Best of
Queer

2007

Backwards to Oregon


Jae - 2007
    She accepted that she would spend her life alone when she chose to live her life disguised as a man. After working in a brothel for three years, Nora Macauley has lost all illusions about love. She no longer hopes for a man who will sweep her off her feet and take her away to begin a new, respectable life. But now they find themselves married and on the way to Oregon in a covered wagon, with two thousand miles ahead of them.

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity


Julia Serano - 2007
    Serano shares her experiences and observations—both pre- and post-transition—to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole.Serano's well-honed arguments stem from her ability to bridge the gap between the often-disparate biological and social perspectives on gender. She exposes how deep-rooted the cultural belief is that femininity is frivolous, weak, and passive, and how this “feminine” weakness exists only to attract and appease male desire.In addition to debunking popular misconceptions about transsexuality, Serano makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activist must work to embrace and empower femininity—in all of its wondrous forms.

And Playing the Role of Herself


K.E. Lane - 2007
    Her sometimes-costar Robyn Ward is magnetic, glamorous, and devastatingly beautiful, the quintessential A-List celebrity on the fast-track to super-stardom. When the two meet on the set of 9th Precinct, Caid is instantly infatuated but settles for friendship, positive that Robyn is both unavailable and uninterested. Soon Caid sees that all is not as it appears, but can she take a chance and risk her heart when the outcome is so uncertain?

Call Me By Your Name


André Aciman - 2007
    Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them. What grows from the depths of their spirits is a romance of scarcely six weeks' duration and an experience that marks them for a lifetime. For what the two discover on the Riviera and during a sultry evening in Rome is the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. The psychological maneuvers that accompany attraction have seldom been more shrewdly captured than in André Aciman's frank, unsentimental, heartrending elegy to human passion. Call Me by Your Name is clear-eyed, bare-knuckled, and ultimately unforgettable.

Choices


Skyy - 2007
    Four friends; Lena, who is engaged to a basketball superstar, Denise, who is hoping that she will be the first in her family to graduate college, Freedom, who lives up to her name and Carmen, who needs to work on her self-esteem--lean on each other during their days at Freedom University.

Our World


Mary Oliver - 2007
    Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005, was Oliver's partner for many years, a pioneer gallery owner and photographer. Our World weaves forty-nine of Cook's photographs and selections from her journals with Oliver's extended writings, both reminiscence and reflection, in prose and in poetry. The result is an intimate revelation of their lives and art.Within the art world, Molly Malone Cook made her reputation as an early advocate of photography as an art form; she was a champion of the work of now-famous photographers, including Edward Steichen, Eugene Atget, Berenice Abbott, Minor White, Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, and W. Eugene Smith. There are famous faces here as well, captured by Cook's camera, among them Walker Evans, Robert Motherwell and Henry Geldzahler, the first curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum.Cook and Oliver also lived among writers, and Cook caught several on film, including Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer. Other artists and dozens of wonderful characters and scenes are also immortalized by Cook's unfailing eye for telling detail and composition. Oliver writes of Cook's work, the people they knew, and the places they visited or lived. The poet's beautiful text captures not only the vivifying qualities of her partner's work, but the texture of their shared world. In Mary Oliver's words, Cook taught the beginner poet "to see, with searching attention and compassion."

Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships


Tristan Taormino - 2007
    Drawing on in-depth interviews with over a hundred women and men, Opening Up explores the real-life benefits and challenges of all styles of open relationships -- from partnered non-monogamy to solo polyamory. With her refreshingly down-to-earth style and sharp wit, Taormino offers solutions for making an open relationship work, including tips on dealing with jealousy, negotiating boundaries, finding community, parenting and time management. Opening Up will change the way you think about intimacy.

Without Warning


K.G. MacGregor - 2007
    Two strangers, trapped in a collapsed shopping mall, find each other amid the rubble and join forces to escape. Hampered by injury and darkness, they dig and claw their way through one crumbled store after another, emerging long after most have given up hope for survivors.The ordeal leaves both women shaken, but their shared triumph sets them on a life-changing course together, igniting a connection like neither has ever known.Anna Kaklis—whose perfectly planned life never included falling in love with another woman—is thrown for a loop, but she doesn’t doubt her heart.Lily Stewart—abandoned too many times by people she trusted—won’t let herself believe that Anna’s love will endure.Without Warning is the story of their courageous journey through adversity, and their promise of steadfast love.

