Best of
Queer

2002

Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays


June Jordan - 2002
    The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.

Shield of Justice


Radclyffe - 2002
    Finally, she has a break in the case–a witness–one person who may help her bring a madman to justice. But, the witness is a victim herself and Rebecca must convince the injured woman's physician, Dr.Catherine Rawlings, to assist her–a task that will force both women to confront their own personal demons. Amidst professional conflicts and a growing mutual attraction, the two women become reluctant allies in the battle to stop the perpetrator before he strikes again.

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity


Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - 2002
    In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion." In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

The Quiet Violence of Dreams


K. Sello Duiker - 2002
    In this daring novel, the author gives a startling account of the inner workings of contemporary South African urban culture. In doing so, he ventures into unexplored areas and takes local writing in English to places it hasn't been before. The Quiet Violence of Dreams is set in Cape Town's cosmopolitan neighbourhoods - Observatory, Mowbray and Sea Point - where subcultures thrive and alternative lifestyles are tolerated. The plot revolves around Tshepo, a student at Rhodes, who gets confined to a Cape Town mental institution after an episode of 'cannabis-induced psychosis'. He escapes but is returned to the hospital and completes his rehabilitation, earns his release - and promptly terminates his studies. He now works as a waiter and shares an apartment with a newly released prisoner. The relationship with his flatmate deteriorates and Tshepo loses his job at the Waterfront. Desperate for an income, he finds work at a male massage parlour, using the pseudonym Angelo. The novel explores Tshepo-Angelo's coming to consciousness of his sexuality, sexual orientation, and place in the world. lifestyle and set of experiences are explored - that of a young black woman who gets involved with a disabled German student who does not want to commit to marriage, despite Mmabatho's unplanned pregnancy.

One Man's Trash


Ivan E. Coyote - 2002
    The talent evident in that first collection is confirmed with One Man’s Trash, a series of connected stories about being queer, searching out new frontiers, and being on the road.The characters in One Man’s Trash make evident the child in all of us, when heroes and superheroes won the day.Including the hilarious account of an attempted lesbian wedding in a Las Vegas chapel, and a touching tale of being beguiled by an uncle’s independent-minded girlfriend, these are stories about being on the road: to the northern tundra or the southern desert, through cities and towns, on horses, in trucks and vans, with friends, family, and lovers. In achingly personal tones, Ivan Coyote paints beautiful and honest portraits of life, the road, and the spirits within.

Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction


Devon W. Carbado - 2002
    Beginning with the turn-of-the-century writings of Angelina Welde Grimke and Alice Dunbar Nelson, it charts the evolution of black lesbian and gay fiction into the Harlem Renaissance of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and the later postwar era, in which works by Audre Lorde and James Baldwin signal the emerging sexual liberation movements. The 40 authors featured also include Alice Walker, E. Lynn Harris, Audre Lorde, April Sinclair, Jewelle Gomez, Thomas Glave, and Jacqueline Woodson.

What Happened to Lani Garver


Carol Plum-Ucci - 2002
    Everything about this new kid is a mystery: Where does Lani come from? How old is Lani? And most disturbing of all, is Lani a boy or a girl?Claire McKenzie isn't up to tormenting Lani with the rest of the high school elite. Instead, she befriends the intriguing outcast. But within days of Lani's arrival, tragedy strikes and Claire must deal with shattered friendships and personal demons--and the possibility that angels may exist on earth.

The Complete Strangers in Paradise, Volume 3, Part 4


Terry Moore - 2002
    Francine and Katchoo are high-school best friends who are reunited when Francine comes back to town after years away from her hometown. David is their new friend entangled in their complicated lives. From creepy ex-boyfriends and insensitive bosses to the reality of AIDS and underworld prostitution, you never know what will come up next - but you can always count on laughing and crying at the same time. This foil-stamped casebound hardcover with color dust jacket includes a special color cover art section, sketches, and more.

