The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams

“On these pages, Eve Adams rises up, loves, rebels—her times, eerily resembling our own.” —Joan Nestle, cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and author of A Restricted Country

• 2022 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist

Historian Jonathan Ned Katz uncovers the forgotten story of radical lesbian Eve Adams and her long-lost book Lesbian Love 

Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Eve Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912,took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love.

Adams’s bold activism caught the attention of the young J. Edgar Hoover and the US Bureau of Investigation, leading to her surveillance and arrest. Adams was convicted of publishing an obscene book and of attempted sex with a policewoman sent to entrap her.

Adams was jailed and then deported back to Europe, and ultimately murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz. In The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early, daring activist.

Carefully distinguishing fact from fiction, Katz presents the first biography of Adams, and the publisher reprints the long-lost text of Adams’s rare, unique book Lesbian Love