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times


Jasbir K. Puar - 2007
    Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

It's Too Late to Say I'm Sorry


Joey Comeau - 2007
    The Stories Patricia (The Coast) The Math Building 1e4 (Eyeshot) This is Math Historians and Degenerates (Strange Horizons) The Machine (Strange Horizons) Red Delicious XXX (The Coast) One Foot Underwater The Birthday Girl The Underwear Model Giraffes and Everything Where are You Off to Now? (Terminus 1525) Cry Me a River

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History


Heather Love - 2007
    It makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward.

Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution


Alix Olson - 2007
    This demanding oral poetry of the early 21st century has defined a vanguard of lithely muscled voices, women who think and act decisively to create their distinctive and desperately earned realities. The combination of the eminent slam movement and the upsurge of bold underground feminism has created a unique pool of women who verbally challenge society on all fronts. Editor Alix Olson (internationally touring spoken word artist-activist) brought together a variety of astounding spoken word artists for Word Warriors.Included in this collection are Patricia Smith and Eileen Myles, two of our most formidable spoken-word foremothers, Tony-award winners Sarah Jones, Suheir Hammad and Staceyann Chin, recording artists Bitch and Lynn Breedlove from the dyke-punk band Tribe 8, award-winning writer Michelle Tea, and many more. These women join other amazing artists from many different backgrounds to create Word Warriors, a powerful and comprehensive collection of work from the best and brightest female spoken word artists today.

Polaroids


Robert Mapplethorpe - 2007
    Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white Polaroid photographs from the 1970s--a medium in which he established the style that would bring him international acclaim--are brought together in this exquisite volume for the first time.Prestel Publications

The Complete Strangers In Paradise, Volume 3, Part 8


Terry Moore - 2007
    When her famous brother-in-law falls prey to a crazed fan's bullet, Francine is forced to confront her own doubts and fears about the life she has chosen. In a bold move, she leaves her cheating husband and tries to reconnect with the only person she ever truly loved, Katchoo. But things have changed since Francine left, Katchoo has changed, and it soon becomes apparent that if Francine wants her friend back she's going to have to fight for her.

Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006


Carl Phillips - 2007
    Hailed from the beginning of his career for a poetry provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft, Phillips has in the course of eight critically acclaimed collections generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.Phillips's sensibility as he questions morality, psychology, and our notions of responsibility is as startlingly original as the poems themselves, whose exacting standards for the line's flexibility and whose argument for a versatile, more muscular syntax bring to American poetry "something not unlike a new musical scale" (The Miami Herald). Quiver of Arrows is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.

The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion


Eli Clare - 2007
    Embracing contradiction and repetition, this work maps itself around embodied experiences of disability, race, gender transgression and transition, family violence, and sexuality.

Kissing Dead Girls


Daphne Gottlieb - 2007
    Fusing pornography and postfeminist theory, transcript and tell-all, these playful, penetrating poems and stories reach off the page in search of what it is to be known, both to the masses and to the "Other."

Newcomer Can't Swim


Renee Gladman - 2007
    Fiction. Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Studies. In NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM, Renee Gladman invites us to accompany her protagonists on their treks into, through and across variegated, mysterious soulspaces and dreamscapes, troubling the surfaces and boundaries of story and genre. Her figures touch down, chapter by chapter, onto beaches, city streets, and unmarked territories, in which echoes, shadows, and parallel presences delineate borders of the cannily strange. As the narrative flickers before us, gathering into an enthralling flow, we find ourselves recording with unmeasured exhilaration that Gladman once again is mapping one of the most original and vital courses in contemporary literature.

Pierre et Gilles: Double Je, 1976-2007


Pierre et Gilles - 2007
    26 June - 23 September 2007Kings of cult and pop Pierre et Gilles create dreamy portraits that transport their subjects--as well as the viewers--into an alternate world where camp, pop, burlesque, religion, and eroticism mingle in perfect harmony. Creating the sets themselves, and with Pierre as photographer and Gilles as painter/elaborator, they create one-of-a-kind artworks of an unmistakably original style. A host of stars has passed before their lens, such as Iggy Pop, Madonna, Marc Almond, Nina Hagen, Catherine Deneuve, Laetitia Casta, Marilyn Manson, Mireille Mathieu... though many of their portraits also feature unknowns. Marking the 30th anniversary of their collaboration, the Jeu de Paume in Paris is hosting a retrospective of their work from June to September, 2007. Much more than just an exhibition catalog, this book brings together all of the 130 works included in the exhibition as well as an additional 170 pieces focusing on the past ten years. Also included is a tribute text by the artist Jeff Koons. What better way to (re)discover the work of Pierre et Gilles?