Shadows of the Soul


Melissa Good - 2002
    I never was that fond of Armegeddon Now, but Lunacy lives in Miami, and knows where my house is. So – as a compromise, I decided to write a sorta kinda conqueror type story and here it is.This is the first book in the Xena the Merciless series.Cover by Calli’s Creations (www.calliscreations.com)

Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics


Douglas Crimp - 2002
    He shows that the cumulative losses from AIDS, including the waning of militant response, have resulted in melancholia as Freud defined it: gay men's dangerous identification with the moralistic repudiation of homosexuality by the wider society.With the 1993 march on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, it became clear that AIDS no longer determined the agenda of gay politics; it had been displaced by traditional rights issues such as gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. Journalist Andrew Sullivan, notorious for pronouncing the AIDS epidemic over, even claimed that once those few rights had been won, the gay rights movement would no longer have a reason to exist.Crimp challenges such complacency, arguing that not only is the AIDS epidemic far from over, but that its determining role in queer politics has never been greater. AIDS, he demonstrates, is the repressed, unconscious force that drives the destructive moralism of the new, anti-liberation gay politics expounded by such mainstream gay writers as Larry Kramer, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as Sullivan. Crimp examines various cultural phenomena, including Randy Shilts's bestseller And the Band Played On, the Hollywood films Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, and Magic Johnson's HIV infection and retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers. He also analyzes Robert Mapplethorpe's and Nicholas Nixon's photography, John Greyson's AIDS musical Zero Patience, Gregg Bordowitz's video Fast Trip, Long Drop, the Names Project Quilt, and the annual Day without Art.

The Children Are Free: Re-Examining the Biblical Evidence on Same-Sex Relationships


Jeff Miner - 2002
    Jeff Miner and John Tyler Connoley offer a comprehensive yet easy-to-read examination of the biblical evidence regarding loving same-sex relationships and God's attitude toward them. In Chapter One, the authors lead the reader through a discussion of each of the six passages traditionally used against gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. In their friendly and authoritative style, they demonstrate how an anti-gay interpretation is a misapplication of these scriptures. Then, in Chapter Two, Miner and Connoley turn our attention to the biblical stories and passages that affirm loving same-sex relationships. Did you know Jesus once met a gay person? Jesus' loving response is just one of the well-researched stories presented in this chapter. Chapter Three asks readers to take seriously the call of Jesus to think more deeply about biblical rules. And Chapter Four calls Christians to action, making a connection between the conflicts in the early Church and those occurring within the Church today. This book belongs in the library of any Christian questioning the role of Scripture in the lives of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, or the role of GLB people in the Church.

Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris


Suzanne Rodriguez - 2002
    But Natalie had no interest in marriage and made no secret of the fact that she was attracted to women. Brought up by a talented and rebellious mother-the painter Alice Barney-Natalie cultivated an interest in poetry and the arts. When she moved to Paris in the early 1900s, she plunged into the city's literary scene, opening a famed Left Bank literary salon and engaging in a string of scandalous affairs with courtesan Liane de Pougy, poet Renee Vivien, and painter Romaine Brooks, among others. For the rest of her long and controversial life Natalie Barney was revered by writers for her generous, eccentric spirit and reviled by high society for her sexual appetite. In the end, she served as an inspiration and came to know many of the greatest names of 20th century arts and letters-including Proust, Colette, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Truman Capote.A dazzling literary biography, Wild Heart: A Life is a story of a woman who has been an icon to many. Set against the backdrop of two different societies-Victorian America and Belle Epoque Europe—Wild Heart: A Life beautifully captures the richness of their lore.

Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art


Richard Meyer - 2002
    Conflicts surrounding homosexuality and creative freedom have shaped the history of modern art in America. Outlaw Representation traces this history by showing how gay artists have both resisted and responded to the threat of censorship. It features nearly two hundred images, ranging from the work of Robert Mapplethorpe to gay liberation posters.

Alice Walker's "the Colour Purple": A Readers Companion


Nandita Sinha - 2002
    

Lorimal's Chalice


Jane Fletcher - 2002
    She soon discovers that the outside world is a dangerous and confusing place. Bandits and monsters are the least of her problems. Someone is prying into a long hidden secret and Tevi is about to get caught up in the deadly consequences. Jemeryl has her future planned out. A future that will, hopefully, involve the minimum contact with ordinary folk who do not understand sorcerers. Her ambition lies with the Coven and the study of magic. Her goal is to rise up the Coven hierarchy and someday become ruler of the Protectorate. It is all very straightforward - until she meets Tevi. The fate of the greatest civilisation the world has known is at stake. Tevi and Jemeryl will have to risk their lives in the race to uncover the traitor and retrieve the chalice. If this is not enough, they will both have to re-evaluate their assumptions about society and their places in it, and then figure out exactly what they want from life and each other.

