and wakes up the next morning to find TJ, a lanky, dreadlocked vagrant, frying eggs and singing Paul Simon in his kitchen.TJ claims that the two have made a drunken pact to drive all the way from Berkeley to Providence. As it happens, Amal promised his sister he'd be there for her graduation from Brown University. And TJ, well... TJ has his own reasons.The agreement is simple: Amal does the driving; TJ pays the way - but a 3500 mile journey leaves plenty of time for things to get complicated.----------On the official website, click the "First Page" road sign (graphic at the top of the page) to start reading from the beginning. Or just click here to go directly to it.

    Winner of the 2009 Gil Ott Book Award, this expanded edition of The Book of Frank features additional "Frank" poems and an essay by Eileen Myles.Praised by poet Anne Waldman as a "voyeuresque surreal portrait," The Book of Frank is also, in the words of “candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape."

    -- from "Returning to Reims"After his father dies, Didier Eribon returns to his hometown of Reims and rediscovers the working-class world he had left behind thirty years earlier. For years, Eribon had thought of his father largely in terms of the latter's intolerable homophobia. Yet his father's death provokes new reflection on Eribon's part about how multiple processes of domination intersect in a given life and in a given culture. Eribon sets out to investigate his past, the history of his family, and the trajectory of his own life. His story weaves together a set of remarkable reflections on the class system in France, on the role of the educational system in class identity, on the way both class and sexual identities are formed, and on the recent history of French politics, including the shifting voting patterns of the working classes -- reflected by Eribon's own family, which changed its allegiance from the Communist Party to the National Front."Returning to Reims" is a remarkable book of sociological inquiry and critical theory, of interest to anyone concerned with the direction of leftist politics in the contemporary world, and to anyone who has ever experienced how sexual identity can clash with other parts of one's identity. A huge success in France since its initial publication in 2009, "Returning to Reims" received enthusiastic reviews in "Le Monde, Liberation, L'Express, Les Inrockuptibles," and elsewhere.

    Staceyann's mother did not want her, and her father was not present. No one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive.It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica. There, she faced far greater troubles than absent parents. So, armed with a fierce determination and uncommon intelligence, she discovered a way to break out of this harshly unforgiving world.Staceyann Chin, acclaimed and iconic performance artist, now brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a brave, lyrical, and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica. She plumbs tender and unsettling memories as she writes about drifting from one home to the next, coming out as a lesbian, and finding the man she believes to be her father and ultimately her voice. Hers is an unforgettable story told with grace, humor, and courage.

    It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

    All 107 issues of the Strangers In Paradise series are here, including the spin-offs Molly & Poo, Princess Warrior, When World's Collide, and David's Story.

    As the author of Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa played a major role in shaping contemporary Chicano/a and lesbian/queer theories and identities. As an editor of three anthologies, including the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, she played an equally vital role in developing an inclusionary, multicultural feminist movement. A versatile author, Anzaldúa published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, and children’s books. Her work, which has been included in more than 100 anthologies to date, has helped to transform academic fields including American, Chicano/a, composition, ethnic, literary, and women’s studies.This reader—which provides a representative sample of the poetry, prose, fiction, and experimental autobiographical writing that Anzaldúa produced during her thirty-year career—demonstrates the breadth and philosophical depth of her work. While the reader contains much of Anzaldúa’s published writing (including several pieces now out of print), more than half the material has never before been published. This newly available work offers fresh insights into crucial aspects of Anzaldúa’s life and career, including her upbringing, education, teaching experiences, writing practice and aesthetics, lifelong health struggles, and interest in visual art, as well as her theories of disability, multiculturalism, pedagogy, and spiritual activism. The pieces are arranged chronologically; each one is preceded by a brief introduction. The collection includes a glossary of Anzaldúa’s key terms and concepts, a timeline of her life, primary and secondary bibliographies, and a detailed index.

    and a small boy very worried.Lydia Weekes is distraught at the break-up of her marriage. When her young son, Charlie, makes friends with the local doctor, Jean Markham, her life is turned upside down.Charlie tells his secrets to no one but the bees, but even he can't keep his mother's friendship to himself. The locals don't like things done differently. As Lydia and the doctor become closer, the rumours start to fly and threaten to shatter Charlie's world.