Tales from the Woeful Platypus


Caitlín R. Kiernan - 2007
    Kiernan surprised her readers with, Frog Toes and Tentacles, a small-form hardcover of ?darkly weird erotica.? Now Kiernan follows that sold-out volume with a second collection of her unique brand of erotica, Tales from the Woeful Platypus. Like its predecessor, this book will be illustrated by acclaimed artist Vince Locke (The Sandman, Batman, A History of Violence, Deadworld, etc.), and also like the first volume, it is unlikely ever to be reprinted.

Since I Moved In


Trace Peterson - 2007
    In Tim Peterson's first collection of poems, SINCE I MOVED IN, ..".desire is the restless remainder of body subtracted from voice, or maybe it's voice from body. Whitmanian in its quick and tender grandeur, its penchant for direct address, and its abstract kinkiness and longing, SINCE I MOVED IN moves exorably from the transgendering (non) performance of 'Trans Figures' to the startled, suspended chiliasm of 'Spontaneous Generation, ' where at last the fetish body, dispersed into landscape, becomes simply an ambient mode of seeing, or saying, in a post-everything ecology where voice broods over the face of the waters, becoming the (prosthetic) body of the world"--Tenney Nathanson

Dangerous Space


Kelley Eskridge - 2007
    The opening story, "Strings," takes us to a world that tightly controls musical expression and values faithfulness to the canon above all else. By contrast, in the title novella, "Dangerous Space," we see the full power of music unleashed to sexually enthralling as well as risky effect; original to the volume, this tale features Mars, the intriguing narrator of "And Salome Danced" (short-listed for the Tiptree Award), on tour with an indie rock band on the verge of breaking out. Closing the volume, the moving, edgy "Alien Jane" (a finalist for the Nebula Award and adapted for the SciFi Channel's Welcome to Paradox series) delves into the importance of pain for the human organism and finds hope in the most unlikely of places.

The Body is No Machine


Jennifer Perrine - 2007
    Poetry.

Banshee's Honor


Shaylynn Rose - 2007
    Just when all her dreams were about to be fulfilled, treachery stole everything that she loved. Now, landless, loveless and broken near to death, all she clings to is the hope of regaining her honor. Struggling to heal, Azhani discovers that an ancient evil threatens the land she once called home. Will she abandon her quest for honor to save Y'Dan, or will she turn her back on the people who cast her out?

Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word)


Thea Hillman - 2007
    Intersex, too, is gorgeously written."—Women's Review of Books"It's utterly impossible to not be spellbound by performer-activist Thea Hillman, in person or in print ... A must-read."—Curve“There’s nothing else in print like this amazing and courageous book.”—Patrick Califia, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism“An important and wonderfully disarming book. Poetic, political, and deeply personal.”—Beth Lisick, author of Helping Me Help MyselfIntersex (For Lack of a Better Word) chronicles one person’s search for self in a world obsessed with normal. What is “intersex”? According to the Intersex Society of North America, the word describes someone born with sex chromosomes, genitalia, or an internal reproductive system that are neither clearly male nor clearly female. In first-person prose as intimate as a diary, Thea Hillman redefines memoir in a series of compelling stories that take a no-holds-barred look at sex, gender, family, and community. Whether she’s pondering quirky family tendencies (“Drag”), reflecting on “queerness” (“Another”), or recounting scintillating adventures in San Francisco’s sex clubs, Hillman’s brave and fierce vision for cultural and societal change shines through.According to a special report by the Traditional Values Coalition entitled “Homosexual Urban Myth,” award-winning writer Thea Hillman is a radical who conducts erotic readings to promote the “homosexual revolution.” Thea offers presentations about sex and gender and performs her work at colleges and festivals around the country. She lives in Oakland, California.

The Complete Brandstetter


Joseph Hansen - 2007
    Contents:1--Fadeout2--Death claims3--Troublemaker4--The man everybody was afraid of5--Skinflick6--Gravedigger7--Nightwork8--The little dog laughed9--Early graves10--Obedience11--The boy who was buried this morning12--A country of old men.

Gaylord Phoenix


Edie Fake - 2007
    Edie Fake confronts the reader with violent and unexpected manifestations of sexual connection and romantic possession as the Gaylord Phoenix searches for his lost love, his origins and his place in the world.