Publics and Counterpublics


Michael Warner - 2002
    How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public? According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover. Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.

The Uncle's Story


Witi Ihimaera - 2002
    Michael Mahana's personal disclosure to his parents leads to the uncovering of another family secret-about his uncle, Sam, who had fought in the Vietnam War.Now, armed with his uncle's diary, Michael goes searching for the truth about his uncle, about the secret the Mahana family has kept hidden for over thirty years, and what happened to Sam.A powerful love story set in the war-torn jungles of Vietnam and in present-day New Zealand and North America, Witi Ihimaera's powerful new novel courageously confronts Maori attitudes to sexuality and masculinity and contains some of Ihimaera's most passionate writing to date.

Fingersmith


Sarah Waters - 2002
    Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum.With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

Pastoral


Carl Phillips - 2002
    Trained in classical Greek and Latin, Phillips seems to excavate as he forms words into lines, breaking images into tiny parts of thought as he digs for meaning and accuracy. As part of this excavation, Pastoral explores what flesh, wanting, and belief are made of. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips has produced four collections of accomplished verse in the past few years. In each book, the influence of classical syntax and rhythm can be heard. And with each book, Phillips refines his poetic voice, combining the prayerlike and the erotic, and often elegantly swooping from a whisper to a scream in the space of a few stanzas.This time, the poems fall along a wide range of tones, from italicized commands like "Let me" and "Now" in the poem "Lay Me Down" to a hesitant question, or a deepening well of self-doubt. Phillips is always original, and he's always remembering, even when a poem is firmly written in present tense. He is hyperaware not only of the ancient poets, but also of history, especially the great destructions.In the ominously titled "The Kill," he remembers a familiar daily scene. The speaker analyzes his own love for another in clinical detail that suddenly veers into longing. The way these lines break adds to the sense of tragic fragment, of an ache:      The last time I gave my body up,      to you, I was minded       briefly what it is made of,       what yours is, that      I'd forgotten, the flesh      which always       I hold in plenty no       little sorrow for because -- oh, do      but think on its predicament,      and weep.In just four stanzas, Phillips moves from an image of both love and surrender to a consideration of temporality -- the bald fact that his lover is mortal. This thought of "its predicament" makes him weep, even though death is not a stated issue here.In "The Kill," the last poem in the volume, the speaker anticipates the need to remember. The second poem in the book referred to Pompeii, and the shadow of Pompeii is still resonant as the speaker describes his lover's body, still current and alive despite the title's warning.He remembers a body he has felt before, and probably will feel again -- judging by the present tense of "what yours is." And yet, the speaker here feels the need to freeze that body in time, to memorialize it. The next stanza explains this strong urge to hold on:      We cleave most entirely      to what most we fear      losing. We fear loss      because we understand       the fact of it, its largeness, its      utter indifference to whether      we do, or don't,       ignore it. The "largeness" of loss is what these poems are loath to accept, even as they seek to understand. Each poem tries to break loss down into questions, confessions, prayers, or simple expressions of doubt. While the poems fight against death and inevitable loss, they also seem to seek moral guidance to help with these losses.Nowhere is the search for answers and guidance more apparent than at the endings of these poems, which are frequently questions. Phillips is fond of abrupt, mysterious dashes as conclusions. In his quest for a moral compass, he also quotes from "Lamentations" and draws on familiar Biblical stories. The wanderings of Cain, for example, seem to appear in the backgrounds of poems where man seeks. What's more, the epigraph is from George Herbert, the great poet of faith and the war between faith and flesh. The sense of struggle between opposing ideas is something Phillips incorporates and modernizes into a contemporary parable of carnal love and constant questioning of that love. There's a frequent seesawing in the book, a back-and-forth on the big questions that permeates even the simplest narrative. For example, in "Favor," the second section of a five-part poem called "And Fitful Memories of Pan," Phillips sees a man in the distance:      Even from a distance, I can tell:       a man, clearly.       Gods cast no shadow. The struggle between man and God, between flesh and faith, is hinted at in the first stanza. Man, for Phillips, is an instrument of struggle, a tortured wanderer. The poem continues:      Also, that he tires,       stops to rest, looks like      sleeping, or could use some.       How long he has been,       coming, how long it takes, just      to cross it, the lush      measure that -- all summer -- has      been these well-groomed,       well-fed grounds, the lake      unswum and gleaming, the light      catching, losing      the useless extravagancePhillips basically forms the scene of a man walking into a discussion of man's temporality, the fact that man tires. While what God makes -- "the lake unswum and gleaming" -- needs to make no effort to be beautiful, man exhausts himself just surviving. By the last two stanzas, the speaker concludes that the body must make bets with itself:      Always, the body      wagering --      up, through itself --       Give. What he wants, he shall have.In Phillips's work, man -- though mortal -- still has great power. Man can demand, man can inspire love, and man can pray. In the struggle between man and God, in that constant "wagering," man sometimes wins.&3151;Aviya Kushner

