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I am looking for something to fill in the details of a LGBT scene in a city between 1940 and 1990 I think.
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I do identify as LGBT myself but my google searches had not led to much yesterday and I was hoping to find something about 1) the LGBT meeting places during the time period that I mentioned. I imagine that for some people there must have been a difficult balancing act between being part of the scene and distancing from it to avoid attention.
And 2) did it happen that LGBT people of different genders would enter a marriage with each other to avoid exposing their true sexual orientations to people they were not out to.
Of course, my references are all U.S. centric... 1940-1990 is a rather large span of time where things could be much different from one end to the other.
In terms of gay people finding each other, the Allan Berube book COMING OUT UNDER FIRE shows how gay people came to find each other, either enlisting or being drafted into WWII. And then how the military dealt with them. There's also a documentary on this subject, same title, by Arthur Dong. (Same title.) From reading that book it became clear that there was not a general consensus or experience for these people, depending on the situations and locations they were. Some had really harsh experiences and others varying amounts of freedom.
As for "LGBT people of different genders entering a marriage with each other to avoid exposing their true sexual orientations"... In the 1970's I met a gay guy who had been in the air force and the air force was investigating a female enlistee who was thought to maybe be lesbian (she was) and he married her. And, I suppose since marrying a man was never thought to be a possibility for him, they remained married and in various stages of contact over the years. The investigation stopped after they were married.
...for what it's worth.