Scars Tell Stories: A Queer and Trans (Dis)ability Zine


Colin Kennedy Donovan - 2007
    Through poetry, art, and essays, this zine tells our stories—funny, sexy, and complex—as a radical act of resistance, and prioritizes the work of trans people and people of color working for radical social change.Featuring artwork, poetry, and essays by Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Sarain Cuthand, Louis Esmé Cruz, Sharon Deevey, Loree Erickson, romham padraig gallacher, Raven Gildea, emi k, Dani Frances Montgomery, Peggy Munson , billie rain, Tsi-ge'-yu Sharp, Captain Snowden, suki valentine, and Sharon Wachsler.

The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho


Eloise Klein Healy - 2007
    The poems attempt a meeting between a contemporary woman poet and one from antiquity, both of them adrift in time. What can a lesbian poet know of her supposed progenitor? If Sappho is only fragments, is not a lesbian tradition in poetry the same, or does it only feel that way? The Islands Project investigates these questions and deals, at the same time, with the death of the poet's mother.

Selected Essays


Gore Vidal - 2007
    No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality & provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay. This long-needed volume comprises some 24 of his forays into criticism, reviewing, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, &, occasionally, unfettered score settling. Among them are such classics as The Top Ten Best-Sellers, Dawn Powell: The American Writer; Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy, Pornography, & The Second American Revolution. Edited & introduced by Gore Vidal's literary executor, Jay Parini, it will stand as one of the most enjoyable & durable works from the hand & mind of this vastly accomplished & entertaining immortal of American literature.

Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems


Sheryl St. Germain - 2007
    Germain sings of her New Orleans upbringing, the Cajun/Creole culture, and the struggles of being a woman in a decaying culture.

After the Fall: Poems Old and New


Edward Field - 2007
    After the Fall refers to the twin towers, and is Field’s ode to the events that transpired thereafter--the war in Iraq andthe attack on civil rights in America--as well as his own personal struggles over the indignities of aging.

And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life


Nicola Griffith - 2007
    This is no ordinary memoir. Nicola is candid and unflinching in telling the ups and downs of her youth. Drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll are just the beginning. To commemorate this extraordinary work, Payseur & Schmidt is issuing a boxed set that includes the memoir bound in five volumes (including diary entries, photographs, poetry, and early fiction). The box also contains a facsimile of Nicola's first book (created age 4), a CD of songs by Nicola and her early-'80s punk band, Janes Plane, as well as three scratch-n-sniff cards, a fold-out poster, a letterpressed preface by Dorothy Allison, and a numbered signing sheet. This is a limited edition of 450 signed and numbered box sets.(Payseur & Schmidt)ASIN: B000TA5EKM

Skin Lane


Neil Bartlett - 2007
    F's working life on London's Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision and routine. So when he starts to have frightening, recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them. The images that appear in his dream are disturbing, Mr. F can't for the life of him think where they have come from. After all, he's a perfectly ordinary middle-aged man. As London's crooked backstreets begin to swelter in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F's nightmare becomes an obsession. A chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the torments of his sweat-drenched nights lead him and the reader deeper into a terrifying labyrinth of rage, desire and shame. Part fairy-tale, part compelling evocation of a now-lost London, Neil Bartlett's long-awaited third novel is his fiercest piece of writing yet: cruel, erotic, and tender.

The Kind of Girl I Am


Julia Watts - 2007
    This last venture leads Vestal to find her true profession—as the madam of the most notorious brothel in Knoxville, Tennessee.Spanning decades, The Kind of Girl I Am humorously explores the changing sexual and social mores of the South and depicts an extraordinary woman's experiences of triumph, heartbreak, friendship and forbidden love.

The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire


Greg Thomas - 2007
    Greg Thomas interrogates a system that represents race, gender, sexuality, and class in certain systematic and oppressive ways. By connecting sex and eroticism to geopolitics both politically and epistemologically, he examines the logic, operations, and politics of sexuality in the West. The book focuses on the centrality of race, class, and empire to Western realities of "gender and sexuality" and to problematic Western attempts to theorize gender and sexuality (or embodiment). Addressing a wide range of intellectual disciplines, it holds out the hope for an analysis freed from the domination of white, Western terms of reference.