Wanting in Arabic


Trish Salah - 2002
    Braiding theoretic concerns with the ambivalences of sexed and raced identity.WANTING IN ARABIC attempts to traverse the fantasies of foundational loss and aggressive nostalgia in order to further a poetics of a conscious partiality of being, of generous struggle and comic rather than tragic misrecognition. "Trish Salah's poetic sequence is not simply a narrative of gender change; it's a wandering, thoughtful text, one both fierce and tremulous"--Erin Moure. "This is a beautiful and disturbing collection of poems, writing from the uncharted langscape of the third sex"--Mary Di Michele.

Essential Acker: The Selected Writings


Kathy Acker - 2002
    Now Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper have distilled the incredible variety of Acker's body of work into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-twentieth-century America. Acker was a literary pirate whose prodigious output drew promiscuously from popular culture, the classics of Western civilization, current events, and the raw material of her own life. Her vision questions everything we take for granted — the authority of parents, government, and the law; sexuality and the policing of desire — and puts in its place a universe of polymorphous perversity and shameless, playful freakery. Spanning Acker's '70s punk interventions through more than a dozen major novels, Essential Acker is an indispensable overview of the work of this distinctive American writer and a reminder of her challenge to and influence on writers of the future.

How to Do the History of Homosexuality


David M. Halperin - 2002
    Halperin revisits and refines the argument he put forward in his classic One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: that hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically constituted but are, instead, historically and culturally produced. How to Do the History of Homosexuality expands on this view, updates it, answers its critics, and makes greater allowance for continuities in the history of sexuality. Above all, Halperin offers a vigorous defense of the historicist approach to the construction of sexuality, an approach that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their irreducible specificity and does not force them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be.Dealing both with male homosexuality and with lesbianism, this study imparts to the history of sexuality a renewed sense of adventure and daring. It recovers the radical design of Michel Foucault's epochal work, salvaging Foucault's insights from common misapprehensions and making them newly available to historians, so that they can once again provide a powerful impetus for innovation in the field. Far from having exhausted Foucault's revolutionary ideas, Halperin maintains that we have yet to come to terms with their startling implications. Exploring the broader significance of historicizing desire, Halperin questions the tendency among scholars to reduce the history of sexuality to a mere history of sexual classifications instead of a history of human subjectivity itself. Finally, in a theoretical tour de force, Halperin offers an altogether new strategy for approaching the history of homosexuality—one that can accommodate both ruptures and continuities, both identity and difference in sexual experiences across time and space.Impassioned but judicious, controversial but deeply informed, How to Do the History of Homosexuality is a book rich in suggestive propositions as well as eye-opening details. It will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality.

Lemon Hound


Sina Queyras - 2002
    One sequence imagines Virginia Woolf’s childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, ‘On the Scent,’ makes us flâneurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while ‘The River Is All Thumbs’ uses a palette of vibrant repetition to ‘paint’ a landscape.Queyras’s language – astute, insistent, languorous – repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do we make a moment firm? These ‘postmodern,’ ‘postfeminist’ poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?Sina Queyras's latest collection of poetry, Expressway, was nominated for a Governor General's Award and won Gold at the National Magazine Awards. Her previous collection Lemon Hound won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford and Concordia University in Montreal where she now resides.