    A. Powell since his remarkable trilogy of Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award so many of the best days seem minor forms of nearness that easily falls among the dropseed: a rind, a left-behind —from "no picnic" In these brilliant new poems from one of contemporary poetry's most intriguing, singular voices, D. A. Powell strikes out for the farther territories of love and comes back from those fields with loss, with flowers faded, "blossom blast and dieback." Chronic describes the flutter and cruelty of erotic encounter, temptation, and bitter heartsickness, but with Powell's deep lyric beauty and his own brand of dark wit.

    Ray McKenna returns from the war in Iraq to find that she had attained unwanted celebrity status back home. As the only surviving American soldier of a well-publicized hostage crisis, she is the center of attention at a time when all she wants is solitude. Struggling to overcome the fear and anxiety that plague her, she relies on her psychiatric therapy dog Jagger to help her through the vicious symptoms of PTSD. Veterinarian Dr. Carly Warner hasn't yet figured out how to open her heart to the possibility of falling in love again after the death of her longtime partner. When Ray McKenna walks into the North Coast Veterinary Clinic with Jagger, she and Carly begin a friendship that takes them both by surprise. Brought together by their shared love of dogs, Ray and Carly discover that they are both capable of moving forward, if only they are brave enough to try

    The introduction to the book is a 30-page analysis of the general themes presented in the stories.

    However, instead of softening her words, she buttresses them with music from songwriters Kim Taylor and Chris Pureka, and music inspired by Devotchka.

    Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http: //brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

    Filled with humor and pathos, with the nearness and danger of life on the edge, these stories chart the anxious inner moments of four related characters.Johnson introduces the teenage Delia in the midst of working up the nerve for a first kiss; and Dooley, who drives a forklift for a living but dreams of a career in music that's been put on ice after a tragic accident. Pudge, an alcoholic who survived a cruel childhood with an abusive father, now hides from his own son, Luis; and Luis, raised without a father, concocts a suitable end for his mother's horrible boyfriend. Determined to save both Pudge and his son from an unhappy end, Johnson's cast of characters huddles together at the local laundromat, scheming.Johnson's stories are sweet, messy, and heart-rending. As we watch her characters through her wide-angle lens, she makes us believe that life is worth living even when the circumstances say otherwise. Irresistible and perfect, More of This World or Maybe Another introduces an original voice in American fiction.

    These bizarre, multifaceted short pieces are an homage bursting with love, oddball white trash, and twisted sincerity.Using a mélange of breathless energy and flamboyant desire, Conrad ensnares his reader from the first vignette, leaving us no choice but to doggedly follow him around the backwaters of Memphis. Conrad blurs the distinction between real and fictional experience to create a transcendental portrait of the legendary Elvis—the man who changed music and America forever. Through sources as disparate as graffiti, talk-show interviews, phone messages, and poetry, Conrad (whose unfettered energy is about as reality-based as an evening at Graceland) constructs a semimystical collage both celebrating and laughing with the cult of Elvis.Get ready for a surreal tour of a celebrity-obsessed, picaresque America from one of its most unusual guides. Conrad delights in turning his fantasies into our reality, making this frenetic fictionalized experience “as real as if it were real.”

    Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the city--wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit--seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing about art and culture has always been a social gesture. Culled by the poet from twenty years of art writing, the essays in The Importance of Being Iceland make a lush document of her--and our--lives in these contemporary crowds. Framed by Myles's account of her travels in Iceland, these essays posit inbetweenness as the most vital position from which to perceive culture as a whole, and a fluidity in national identity as the best model for writing and thinking about art and culture. The essays include fresh takes on Thoreau's Cape Cod walk, working class speech, James Schulyer and Bjork, queer Russia and Robert Smithson; how-tos on writing an avant-garde poem and driving a battered Japanese car that resembles a menopausal body; and opinions on such widely ranging subjects as filmmaker Sadie Benning, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, and flossing.

