Near-miniature. (50)pp. An assemblage of photographs and clippings of texts, advertisements, illustrations, and other nostalgic midcentury American iconography, recruited to describe bi- and/or pansexuality and the social conditioning of gender. The conservative ethos that came to define postwar America, displayed in images of men in suits, women in kitchens, and dazzling consumer goods, reinforced a heteronormativity in the domestic and social spaces that served to stabilize a conservative political agenda. Political oppression led to personal repression of all romantic partnerships that were not straight. Kokin here explores the subversive possibilities operating in the other direction: glimmers of personal sexual freedom and same-sex attraction that surfaced in the very images that peddled suppression. Kokin intersperses nature illustrations, both photographs and diagrams, that support the statement that an ambivalent, mutable sense of self, gender, and sex is, in fact, natural. Bound in soft black leather covers with gilt titling. A fine treatment of a still urgent reality.