The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England


Valerie Traub - 2002
    Contrary to the silence ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. As a contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.

Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent


Richard Bruce Nugent - 2002
    Protégé of Alain Locke, roommate of Wallace Thurman, and friend of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, the precocious Nugent stood for many years as the only African-American writer willing to clearly pronounce his homosexuality in print. His contribution to the landmark publication FIRE!!, "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," was unprecedented in its celebration of same-sex desire. A resident of the notorious "Niggeratti Manor," Nugent also appeared on Broadway in Porgy (the 1927 play) and Run, Little Chillun (1933).Thomas H. Wirth, a close friend of Nugent's during the last years of the artist's life, has assembled a selection of Nugent's most important writings, paintings, and drawings-works mostly unpublished or scattered in rare and obscure publications and collected here for the first time. Wirth has written an introduction providing biographical information about Nugent's life and situating his art in relation to the visual and literary currents which influenced him. A foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasizes the importance of Nugent for African American history and culture.

Famous Builder


Paul Lisicky - 2002
    Born into a family whose incremental success bumps them up a notch from their immigrant upbringing and into suburban America, Paul puts his creative, undaunted energy into drawing intricate housing development plans and writing liturgical music.In the lively, loving essays contained in Famous Builder, Lisicky explores the constant impulse to rebuild the self. With gracious, thoughtful candor and pitch-perfect humor, he explores the very personal realms of childhood dreams and ambitions, adolescent sexual awakenings, and adult realities.

Ridiculous!: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam


David Kaufman - 2002
    The astonishing life and legacy of this force to be reckoned with are at last revealed in RIDICULOUS!, a literary biography of an American comic genius. After founding the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967, Ludlam sustained an ever-shifting troupe of bohemian players through two decades of perennially daunting circumstances by writing 29 plays - plays that he starred in and directed as well. While Ludlam's work has become increasingly popular at regional theatres, on college campuses, and on stages throughout the world, his gender-bending theories and wide-ranging cultural impact have reached far beyond Bette Midler, the original cast members of Saturday Night Live and the countless other artists he influenced during his abbreviated lifetime. Like his early plays, Ludlam's life was rife with the sex, drugs and creative experimentation that characterized the freewheeling '60s and '70s. Based on a decade of research and interviews with more than 150 people who knew or worked with Ludlam - including all of the major players in his troupe and seven of his lovers - RIDICULOUS! recreates the dramatic life of an inimitable and subversive theatrical master with you-are-there intensity. Winner of the LAMBDA Literary Award for Biography and the Theatre Library Association Award for Outstanding Theatre Book of the Year "David Kaufman makes a persuasive case for Ludlam's being a genius ... As a record of Ludlam's life and the theatrical world in which he was both guru and grandmaster, this book is informed and passionate." - Mel Gussow, The New York Times "A fascinating portrait of an authentic stage genius and the New York avant-garde scene in which he toiled with such demented and dedicated diligence." - Playbill "The phenom who inspired everyone from Bette Midler and Madeline Kahn to Tony Kushner and Paul Rudnick was no box of chocolates - which, as reading experiences go, makes his story all the sweeter." - Vanity Fair "This is one helluva piece of work." - Marilyn Stasio, Variety.com

The Harvey Milk Story


Kari Krakow - 2002
    The story of Harvey Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay city official.

Americano: Growing Up Gay and Latino in the USA


Emanuel Xavier - 2002
    The poems contained in these pages challenge mainstream sexual, political and religious beliefs reflecting unique experiences from the outskirts of the heartland. In pursuit of the American dream, this is a tribute to freedom and equality from an insider looking out while enjoying a piece of both the apple and lemon merengue pie.