    

    Sherry Wolf analyzes different theories about oppression—including those of Marxism, postmodernism, identity politics, and queer theory—and challenges myths about genes, gender, and sexuality.“Sexuality and Socialism is the most intelligent and enlightened discussion on sexuality to come from the Left in a long time. No other work that comes to my mind explains the history of sexuality and sexual repression in the United States as comprehensively and compellingly.”—Ron Jacobs, Dissident Voice“Sherry Wolf: Lesbian, Activist, Communist & Badass-ist... spoke to a pre-National Equality March rally. She. Blew. It. Up.”—Austin Chronicle“Sherry speaks with such eloquence and plain common sense that I can't help but want to know more about her ideas and convictions.”—Derek Washington, “In the LV” radio host, Director of LGBT Outreach, Clark County Democratic Black Caucus“The icons of the new generation of activists are people like Lady Gaga, Dustin Lance Black, Judy Shephard, Lt. Daniel Choi (ret.) and Sherry Wolf (author of Sexuality and Socialism).”—Don Gorton, Join the Impact Board Member“Surprisingly funny, very readable and a fitting tome for a new movement in these troubled times.”—Dave Zirin for Progressive's Best Books of 2009“‘What humans have constructed they can tear down.’ This is the powerful insight of this rare book that is at once politically important, theoretically and historically sophisticated, and clearly written. Sexuality and Socialism is enlivened in its engagement with a number of controversies, including those over the alleged biological determination of homosexuality, the myth of Black homophobia, and the consequences of postmodernist theories for the politics of gay liberation. Above all else, Wolf puts forward a cogent defense of the Marxist tradition—long and wrongly reviled as homophobic in itself—as a way to explain how LGBT oppression arose and what we can do to put it to bed.”—Dana Cloud, University of Texas at AustinSherry Wolf is the associate editor of the International Socialist Review. She was on the executive committee of the National Equality March Oct. 11, 2009 and has written for publications including the Nation, MRZine, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and Socialist Worker and speaks frequently across the country on the struggle for LGBT liberation as well as a wide range of social and economic justice issue.

    Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.Canaday looks at three key arenas of government control--immigration, the military, and welfare--and demonstrates how federal enforcement of sexual norms emerged with the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. She begins at the turn of the twentieth century when the state first stumbled upon evidence of sex and gender nonconformity, revealing how homosexuality was policed indirectly through the exclusion of sexually degenerate immigrants and other regulatory measures aimed at combating poverty, violence, and vice. Canaday argues that the state's gradual awareness of homosexuality intensified during the later New Deal and through the postwar period as policies were enacted that explicitly used homosexuality to define who could enter the country, serve in the military, and collect state benefits. Midcentury repression was not a sudden response to newly visible gay subcultures, Canaday demonstrates, but the culmination of a much longer and slower process of state-building during which the state came to know and to care about homosexuality across many decades.Social, political, and legal history at their most compelling, The Straight State explores how regulation transformed the regulated: in drawing boundaries around national citizenship, the state helped to define the very meaning of homosexuality in America.

    But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more; even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion.Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP's provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement's public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UP’s origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.

    Battered but never beaten, this narrator finds salvation in ecstatic communion with the gods of jazz and especially boxing: “O Tommy Hearns, O blood come down,” she prays. “Find your way to Hungerford where my/father glowers over me. Show him/how the bag does penance.” In such prayers she finds the strength to survive the home she has to leave and, once she does, the strength to face the fires she finds flaring the country over, from Los Angeles to Laramie. Apocalyptic Swing is a work of unbelievable force, a devastating and glorious testimony about America—its lore, disappointments, and promise.

    Along the way there are many vignettes about sex, farts, the queer community, the Brits, vibrators and figuring out sexual identity. The first DAR volume, collecting re-toned strips from 2006-2009 of the award-winning weekly webcomic —PLUS bonus, behind-the-scenes material!DAR Volume 1 (A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary)ASIN: 0982343701Title: DAR Volume 1Binding: PaperbackPublication date: 2009

    Told through a kaleidoscopic braid of stories, letters, and riddles, this stunning debut collection follows Xiaomei's life as she grows into her sexuality and searches for a way to deal with her complicated histories.At times, meditation, celebration, investigation, and elegy, this is a book about personal transformation within the context of a family forced to make do—a Makeshift Family—and how one might create new language to name the New World.

