America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously? In answering these questions, Shilts weaves the disparate threads into a coherent story, pinning down every evasion and contradiction at the highest levels of the medical, political, and media establishments. Shilts shows that the epidemic spread wildly because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation's welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives. Against this backdrop, Shilts tells the heroic stories of individuals in science and politics, public health and the gay community, who struggled to alert the nation to the enormity of the danger it faced. And the Band Played On is both a tribute to these heroic people and a stinging indictment of the institutions that failed the nation so badly.

    Writing in a lyrical mixture of Spanish and English that is her unique heritage, she meditates on the condition of Chicanos in Anglo culture, women in Hispanic culture, and lesbians in the straight world. Her essays and poems range over broad territory, moving from the plight of undocumented migrant workers to memories of her grandmother, from Aztec religion to the agony of writing. Anzaldua is a rebellious and willful talent who recognizes that life on the border, "life in the shadows," is vital territory for both literature and civilization. Venting her anger on all oppressors of people who are culturally or sexually different, the author has produced a powerful document that belongs in all collections with emphasis on Hispanic American or feminist issues.

    Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women-of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth, who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.

    The Passion is perhaps her most highly acclaimed work, a modern classic that confirms her special claim on the novel. Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meet their singular destiny.In her unique and mesmerizing voice, Winterson blends reality with fantasy, dream, and imagination to weave a hypnotic tale with stunning effects.

    Available for the first time in years, this revised classic collection of personal essays offers an intimate account of the lesbian, feminist, and civil rights movements.

    Until his wife's death, not even his children -- Diana's nieces and nephews -- have known about Diana and her lifetime companion Constance. But now David seeks to bridge over those years and recapture the closeness of childhood, to become part of Diana's life, to have her be a major part of his.For the independent, irascible Diana, the overtures from her brother are an unwelcome intrusion. Retired from her medical practice, she spends her days fully occupied with Constance, for whom memory is increasingly a sometime thing.David, growing ever more fond of the enchanting Constance, struggles to win her trust... and Diana is inexorably drawn into the events and drama of David's family life.In Memory Board the incomparable Jane Rule gives us her tenderest, most poignant, most humor-filled novel... and brings to us altogether fresh insights into living and loving and the nature of commitment.

    But AIDS has precipitated a crisis that is not primarily medical, or even social and political; AIDS has precipitated a crisis of signification the "meaning" of AIDS is hotly contested in all of the discourses that conceptualize it and seek to respond to it . AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism is the first book on the subject that takes this battle over meaning as its premise.ContributorsLeo Bersani, author of The Freudian Body; Simon Watney, who serves on the board of the Health Education Committee of London's Terrence Higgens Trust; Jan Zita Grover, medical editor at San Francisco General Hospital; Suki Ports, former executive director of the New York City Minority Task Force on AIDS; and Sander Gilman, author of Difference and Pathology.Also included are essays by Paula A. Treichler, who teaches in the Medical School and in communications at the University of Illinois; Carol Leigh, a member of COYOTE and contributor to Sex Work; and Max Navarre, editor of the People With AIDS Coalition monthly Newsline. In addition to these essays, the book contains a portfolio of manifestos, articles, letters, and photographs from the publications of the PWA Coalition, an interview with three members of the AIDS discrimination unit of the New York City Commission on Human Rights; and presentations for the independent video documentaries on AIDS, Testing the Limits and Bright Eyes.An October Book.

    Abandoned and left for dead, she walks to the ocean to kill herself. Instead she is rescued by the Hadra, wild riding-women with strange powers, women who ride their horses by consent, speak mind-to-mind with each other and are all lovers of women. This is Sair's own tale of her life and adventures among the Hadra, a journey that will finally take her to the fabled city of Zelindar.

    Subtitled "a play with poetic myths," it evolves around a modern-day Helen (associated with Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven and Earth) who descends to an underworld complete with a lesbian bar and a chorus of punning crow-dykes who put her through various trials designed to release her powers. The play is followed by two poems, connected thematically and imagistically, and exhaustive notes explaining the mythic allusions.

    In doing so, she skillfully demonstrates that the ideas we now recognize as characteristic of post-structuralism and deconstruction were being developed independently by Burroughs long ago.

    Updated version of Willis' chapbook (pre-Dogs in Lingerie) includes short prose in addition to the poems published in previous editions.

    She goes back home to her little factory town and there starts the saga of the diner. Dusty and Elly, both characters from Lynch's novel Toothpick House, along with their blind friend Grace, the fiery old lesbians Gussie and Nan, lively gay Jake and their non-gay co-workers wage the battle of their lives to keep the dream of Dusty's Queen of Hearts Diner thriving in the face of powerful bigotry. Erotic, dramatic and very real, this is the celebrated first book of The Morton River Valley Trilogy.

    Lawrence, Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, and Thom Gunn. Woods’s controlled and elegant study demonstrates that a critic who ignores the sexual orientation of a poet, particularly a love poet, risks overlooking the significance of the poetry itself.

    The photographs disclose the vital work of lesbians as we invent our lives, and the passionate, committed work of lesbians within many political movements.... These pictures urge us to see our selves, our fire of life, to imagine and create a future where we see each other, distinctly, in all our differences, and honor each other there.

    So it was not till 1987 that it finally saw the light of day, published by Virago.Mariana Clare, born in the Deep South of the United States, is a romantic child and a great reader of fairy tales, which convince her of the existence of eternal love. Orphaned at a young age, she has lived with her grandmother until the old lady dies, at which point Mariana decides to move to New York. Amazed and bemused by city life, she falls in with a group of bohemian young people and is quite astonished by their sexual openness...