Academic Writing
Vider has published a wide range of research on LGBTQ history, HIV/AIDS, mental health, humor, and performance in academic journals and edited collections.
“What Happened to the Functional Family?: Defining and Defending Alternative Households Before and Beyond Same-Sex Marriage”
Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History, edited by Margot Canaday, Nancy F. Cott, and Robert O. Self (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
The 1989 case of Baer v. Town of Brookhaven set crucial precedent for recognizing diverse families in the law, based not on marriage or lineage but on the ways households functioned—most importantly in the case of Braschi v. Stahl and Associates, the first time a state court recognized a gay couple as a family. But while the Braschi case has been recognized as a crucial turning point in the legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships, Baer’s story has largely been forgotten.
This essay revisits Baer and Braschi to reconsider the social and legal history of “non-traditional” families since the 1970s, and how this history connects with and diverges from better-known battles around same-sex marriage.
“Domesticity”
The Routledge History of American Sexuality, edited by Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin (Routledge, 2020)
Historical and literary scholarship dating back to the 1960s has demonstrated how conceptions and practices of domesticity have structured understandings of gender, race, and class, in connection to marriage, reproduction, and family as well as labor, political participation, social reform, and citizenship. Sexual practices, identities, and conceptualizations, however, have been largely overlooked.
This chapter examines how domesticity has structured sexual ideals and norms and controlled sexual practices, and, at the same time, how domestic spaces have provided room for transgression of those norms and ideals, to create alternative or queer domesticities. Marital domesticity has been persistently prioritized, yet in practice, home has operated as frequently as a stage for sexual normalization as subversion.
“Clinical Activism in Community-based Practice: The Case of LGBT Affirmative Care at the Eromin Center, Philadelphia, 1973–1984”
American Psychologist (2019), with David S. Byers and Emil Smith
Eromin Center executive director Anthony Silvestre, left, and clinical director Mary Cochran, 1981. Jack Tinney/Temple University Libraries.
The Eromin Center was founded in Philadelphia in 1973, aiming to provide LGBT affirmative mental health treatment six months before the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Drawing on archival records and oral histories, this study shows how Eromin Center staff and volunteers improvised new approaches to community-based care. Rather than waiting for national leadership or institutional change, they aimed to respond directly to otherwise unrecognized needs of LGBT people through psychotherapy and social services—what we call clinical activism. Largely overshadowed by the broader policy changes in mental health care, Eromin’s work provides a crucial case study in community-based clinical activism and affirmative practice with continuing significance today.
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“Public Disclosures of Private Realities: HIV/AIDS and the Domestic Archive”
The Public Historian (2019)
Jeffrey Scott Wilson, “HIV Sampler,” 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
Winner of 2020 G. Wesley Johnson Award, best article in The Public Historian in 2019, National Council on Public History
The exhibition AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism (Museum of the City of New York, 2017), aimed to complicate popular narratives about the history of HIV/AIDS by examining how HIV/AIDS played out in the everyday lives of diverse communities in New York. Placing works of art alongside archival documents, the exhibition asked visitors to reconsider what counts as activism, and how home functions as a political space. This article reflects on the ways the curator sought to activate the domestic archive—the everyday ephemera and affects of illness, caretaking, and family life.
“Consumerism”
The Routledge History of Queer America, edited by Don Romesburg (Routledge, 2018)
This chapter explores how consumerism has shaped LGBT life and politics from the early twentieth century to the present. It traces how acts, objects, and spaces of queer consumption played a central role in consolidating LGBT identities and communities, and provoked many of the earliest legal battles for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights. At the same time, it argues, consumerism has frequently functioned to reify gender, racial, and class divides among LGBT people, posing particular challenges for political activism and collective struggle for free expression and acceptance.
The chapter is organized around five central themes in the historiography on LGBT consumerism: (1) identification; (2) performance; (3) space-making; (4) contestation; and (5) mainstreaming. These thematic sections draw together a wide range of historical research, as well as diverse actors, objects, and spaces, to point to common social and political meanings of consumerism over time, as well as changes in practices and opportunities for consumption among LGBT people and communities.
“Lesbian and Gay Marriage and Romantic Adjustment in the 1950s and 1960s United States”
Gender & History (2017)
Frank Leach (left) and H. Lee Fuller at home in Monrovia, California, in the early 1950s. Lee Fuller Photograph Album, Human Sexuality Collection, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Gay men and lesbians of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s routinely used the word “marriage” to describe long-term same-sex relationships. Such relationships were not unprecedented, but they took on particular visibility in the postwar “homophile” movement, a network of organizations and activists dedicated to improving the status of gay men and lesbians.