    "Of the many ways of knowing the world, Stacie Cassarino in her elegant and poignant first book of poems, ZERO AT THE BONE, reminds us of the primacy of the senses. She tells us 'our mouths try to get it right' or that the 'mouth of the trees' will swallow us whole, by which she means taste is the most direct authenticator of experience and also the most defenseless because it's instruments of lips and tongue are eager. As a result, her great pre-occupation is with the vulnerability of human relationships, but as the title of the book suggests, Cassarino is fearless in her explorations of the risks. She knows 'you've got to live like everything will hurt you'"--Michael Collier.

    These weekly portions, read aloud in synagogues around the world, have been subject to interpretation and commentary for centuries. Following on this ancient tradition, Torah Queeries brings together some of the world's leading rabbis, scholars, and writers to interpret the Torah through a bent lens. With commentaries on the fifty-four weekly Torah portions and six major Jewish holidays, the concise yet substantive writings collected here open up stimulating new insights and highlight previously neglected perspectives.This incredibly rich collection unites the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight-allied writers, including some of the most central figures in contemporary American Judaism. All bring to the table unique methods of reading and interpreting that allow the Torah to speak to modern concerns of sexuality, identity, gender, and LGBT life. Torah Queeries offers cultural critique, social commentary, and a vision of community transformation, all done through biblical interpretation. Written to engage readers, draw them in, and, at times, provoke them, Torah Queeries examines topics as divergent as the Levitical sexual prohibitions, the experience of the Exodus, the rape of Dinah, the life of Joseph, and the ritual practices of the ancient Israelites. Most powerfully, the commentaries here chart a future of inclusion and social justice deeply rooted in the Jewish textual tradition.A labor of intellectual rigor, social justice, and personal passions, Torah Queeries is an exciting and important contribution to the project of democratizing Jewish communities, and an essential guide to understanding the intersection of queerness and Jewishness.

    But when Kicker falls in love with a teacher, Madelyn Bristow, it radically alters the course of her tranquil life.Together, the lovers flee the brutality of Madelyn's father and the prejudices of upper crust England in search of freedom to live, and love, as they choose. A journey as much of the heart and soul as of the body, it will find the lovers struggling against the expectations of gender, the oppression of class, and even, at times, each other.What they find at the end of their journey is not a new Eden, but a land of hope and opportunity that offers them the chance to live out their most cherished dream - a life together.

    "HYPERGLOSSIA is part anthropology, part anatomy; it is part song and part dissonance. Yet Szymaszek's poetry is always too wily, and too alive with its own pleasures--in short, too wise--to accept any conscription to stable identity. In this 'skirmish with a makeshift tongue, ' the poet keeps us 'attuned to close-calls and eruptions of selfhoods.' Demonstrating that language and identity are 'a temporary site, ' this poetry is a cultural 'mirroror, ' full of sly heresies which abet Szymaszek's poetic subversions so that she is able to 'elude detection and find company.' Indeed, in her company, we can be grateful to find such a 'superior sayerer'"--Elizabeth Robinson. Cover art: "Betty's Revenge" by Laurel Spar

    Here, under the author’s careful control and easygoing charisma, everything seems up for grabs, and almost anything seems possible.”—Time Out New York Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

    with his skin intact. For three years he's lived by his wits and the fall of the cards in the criminal underworld of South America, but jumping planet for Space Station Sidon means walking into a ambush more dangerous than any he's yet faced: A man named Alex Hart wants to play cards with him.Their meeting will fling Joss into a game playing for highest stakes in town: control entire solar system. Chased by a revolutionary leader, agents of a corrupt senator, and an underworld boss known only as The Green Lady, he quickly discovers that in the looking-glass world above the gravity well, survival, like poker, is just another sport. And in this contest, it isn't whether you win or lose, it's how you rig the game.