Music Like Dirt: A Chapbook


Frank Bidart - 2002
    I wanted not a tract, but a tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processes—sexuality, mortality—inseparable from it.""Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and, recently, that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidart’s poems sound like no one else’s; they look like no one else’s. . . . He is, in the feeling of our jury, one of the great poets of our time."—Louise Glück, jury chair, 2001 Wallace Stevens Award The Academy of American PoetsThe inaugural edition in Sarabande's Quarternote Chapbook Series which will feature a select group of poets by invitation onlyFrank Bidart's collections of poetry include Desire (1997), which received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990); The Sacrifice (1983); The Book of the Body (1977); and Golden State (1973). Among his many honors are the Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Curbside Boys: The New York Years


Robert Kirby - 2002
    Kirby’s chronicle of sexual mishaps and bittersweet romance is syndicated widely in gay newspapers in the U.S.

A Day in the Life of P.


Kari Edwards - 2002
    LGBT Studies. "Sonner or later it seemed people would need to start writing in groups. It seems like the people who died in the World Trade Center must have died for someone and shouldn't everyone write a book for them. And what about me? Shouldn't everyone write a book for me. Who would write a book for all the women, or all the men. The queers. How about all the people who died in the holocaust. What about all the people who didn't. What about the people working in the buildings not next, but not far from the World Trade Center. Or in other cities. Why doesn't everybody write a book for them? And who would be its author. kari edwards comes up & down like a cloud writing a sneering exuberant millennial book, speaking for the army of us who know something else, but don't know how to say or do. kari edwards' A DAY IN THE LIFE OF P is a total fucking masterpiece. She's a monk postmodernist, kari writes in groups. People should start chanting this book on streetcorners. I can't stop reading it, it's screamingly grey, it's better than phone sex, than Burroughs or Proust, it's outrageously cool"--Eileen Myles.

Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude


Justin Spring - 2002
    He first gained national recognition in 1934 when his bawdy painting "The Fleet's In!" was barred from a Public Works of Art exhibition in Washington, D.C. For more than six decades following, Cadmus led a career as a meticulous craftsman devoted to Renaissance-era traditions of figurative realism. But his drawings of the male nude, which always formed the heart of his work, were often overlooked. Here for the first time in one volume are seventy of Cadmus's most stunning tributes to the male form. Cadmus continued to produce these works up until his death at age ninety-four, and this volume includes many drawings that have never been seen before. The artist's most frequent model was his lifelong partner Jon Anderson, and the drawings offer up not just an elegant fluency and technical virtuosity but also a tender emotional resonance. Introducing each era of the artist's career is an illustrated essay by respected critic and writer Justin Spring, placing Cadmus in the context of the rich history of the male nude. Paul Cadmus reminds us-- poignantly, eloquently, humbly-- of the sincere beauty of the male form and of humanity itself with each masterful rendering. As Guy Davenport wrote in "The Drawings of Paul Cadmus," "His drawings of male nudes are of bodies, but of achieved, perfected bodies that serve as symbols, as in ancient Greece, of a perfect unity of spirit and flesh, mind and body. For Cadmus the body" is "the person."

Hermaphrodeities: The Transgender Spirituality Workbook


Raven Kaldera - 2002
    

Surviving Madness: A Therapist's Own Story


Betty Berzon - 2002
    Berzon’s journey from psychiatric patient on suicide watch—her wrists tethered to the bed rails in a locked hospital ward—to her present role as a groundbreaking therapist and gay pioneer makes for purely compelling reading.Berzon is recognized today as a trailblazing co-founder of a number of important lesbian and gay organizations and one of the first therapists to focus on means of developing healthy gay relationships and overcoming homophobia. Her sometimes bumpy road to success never fails to fascinate. Along the way she encounters such luminaries as Anaïs Nin, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Sitwells, Evelyn Hooker, and Paul Monette. Her recollections here provide a collective portrait of her fellow pioneers and a stirring lesson in twentieth-century history.It is, however, the intimate story of Berzon’s own private passage toward self-discovery—from mental breakdown and suicide attempts, through hospitalization, eventual triumphant recovery, and her own coming out as an open lesbian at the age of forty—that makes this memoir an urgent, insightful, and deeply emotional testament to human survival.

