Nestle explores the “fragile unions” of contemporary lesbian life, both personal and historic.

    Set in North America and Japan, Exile and the Heart weaves beautiful stories of women on the diaspora negotiating love, identity and friendship.

    Susan Love). 85 photos.

    Claire's partner Lucy and her friends Rasheda, Jane, and Harry struggle to reshape their lives, their allegiances, and their expectations as they learn to live with her absence.Lucy discovers that grief is a new form of gravity that alters the world. Rasheda reaches for a definition of family that both transcends tradition and includes her husband and little girl, while Harry wonders how he can continue to love women in the midst of this epidemic. Jane fights to balance a new passion with an old secret. And Claire -- who has been dead six months when the book begins -- still manages to pull the strings.The Mayor of Heaven is both a portrait of a missing person and an exploration of four diverse friends who finally discover what unites them.Praise for Kanter's first novel, On Lill Street: A classic dilemma and one you don't want to miss. On Lill Street is a wonderful novel from a press that is quickly making a name for itself as a publisher of quality lesbian fiction. -- Bay WindowsKanter has created memorable characters, realistic pathos, and subtle emotional nuance. -- Small PressA convincing story about multidimensional characters who find themselves in unbelievably believable situations. -- Lambda Book Report

    An intensive feminist qualitative study, the book offers guidelines for counselors and lesbian step families for creating healthy, functioning family structures and environments. It is the first book to concentrate exclusively on lesbian step families rather than on lesbian mothering in general.In Lesbian Step Families: An Ethnography of Love, you'll explore in detail the different kinds of step relationships that are developed and what factors may lead to the different types of step mothering in lesbian step families. The book helps you understand these relationships and parent roles through in-depth discussions of:how a step mother and legal mother who live together negotiate and organize parenting and homemaking tasks how members of lesbian step families define and create the step mother role strategies family members use to define and cope with oppression how sexism is transmitted within the family and how mothering may limit and/or contribute to female liberation the opinions and viewpoints of the children of these families The findings in Lesbian Step Families: An Ethnography of Love challenge traditional views of mothering and fathering as gender and biologically based activities; they indicate that lesbian step families model gender flexibility and that the mothers and step mothers share parenting--both traditional mothering and fathering--tasks. This allows the biological mother some freedom from motherhood as well as support in it. With insight such as this, you will be prepared to help a client, a loved one, or yourself develop and maintain healthy family relationships.

    -- Grace Paley"Bea Gates is a discoverer. Her poems of the lost and the found are transparently true to the time we live in. They move us because she has endured until she found words steady enough to present them. Major contemporary themes -- eros, AIDS, child abuse, friendship, homelessness -- emerge free of cliche from the hush of her unflinching awareness. Her language is wonderfully lucid -- modest and dazzling, so that we see our crimes and privileges in her view, rising out of her anguished love-affair with the real world. Her landscapes are intensely alive, peopled by those who are suffering and stricken by hope. Her discoveries allow us to imagine what else there is, once we refuse the dual anesthesia of shock and despair". -- Marie Ponsot"Bea Gates writes of 'the power of loving clear, ' and in the tough and clear-eyed poems in this book, she bravely takes the reader to wherever that phrase needs to go. This is a poet who doesn't blink yet has the power to transform the awkward and dangerous facts of our lives into healing song". -- Cornelius EadyThe poems in Gates' collection, "shocking in their nakedness" and raw beauty, plunge immediately into a language of feeling. "Major contemporary themes -- eros, AIDS, child abuse, friendship, homelessness -- emerge free of cliche". Language and experience come together in her discover of difficult truths. She has "the power to transform the awkward and dangerous facts of our lives into healing song".