    She takes the book’s title from Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here, where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between women in the poetry and prose that Tinsley analyzes. She not only recuperates stories of Caribbean women loving women, stories that have been ignored or passed over by postcolonial and queer scholarship until now, she also shows how those erotic relations and their literary evocations form a poetics and politics of decolonization. Tinsley’s interpretations of twentieth-century literature by Dutch-, English-, and French-speaking women from the Caribbean take into account colonialism, migration, labor history, violence, and revolutionary politics. Throughout Thiefing Sugar, Tinsley connects her readings to contemporary matters such as neoimperialism and international LGBT and human-rights discourses. She explains too how the texts that she examines intervene in black feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, particularly when she highlights the cultural limitations of the metaphors that dominate queer theory in North America and Europe, including those of the closet and “coming out.”

    DICK OF THE DEAD is an investigation into American sexual and political consciousness, and at its eccentric heart lies the undead and uneasy 37th president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. Also sifting the evidence (or implicated in its findings) are an experimental subject in a pink tutu, a Finnish gravedigger, an exiled Anglo-Saxon poet, and an industrious gang of fairies. Loden's Nixon is never merely the consummate villain deplored by his critics nor the tragic visionary statesman acclaimed by his apologists. He is nearly a force of nature: throwing off his gravestone in the garden at Yorba Linda, calling up his troops, his family, and even his black and white cocker spaniel, he is ready to smash death by any means necessary, to beat back a sea of pretenders and retake Washington by storm. DICK OF THE DEAD is a trip through the underworld of the American psyche, much funnier and ultimately much more serious than any one book of poems has a right to be.

    Philip Clark is a writer and teacher from the Washington, DC, area.

    From the mores of the Colonial period to the roles that Hollywood, the CIA, and Wall Street played in depicting Cuba as a “police state” for gays and in reinforcing the oppression, this overview provides a backdrop of the past and illustrates the persecution and exploitation originally planted by Spanish colonialism and further cultivated by U.S. capitalism. Details on the gradual transformation follow as the narrative examines the impact of the political and institutional initiatives taken by Fidel Castro and the Cuban leadership to overcome bigotry and prejudice against LGBT people—among them free health care and education, guaranteed jobs and housing, special health care for AIDS victims, and widespread sex education.

    Written in vivid fragments that, like the pieces of a mosaic, come together into a glimmering whole, it shows us both the wild nature of grief and the intimate conversation that is love.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    LGBT Studies. "'I'm portable. My mind travels / the verse and valleys of whole people' says the poet. Correct! Readers of this book will discover their own memories. They will melt in them, amazed, lullabied, dramatized, shocked that they exist. Amy King is a true bard"--Tomaz Salamun.

    If Fiona had her way, she'd spend all of her time sleeping. What's she got worth staying awake for, anyway? Her classmates hate her, her stepmother hates her, even the nuns at her Catholic high school hate her. But when a new girl named Lia joins the class, Fiona starts experiencing some new feelings, and life suddenly becomes interesting enough to stay awake for. Winner of PrismComics.com's 2006 Press Grant, YU+ME Volume 1 collects issues 1-4 of the hit lesbian webcomic.

    Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course of nine critically acclaimed collections, he has 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.These new poems are of a piece with Phillips's previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line. Speak Low 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.Speak Low is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

    His courage changed lives. In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man to be voted into major public office in America. His victory was not just a victory for gay rights; he forged coalitions across the political spectrum. From senior citizens to union workers, Harvey Milk changed the very nature of what it means to be a fighter for human rights and became, before his untimely death in 1978, a hero for all Americans.Part I, "The History," covering Milk's life in New York pre-1973 through his death in San Francisco in 1978, features: * a brief history of Harvey Milk * 90 historical photos * and recollections from Milk's many activist friends in his Castro Street neighborhood, campaigns and eventual victory, Prop 6 protests, the Gay Freedom Day Parade, and Harvey Milk's enduring legacy.Part II, "The Movie," details the making of the film, and includes: * commentary by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who was on the set every day * movie stills, side-by-side with the historical photos they re-create * and behind-the-scene shots of the real historical characters who consulted on or appeared in the film.