PASSING


Eloise Klein Healy - 2002
    Check out 'Louganis,' a beautiful sestina about beauty and HIV. You'd say the woman is all heart, except that her 'craft' is so good. The poet's elegies are filled with joy's memory and power, her lust insists on the rights and rites of the body--and her anger is aflame"--Alicia Ostriker. Los Angeles-based Eloise Klein Healy is the author of five books of poetry including Building Some Changes, A Packet Beating Like a Heart, Ordinary Wisdom, and Artemis In Echo Park, which was nominated for the Lambda Book Award and released as a spoken word recording by New Alliance Records.

Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray!: Feminist Visions for a Just World


M. Jacqui Alexander - 2002
    It will become a definitive work for academics and activists committed to an unflinching inquiry into the mechanisms of global justice.

Mind & Body: Erotica of the Mind


Cecilia TanEvan Hollander - 2002
    So much of what is erotic is unspoken, expressed without words. In MIND & BODY, 11 writers take that into the realm of fantastic fiction. 11 little paranormal romances, as a lonely shopkeeper checks the "psychic personals," mysterious dreams lead a woman to her soul mate, and lust goes beyond skin deep.

August Witch


Chandra Mayor - 2002
    What links all the poems in this collection is the theme of boundaries between self and other, desire and body, "breath and reason." Mayor's poetic voice is at once confessional, playful and linguistically sophisticated. Here is a book that confirms the most exciting aspects of the poetic process. This is a stunning debut collection of poetry.

From the Other Side of Night: New and Selected Poems


Francisco X. Alarcón - 2002
    One of Chicano literature's premier poets, Alarcón has brought his luminous images to the page in such acclaimed volumes as Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes and Snake Poems. Now he has assembled the best of his work from fifteen years, along with fourteen new poems, in a book that distills his magical sense of reality into a cup brimming with passion. Raised in Guadalajara and now living in the San Francisco Bay area, Alarcón sees that " 'Mexican' / is not / a noun / or an / adjective / 'Mexican' / is a life / long / low-paying / job." Participating in a poetic tradition that goes back to the mystic Spanish poets of the sixteenth century, he brings us sonnets infused with romance and tenderness—and shorter poems that are direct and hard-hitting commentaries on American society, as he cries out for "a more godlike god," one "who spends nights / in houses / of ill repute / and gets up late / on Saturdays." Alarcón invokes both the mysteries of Mesoamerica and the "otherness" of his gay identity. "My skin is dark / as the night / in this country / of noontime," he writes, "but my soul / is even darker / from all the light / I carry inside." In lyrical poems open to wide interpretation, he transcends ethnic concerns to address social, sexual, and historical issues of concern to all Americans. The fourteen new poems in From the Other Side of Night offer startling new commentaries on life and love, sex and AIDS. Shifting effortlessly between English and Spanish—and even Nahuatl—Alarcón demonstrates the gift of language that has earned him both a wide readership and the admiration of fellow poets. With this book, he invites new readers to meet him where the darkness is palpable and the soul burns bright.

Solitaire


Kelley Eskridge - 2002
    Convicted of a crime she did not commit, former Hope child Jackal serves a terrible solitary imprisonment sentence and is eventually abandoned in a strange country where other people like herself help her learn the truth about her imprisonment.

Other Girls


Diane Ayres - 2002
    . . Other Girls.

From the Ashes (The Pendragon Trilogy #1)


Meghan Brunner - 2002
    An urban fantasy tale of two women who overcome heartbreak, history, and the Shadow Fae to find happiness, themselves, and each other against the Magickal backdrop of Pendragon Renaissance Faire.

Polari - The Lost Language of Gay Men


Paul Baker - 2002
    Derived in part from the slang lexicons of numerous stigmatised and itinerant groups, Polari was also a means of socialising, acting out camp performances and reconstructing a shared gay identity and worldview among its speakers. This book examines the ways in which Polari was used in order to construct 'gay identities', linking its evolution to the changing status of gay men and lesbians in the UK over the past fifty years.

Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality At The Border


Eithne Luibhéid - 2002
    Since the late nineteenth century, immigrant women's sexuality has been viewed as a threat to national security, to be contained through strict border-monitoring practices. By scrutinizing this policy, its origins, and its application, Eithne Luibheid shows how the U.S. border became a site not just for controlling female sexuality but also for contesting, constructing, and renegotiating sexual identity.Initially targeting Chinese women, immigration control based on sexuality rapidly expanded to encompass every woman who sought entry to the United States. The particular cases Luibheid examines -- efforts to differentiate Chinese prostitutes from wives, the 1920s exclusion of Japanese wives to reduce the Japanese-American birthrate, the deportation of a Mexican woman on charges of lesbianism, the role of rape in mediating women's border crossings today -- challenge conventional accounts that attribute exclusion solely to prejudice or lack of information. This innovative work clearly links sexuality-based immigration exclusion to a dominant nationalism premised on sexual, gender, racial, and class hierarchies.

The Logic of the Lure


John Paul Ricco - 2002
    With The Logic of the Lure, John Paul Ricco argues that it is precisely such fleeting, erotic, and even perverse experiences that will help us create a truly queer notion of ethics and aesthetics, one that recasts sociality and sexuality, place and finitude in ways suggested by the anonymity and itinerant lures of cruising. Shifting our attention from artworks to the work that art does, from subjectivity to becoming, and from static space to taking place, Ricco considers a variety of issues, including the work of Doug Ischar, Tom Burr, and Derek Jarman and the minor architecture of sex clubs, public restrooms, and alleyways.

Love's Learning Place: Truth as Aphrodisiac in Women's Long-Term Relationships


Renate Stendhal - 2002
    

The Darker Fall: Poems


Rick Barot - 2002
    Morton Prize in Poetry."Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly"This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

In Clara's Hands


Joseph Olshan - 2002
    At seventy-five, Clara comes to the emotional rescue of Will Kaplan, a character from Olshan's previous novel Nightswimmer, now a cartographer based in Vermont. Aware that to the outside world 'an elderly black woman and a young white man didn't add up', Clara knows that she and Will are tied into a bond as strong as any blood family's, and Will now needs his old nanny's wit and heart more than ever. Interweaving the narrative threads with spellbinding agility, Olshan shows how it's possible to choose for yourself a family other than the one you were born into, and how past personal failings, with love, may be forged into redemptive new beginnings.

Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography


Jerry Rosco - 2002
    As a literary figure, Wescott also became a symbol of his times. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1901, he associated as a young writer with Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris and subsequently was a central figure in New York’s artistic and gay communities. Though he couldn’t finish a novel after the age of forty-five, he was just as famous as an arts impresario, as a diarist, and for the company he kept: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Joseph Campbell, and scores of other luminaries.     In Glenway Wescott Personally, Jerry Rosco chronicles Wescott’s long and colorful life, his early fame and later struggles to write, the uniquely privileged and sometimes tortured world of artistic creation. Rosco sensitively and insightfully reveals Wescott’s private life, his long relationship with Museum of Modern Art curator Monroe Wheeler, his work with sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that led to breakthrough findings on homosexuality, and his kinship with such influential artists as Jean Cocteau, George Platt-Lynes, and Paul Cadmus.

Hero of Flight 93: Mark Bingham


Jon Barrett - 2002
    Their heroism and sacrifice inspired us all. One of these passengers was Mark Bingham, a living-out-loud, gregarious, gay man. But who was Mark Bingham really? What was it about this man that caused his friends to unanimously say that he must have been one of the men who rushed the hijackers? The Advocate’s senior news editor Jon Barrett interviewed those who knew him best, starting with the mother who instilled in him the belief that he could be anything, to the friends, lovers, business associates, and rugby teammates who complete the picture of a man determined to never take second place. This is his story, told to remind all Americans that heroism knows no sexuality.Jon Barrett is the senior news editor for The Advocate magazine, and the author of the cover story on Mark Bingham in The Advocate upon which this book is based. He lives in Los Angeles.

Sexuality, Obscenity, and Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India


Charu Gupta - 2002
    The book offers an exceptionally nuanced account of Hindu gender politics.

Jim: A Life With AIDS


June Callwood - 2002
    

Intimacies


Tee A. Corinne - 2002
    Speaking about her work, Corinne says, If I became a 'visible and accessible lesbian artist' it is because of the images made to fill a perceived void, to fill these blank spaces where desire and questioning and transcendence converged, where my intellectual longings and seven years of university art training responded to the social and cultural forces set in motion in the 1960s.