"Victory," by Linda Hirshman - NYTimes.com His dashing ascot billowing, his flat cap perched just so (to hide his bald spot), the cleft-chinned Harry Hay had some impressive head shots. As a student at Stanford in the early 1930s, he had come out to his classmates as "temperamental," code for "homosexual." In 1934, having dropped out of Stanford and moved to Los Angeles to try a career in pictures - and having already begun to hone his identity as sensualist and agitator - he joined the Communist Party. Around 1936, he turned up at a Halloween party dressed as "the demise of fascism." The other homosexual bons vivants were stumped: none were terribly turned on to politics, so none knew what Harry's costume meant. These men, and others like them across America, had no core ideology, no political groups to join, no leaders. Hay changed that. In 1950, he helped create the Mattachine Society, the country's first gay rights organization, and demanded that the people it represented "be respected for our differences, not for our sameness to heterosexuals." The Triumphant Gay Revolution By Linda Hirshman Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99. Dirck Halstead/Time & Life Pictures - Getty Images Kennebunkport, Me., 1991. This year, the Human Rights Campaign, America's largest advocacy and lobbying organization for gay, bisexual and transgender rights, appointed Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, as the first national corporate spokesman for its same-sex marriage campaign. "Ameri­ca's corporations learned long ago that equality is just good business and is the right thing to do," Blankfein says in a Web video. The organization also bestowed on Goldman Sachs its 2012 "corporate equality award." How does a movement get from there to here - from Hay to Blankfein? Linda Hirshman's "Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution" sets out to explain, tracing the history of gay rights from the early 20th century to the present. Ever since the Enlightenment, when intellectuals articulated the crucial promises of the modern liberal state - security, liberty and self-governance - society's dispossessed have struggled to claim these rights as their own. The gay and lesbian movement, like the black civil rights and women's movements, has from its earliest days sought security (protection from violence and discrimination), freedom (inalienable human and group rights) and self-governance (the ability to participate effectively in political and economic life). Hirshman's book, drawing from an arsenal of archival records, firsthand interviews, court documents and previous histories, is a sprawling account of juicy trysts, hushed political meetings, internecine movement skirmishes, sudden mutinies and activists turning personal humiliation into rocket fuel. The emerging facts are not new to scholars, but as popular history, "Victory" excels. Hirshman is a nimble storyteller with an agile curatorial eye for what matters: witness her recounting of the zany founding of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund and her contrasting of San Francisco's disciplined, well-oiled political machine of the 1970s with New York City's angry, anarchic community pre-Stonewall. See too her exposé of the rivalries between movement factions, like the pro-Black Panther gays versus the get-along gays - and, of course, the lesbian feminists versus the chauvinist gays, who didn't want expansive rights, just a place at the straight white men's table. A lawyer and feminist scholar and the author of several previous books, Hirshman writes with knowing finesse. Harvey Milk, "at 40-something, was almost twice as old as the other cool gays walking down the newly colonized gay Castro neighborhood in their tight jeans," she explains. But he did bring his current lover, the perennially younger man of the moment, Scott Smith. Scotty and Harvey opened a camera store in an old Castro storefront, just to do something, not that they knew anything about cameras. She introduces another historical figure: a "lady­like" Dianne Feinstein, "Jewish, conventional, daughter of a doctor and wife (serially) of several wealthy men." Hirshman's observations land with that tart humor and piquant irony beloved by gay men. Some call it camp, others call it dish. Hirshman is heterosexual, but this book isn't straight. Rich Benjamin is the author of "Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America" and a senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan research institute.