    Wishing to bring the vigor and energy of the gay rights and feminist movements, Bruce Boone's writing of the late 1970s is as fresh, funny, witty, and self-reflexive as it was thirty years ago. First published in 1980, Century of Clouds, based on Boone's experiences at the summer meeting of Marxism and Theory Group in St. Cloud, Minnesota, takes up issues of sexuality, political and theoretical identity, religion, and friendship in the characteristically rich and varied writing of the New Narrative movement.

    The hilarious and illuminating poems in his new collection, McPoems, are based on his years working at a particularly well-known fast-food restaurant; they paint a vivid picture of life behind the counter and will resonate with anyone who has ever held a fast-food job. Hold the pickle!Billeh Nickerson's other books include the essay collection Let Me Kiss It Better and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets. He has taught poetry at Kwantlen University College (Vancouver) and Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario).

    Building on a legacy of savage hate crimes—such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd—McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the disabled, the feeble, and the poor are all aspects of the same societal distemper, and that when the civil rights of one group are challenged, so are the rights of all.

    Award-winning authors, spoken-word artists, and new voices come together to challenge conventional ideas of how disability, class, nationality, race, aesthetics, sexual orientation, gender identity and body type intersect with each contributor's concrete notion of femmedom.

    When I was nineteen I discovered the poetry of Judy Grahn, and I was so moved by A Woman Is Talking to Death, it's still one of my favorite poems ever, in the world."--Ani DiFranco"Judy Grahn has done more to create a women's literature than any other writer in the past half century." --Ron Silliman

    In her essays and linguistic-sculptural interventions on what poetry makes possible, Moure reveals why she has placed her bets on poetry as a way of life. In these works, the richness of poetry is laid bare as Moure challenges us to think more deeply about who we are as speakers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world.

    His diaries, kept from the age of eight, make it clear that he was openly homosexual from his late teens, but until the age of 42 he lived and worked in his mother's L.A. rooming house, where his strict ethical code prevented him from fully expressing his fantasies. For 24 years he worked in black and white and never showed a completely naked man, but following his mother's death in 1964 Mizer built a kingdom dedicated to the pleasures of male flesh, and photographed fully nude men in explicit poses and psychedelically saturated colors. In the 1970s and '80s Bob Mizer's compound, centered around the old rooming house, became home to dozens of his young models, who lived outdoors on couches and porch gliders among the chickens, geese, goats and monkeys, Roman statuary, cast off Christmas trees and other sundry props that featured in his increasingly quirky films and photography. Sometimes called the Hugh Hefner of gay publishing for his pioneering magazine (republished in entirety by TASCHEN in 1997), Mizer influenced figures in art and society from David Hockney–who first came to America partly to meet Bob Mizer–to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who modeled for Mizer in 1975. Bob's World: The Life and Boys of AMG's Bob Mizer is the first book to celebrate the full-color, deliriously uninhibited carnival of late-period Mizer. Over 250 photos are accompanied by an oral history by contributing artists David Hockney, Jack Pierson and John Sonsini, photographers David Hurles and Hal Roth, models Ben Sorensen and Andrew Sears, and Wayne Stanley, inheritor of the Mizer estate. The book includes a one-hour DVD of Mizer films spanning 1958–1980, specially edited for this edition.

    With wit and honesty, women writers share nonfiction stories of their teen experiences—both positive and negative—on everything from pop culture to high school principals. The collection is founded on the tradition of Shameless, a Toronto-based magazine, of celebrating smart, sassy, honest, and inclusive writing that reaches out to young female readers who are often ignored by the mainstream: freethinkers, queer youth, young women of color, punk rockers, feminists, intellectuals, artists, and activists.

    From Genesis to Revelation, Pastor R. D. Weekly uncovers the biblical witness. This riveting exposition will bring peace to your soul, and equip you to effectively minister to members of the HBIT community from a spirit of love and truth.

    Twice in our lives we may change from one to another. A change we accept with grace... or resignation. It was our way. ...until one female defied all tradition: Dlane Ashoi-anadi, revolutionary, intentionally childless, runaway. This is not her story. This is mine. I am Thenet Reña-eperu, female-guardian, voice of orthodoxy... and Dlane's first and dearest companion. This is the tale of how we changed each other... and how that changed everything.