The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940


Julian B. Carter - 2007
    Gilded Age elites defined white civilization as the triumphant achievement of exceptional people hewing to a relational ethic of strict self-discipline for the common good. During the early twentieth century, that racial and relational ideal was reconceived in more inclusive terms as “normality,” something toward which everyone should strive. The appearance of inclusiveness helped make “normality” appear consistent with the self-image of a racially diverse republic; nonetheless, “normality” was gauged largely in terms of adherence to erotic and emotional conventions that gained cultural significance through their association with arguments for the legitimacy of white political and social dominance. At the same time, the affectionate, reproductive heterosexuality of “normal” married couples became increasingly central to legitimate membership in the nation.Carter builds his intricate argument from detailed readings of an array of popular texts, focusing on how sex education for children and marital advice for adults provided significant venues for the dissemination of the new ideal of normality. He concludes that because its overt concerns were love, marriage, and babies, normality discourse facilitated white evasiveness about racial inequality. The ostensible focus of “normality” on matters of sexuality provided a superficially race-neutral conceptual structure that whites could and did use to evade engagement with the unequal relations of power that continue to shape American life today.

Sexuality and the Stories of Indigenous People


Jessica Hutchings - 2007
    Gradually, as we uncover the truth about what our ancestors believed and peel back the veneer of colonization, it is clear that the sexuality of indigenous peoples is vastly different from the dominant Western paradigm that has been applied around the world.The stories in this book testify to the great diversity of Maori and indigenous sexuality today and provide inspiration for people who want to know more about sexuality and its role in our lives. The people in this book have overcome huge challenges related to their sexuality.These stories will inspire and encourage you, and parts of them will sadden you. The truth that shines through in these stories, though, will confirm that sexuality continues to play a key role in the lives of indigenous people in the twenty-first century. As we decide for ourselves what sexuality means to us, we take control and determine the future for generations to come.

Man to Man: A History of Gay Photography


Pierre Borhan - 2007
    This comprehensive study of homoeroticism and male homosexuality surveys the homoerotic urge in fashion photography, including layouts in Vogue and reprints rare and unpublished work by such photographers as Horst, Mapplethorpe, and Herb Ritts.

A Bridge Dead In The Water (Earthworks S.)


James Thomas Stevens - 2007
    Three long poems focus on mapping, post-colonial emergencies and propoganda, while the short poems are personal experiences in China and Native America.

Punk and Zen


J.D. Glass - 2007
    That? She saves for music, whether she's playing guitar or DJing...and everyone dances to her tune. But when the dreams Nina works so hard for start to fall into place, the past she thinks she's left behind returns. As she opens herself - to everything - Nina learns that being punk alone is not enough. She needs to love and be loved, to let go - without losing herself. Angst, sex, love, rock - 'Nuff said.

The Feminist Philosophy Reader


Alison Bailey - 2007
    Featuring perspectives from across the philosophical spectrum, this text displays the range, depth and diversity of feminist writings on fundamental issues, from the early second wave to the present.

Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film


Jim Stacy - 2007
    Each essay explores the short story, the film, and the sociocultural phenomenon that followed the release of the motion picture in December 2005. This anthology includes selections from traditional perspectives and from postmodern angles, including women's studies, gender studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and American studies. Many of the essays focus primarily on the film, its critical reception, its stars, its director, its soundtrack, and its cultural implications.

Crossdressing


Rachel Kramer BusselRyan Field - 2007
    Drag queens get dolled up for a night on the town, a dyke packs a special surprise beneath her dress, and a devoted husband puts his dress-up skills to the ultimate test in this seductive new collection.

Mutha Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture


L.H. Stallings - 2007
     L. H. Stallings offers distinct close readings of understudied African American women’s texts through a critical engagement with folklore and queer theory. To date, most studies on the trickster figure have rarely reflected the boldness and daring of the figure itself. Emblematic of change and transgression, the trickster has inappropriately become the methodological tool for conservative cultural studies analysis. Mutha’ is Half a Word strives to break that convention. This book provides a much-needed analysis of trickster tradition in regard to gender, sexuality, and Black female sexual desire. It is the only study to focus specifically on trickster figures and African American female culture. In addition, it contributes to conversations regarding the cultural representation of Black female desire in ways that are not strategically invested in heteronormative binaries of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual. The study is distinctly different because it explores folklore, vernacular, and trickster strategies of queerness alongside theories of queer studies to create new readings of desire in literary texts, hip-hop and neo-soul music, and comedic performances by Black females.

Unicorn Jelly


Jennifer Diane Reitz - 2007
    A philosophical and metaphorical science fiction story with a definite beginning and ending, originally told as a web comic.