This essay explores debates around homosexual marriage among homophile activists, to better understand the meanings of marriage for gay men and lesbians and for Americans more broadly in the postwar period. What was at stake was not merely the possibility of long-term homosexual relationships, but the capacity of gay men and lesbians to achieve happiness, emotional stability, and social integration—grouped at the time under the broad, often ambiguous psychological concept of “adjustment.” Within this context, homophile writers and their readers increasingly privileged the capacity for romantic commitment—what this article terms “romantic adjustment”—as a sign of mental health in its own right.
“‘Nobody’s Goddamn Business But My Own’: Leonard Frey and the Politics of Jewish and Gay Visibility in the 1970s”
The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, edited by Matt Bell (Wayne State University Press, 2016)
This essay examines the performances of Leonard Frey—in his roles as Harold in Boys in the Band and Motel the tailor in Fiddler on the Roof, as well as his practiced persona in newspaper and television interviews—to examine the intersecting politics of queer and Jewish visibility in the 1970s. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, gay activists frequently pointed to American Jews as analogous minority groups.
Frey’s performances suggest how Jewish Americans and gay activists negotiated calls for cultural assimilation, manifesting “identity” not as a “self” to which to be true, but a surface to be managed and manipulated.
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“‘The Ultimate Extension of Gay Community': Communal Living and Gay Liberation in the 1970s”
Gender & History (2015)
Fort Hill Faggots for Freedom, featured in Boston’s Gay Community News, 1976. Photograph by Jane Picard, used by permission.
Though largely neglected in histories of gay male culture and politics in the 1970s, gay communes or living collectives were created and understood as a central strategy of gay liberation. Between 1970 and 1975, gay liberation groups formed male communes in major cities and rural areas across the United States. Gay men were hardly alone in their impulse to create communes. Nonetheless, among gay liberation activists, communal living took on unique meaning as a strategy for remaking forms and feelings of gay male belonging.
This paper draws on manifestos and memoirs from members of gay communes formed in the 1970s to examine the motivations that led gay men to join communes, the challenges they encountered, and the debates around sexuality, gender, and race their activities inspired. Though generally short-lived, gay communes inspired both their members and observers to interrogate sexual and gender roles, and rethink domestic space as a stage for social and political change.
“‘Oh Hell, May, Why Don’t You People Have a Cookbook?’: Camp Humor and Gay Domesticity”
American Quarterly (2013)
Cover of The Gay Cookbook by Lou Rand Hogan, with illustrations by David Costain, Bell Publishing Company, 1965.
Winner of 2015 Crompton-Noll Award, best essay in LGBTQ studies, GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association
This essay analyzes The Gay Cookbook, by Chef Lou Rand Hogan, in order to reconsider the role of domestic space in shaping gay male identity, community, and politics in the decades after World War II.
Published in 1965 and promoted in mainstream and gay media, Hogan’s cookbook presented a style of camp humor that challenged popular representations of gay life as lonely and “seedy” and provided a space to negotiate Cold War class, race, sexual, and gender conventions.
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“Sanford Versus Steinberg: Black Sitcoms, Jewish Writers, and the 1970s Ethnic Revival”
Transition (2011)
Still from “Steinberg and Son” episode of Sanford and Son, originally aired October 1975.
In the fall of 1975, the lead characters of NBC’s hit sitcom Sanford and Son found themselves on the other side of the camera—as members of a TV studio audience. In the meta-theatrical episode, aired October 10, 1975, Fred and Lamont Sanford head to NBC studios to see a taping of a new TV series that appears to have been based on their lives.
There was just one crucial difference: it was called Steinberg and Son. The episode voiced ironically what remained unspoken in nearly all critical assessments of the show: the writers and producers of Sanford and Son, like many black sitcoms of the 70s, were not only white. They were also Jewish.
“Rethinking Crowd Violence: Self-Categorization Theory and the Woodstock 1999 Riot”
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (2004), based on undergraduate research project
News coverage of Woodstock 1999, from Woodstock '99: Peace, Love and Rage, dir. Garret Price, 2021.
According to self-categorization theory (SCT), incidents of crowd violence can be understood as discrete forms of social action, limited by the crowd’s social identity. Through an analysis of the riot at Woodstock 1999, this paper explores the uses and limitations of SCT in order to reach a more complex psychology of crowd behavior, particularly those instances that appear unmotivated, irrational, and destructive.