    Gay and Lesbian Studies. Memoir. Murder attempts ... missing umbilical cords ... haunted quarries ... fat camps ... these darkly comic stories fill the pages of ALL SCREWED UP. Young, gay, and poor, Steve Fellner attempts to shed his trailer park past and seize a better life for himself. But coming from the sticks offers a certain kind of freedom: no one expects anything from you, so you can be as wild and ridiculous as you want. Fellner's humorous and touching memoir centers on his odd relationship with his mother, a woman who was once a championship trampolinist and is now a champion of the unpredictable.

    Award-winning authors, spoken-word artists, and new voices come together to challenge conventional ideas of how disability, class, nationality, race, aesthetics, sexual orientation, gender identity and body type intersect with each contributor's concrete notion of femmedom.

    For the last decade, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has captured international attention. Poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all dropped, while health, education, and living standards have seen a commensurate rise—and this chronicle is the real, bottom-up account. The stories shed light on the complex facets within the revolution, detailing the change in such realities as community media to land reform, cooperatives to communal councils, and the labor movement to the Afro-Venezuelan network. Offering a different perspective than that of the international mainstream media, which has focused predominantly on Venezuela’s controversial president, Hugo Chavez, these examples of democracy in action illustrate the vast cultural, economic, and racial differences within the country—all of which have impacted the current South American state.

    Indeed, love is never what you think. When a painter goes beyond the degree of intimacy that provides the connection between him and the older man who is his newly-discovered muse, he is forced to undergo a re-evaluation of the true meaning of love.

    Arcade's brand of high camp and street-smart, punk-rock cabaret showmanship has been winning over international audiences ever since. This autobiographical trilogy of plays represents her at her best. Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is Penny Arcade's raucous, cutting-edge sex and censorship show, (which continues to be a commercial hit around the world), featuring the daily life of a receptionist in a brothel, the upbringing and rearing of a "faghag," the evolution of the New York gay scene in the 1990s, and a participatory "audience dance break." The funny and heart-rending title work, Bad Reputation, portrays a young teen runaway's coming of age in a Catholic reform school (run by nuns who are former fashion models) and her subsequent life on the streets of 1960s New York. La Miseria, a rare depiction of working-class Italian-Americans from a woman's point of view that portrays the clash between working-class morals and compassion during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, rounds out the trilogy. Bad Reputation is the first book by and on Penny Arcade. The complete scripts are accompanied by a new interview with Penny Arcade by Chris Kraus, a range of archival photographs of the East Village scene and Arcade's performances, an introduction by playwright Ken Bernard, and contributions by Sarah Schulman, Steve Zehentner, and Stephen Bottoms.

    These books were about gay characters. They were written mostly by gay writers. Above all, they were for gay readers. And, as this entertaining chronicle of the emergence of gay literary pride makes clear, it was a revolution that occurred several years before Stonewall!Their characters were mostly out or struggling to get out. The books were definitely out—out on the revolving paperback bookracks in grocery stores, dime stores, drugstores, magazine agencies, and transportation terminals across the nation for youths and senior citizens, in the cities and the rural areas alike, to find and to devour.Here 19 writers take you on a tour of this Golden Age of Gay Fiction —roughly the period between the first Kinsey Report and the first collection of Tales of the City —paying attention to touchstone novels from the period but, even more, highlighting works of fiction that have been left unjustly to gather dust on literary shelves.Written by authors, scholars, collectors, and one of the publishers, their essays will inform you. They will sometimes amuse you. They will take you into literary corridors you only suspected were there. And the some 200 illustrations, chosen for their historical as well as their artistic interest, provide a visual record of why this was the golden age.