Gays and Grays: The Story of the Gay Community at Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Parish


Donal Godfrey - 2007
    Most Holy Redeemer Parish in San Francisco is in the center of the world's first gay neighborhood, The Castro. This parish was the center of the hostility to the arriving gay population in the 1970s; but paradoxically was itself transformed into a welcoming parish. The old time parishioners, "the gray," bonded with the new comers, "the gay, " particularly in a joint compassionate response to the crisis of AIDS. A charismatic pastor, FR Tony McGuire also played a key role in the transformation of this interesting parish. Most Holy Redeemer was changed from a dying parish to a vital place where gay and straight people together created something new. Father Donal Godfrey shows how this parish became prophetic and compassionate, through conflict and compromise at times; despite opposition from many sources, including the institutionalized homophobia of the church and society. Rather than becoming embittered, the parish opened up to be a place of healing and indeed sanctuary for many. This book tells this fascinating story and why it is significant beyond the scope of San Francisco. Most Holy Redeemer is a place which has remained within the institution while at the same time challenging it with grace and humor. This accessible and moving book is appropriate for all levels of students of congregational studies, Sociology of Religion, Gay or Queer Studies and Religion courses.

Gay Christian 101: Spiritual Self-Defense for Gay Christians - What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality


Rick Brentlinger - 2007
    GC101 is written in clear, understandable language. Gay Christian 101 - Spiritual Self-Defense For Gay Christians, defends gay Christians and gay relationships which are within the Biblical moral framework, committed, faithful, noncultic. Reasonable, scriptural, thoughtful, this book offers cultural, doctrinal, historical, linguistic and religious proof that the same sex relationships condemned in the Bible are linked to ancient fertility goddess worship. Strongly Christian and evangelical, Brentlinger honors God and the written scriptures of truth in this powerful book.

Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation


Ann Brenner - 2007
    Suspended Animation, the first monograph on the artist and the catalogue of her first U.S. museum exhibition, introduces Benning's paintings and Play Pause, an ambitious new two-channel video installation. Benning's videos, which she began to make in the late 1980s with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000 -toy camera, - are known for their explorations of loneliness, alienation, gender ambiguity and her own developing lesbian identity. Benning's recent paintings--flat, illustrative, exuberant--are playful, imaginary portraits that address similar themes. Play Pause, created entirely from hundreds of Benning's drawings, offers a rhythmic and affectionate view of contemporary life in a city's streets, parks and gay bars. Includes written contributions by Eileen Myles and Aleksandar Hemon, and a conversation with the New York painter Amy Sillman.

Advertisement for a Human Being


Shira Erlichman - 2007
    

Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art


Maura Reilly - 2007
    Contributions by a multinational team of authors focus particular attention on socio-cultural, racial and gender identities.

Pink Harvest: Tales Of Happenstance


Toni Mirosevich - 2007
    A chance meeting with a homeless stranger, the feel of a nickel in the palm of her hand, a conversation about politics while watching a game show -- all are seemingly unremarkable events, but each has the possibility of opening for us a new view, an insight, and the experience of wonder. Through happenstance -- the chance or accidental happening -- we see in unrelated, unexpected events profound connections that form a net of meaning.

Los otros cuerpos : antología de temática gay, lésbica y queer desde Puerto Rico y su diáspora


Luis Negrón - 2007
    Puerto Rican literature -- 20th century Puerto Rican literature -- 21st century Puerto Rican literature -- History and criticism -- Themes, motives Homosexuality Homosexuality in literature Homosexuality and literature -- Puerto Rico

Best Lesbian Love Stories: Summer Flings


Simone Thorne - 2007
    This collection of the best love stories invites readers to Oceanside properties, and sweet, moonlit walks on the beach.

About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir


John Rechy - 2007
    Now, for the first time, he writes about his life, in a volume that is a testament to the power of pride and self-acceptance. Rechy was raised Mexican-American in Texas, at a time when Latino children were routinely discriminated against. As he grew older—and as his fascination with a notorious kept woman from his childhood deepened—Rechy became aware that his differences lay not just in his heritage but in his sexuality. While he performed the roles others wanted for him, he never allowed them to define him—whether it was the authoritarians in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, the bigoted relatives of his Anglo college classmates, or the men and women who wanted him to be something he was not. About My Life and the Kept Woman is as much a portrait of intolerance as of an individual who defied it to forge his own path.