears of nuclear Armageddon were just as prevalent. And, just as importantly, men’s magazines painted a dark picture of a sexual menace being unleashed by postwar American society. Thus, these wide-ranging fears appeared to leave many American men in an uneasy state despite the victory of World War II.

Chapter 4 examines how anarchists handled the ramifications of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The revolution shaped the next decade and a half of anarchist agitation in the region as radicals attempted to figure out not only how to engage the new Communist state in Moscow, but also how to attract Marxists with whom anarchists worked and lived side by side. The post-1917 era also forced anarchists to confront the spread of US-backed anti-Communist surveillance. US intelligence agencies and their Caribbean partners tracked down and tried to suppress radicalism by expanding the Red Scare’s surveillance and repression into the Caribbean and targeting Caribbean anarchists who, from the heights of officialdom, were now seen as “Bolshevikis.”