Drawing on research from his new book, “The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World II” (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Vider will trace the history of two radical experiments of the 1970s—Phyllis Birkby’s lesbian architecture project and Survival House, an early group home for queer and trans homeless youth—to reconsider the place of domestic practices, spaces, and archives in LGBTQ history. While scholars in queer studies have largely emphasized public and commercial spaces as the primary sites of LGBTQ politics and community, Vider will argue that the intimacy of home space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life.

Stephen Vider is Assistant Professor of History and founding director of the Public History Initiative at Cornell University. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Gender & History, and The Public Historian. In 2017, Vider curated the exhibition “AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism” for the Museum of the City of New York.

S.E. Eisterer is Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Her research focuses on spatial histories of dissidence, feminist, queer, and trans theory, as well as the labor of social and ecological movements.

Organized by the Graduate Program in Media+ Modernity and Princeton University

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