    Klein's first book, The Commuters, was a fine debut. Second books aren’t necessarily as good. In this case, it's better." --Noel Alumit, FrontiersFelix Ketay, a twenty-five-year-old Los Angeles dyke, has her foundations shaken when she's ditched by her pomosexual girlfriend and then gay-bashed on the streets of West Hollywood.Felix's old-school lesbian aunt, Anna Lisa Hill, ran away from home in 1965 at age nineteen and ended up in Lilac Mines, a small town in California's Sierra Nevada foothills with a small but tight-knit butch/femme community.When Felix joins her aunt in Lilac Mines hoping to discover a place of respite, Anna Lisa proves stand-offish, so Felix devotes herself to investigating the town's one hundred-year-old mystery: the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Lilac Ambrose in the mine shafts that run beneath the mountain.Felix learns that finding an authentic history is never easy, but Lilac Mines — with its abandoned mines, unknowable secrets, and the occasional quirky-cute thrift store employee — might not be such a bad place to try.Cheryl Klein is a shameless Angeleno, quiet pescatarian, and shameful tabloid reader. She lives in Los Angeles where she is West Coast director of Poets & Writers, Inc.

    A Gothic black & white graphic novelette that is part autobiography, part history and part biography of the spiritualist movement in America during the 1800's.

    June 5 – July 3, 2009 at the Maine College of Art, Portland ME. Photographs courtesy of the University of Southern Maine Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine.Features nearly one hundred photographs by Annette Dragon documenting queer activism in Maine over the last two decades of the 20th century. Also includes new writing on archiving, queer activism and re-imagining radical queer futures by Susie R. Bock, Erica Rand and Ryan Conrad.

    And we find our own hiding place.—Merlie Alunan. Finalist, Gintong Aklat Awards 2010, for English Literature. Winner, 2011 Madrigal-Gonzalez, for First Book Award.

    Mapping a utopia on the brink, THE MOTHERING COVEN's rare blend of charisma and pyrotechnic wordplay makes for an utterly original act of storytelling. Bertrand has disappeared from the house she shared with seven women--artists, scientists, and of course, witches. As the women plan a party for Mrs. Borage's hundredth birthday, Bertrand's absence threatens to dissolve the world they've created. Deliriously imagined, THE MOTHERING COVEN is a work of wonder. Joanna Ruocco arrives: marvelous, and fully sprung!--Carole Maso. [A]n engagingly whimsical tale, graceful and inventive, with its own distinctive lexicon--Robert Coover.

    With no clear models to follow, these new versions of the queer family are creating their own, addressing questions such as: What's the difference between being a donor and being a parent? What happens to non-biological parents when a known donor is also part of the picture? When and how does biology count-or does it? Why do parents choose known donors, and what happens if things get ugly? And what does all this mean for queer families already facing extraordinary social pressures? The contributors-donors, biological and non-bio parents, and their children-offer provocative, nuanced insights into what it means to be or use a known donor and how queer families are being reconceived to include new roles, new rules, and kinship ties that transcend biology.

    The poems in Mobility of Light were chosen by Louise H. Forsyth to elicit a sense of these whirling garlands and convey the intense energy-physical, creative, spiritual, erotic, imaginative, playful, ethical, and political-that has carried Brossard to a uniquely significant vision of the human spirit.Poems are presented in French and English on facing pages, underscoring the density of meaning in each word and line and highlighting the unusual rhythms in Brossard's originals and the extraordinary sonorities with which they beat. Some of the translations in this volume have been previously published, while others are new. In her afterword, Brossard talks about travelling back in time to discover how our most vivid sensations, emotions, and thoughts are nourished and transformed by our enigmatic relation to language.

    Hate destroys everything. Don't let it destroy you..."For decades, ultra-liberal Windfield College has been a thorn in the side of Northern Virginia's hidebound elite. When a teaching position unexpectedly becomes available, the school hires a former male graduate - now a transsexual woman named Nickie Farrell - as an assistant professor of English. Hoping to find peace, Nickie keeps her secret under wraps until ambitious lesbian student reporter Cinda Vanderhart outs her. And Cinda has noticed something else: both Nickie and a young townie waiter named Collie Skinner have a genetic quirk which causes their eyes to be different colors. Convinced that the similarity is no coincidence, Cinda begins an investigation to discover the connection between them. Meanwhile, in a death-bed confession as she succumbs to years of brutality at the hands of her disgraced cop husband, Collie's mother Luanne reveals that his birth resulted from an illicit affair she had with a long-vanished Windfield college senior named Nick Farrington. Shattered by his mother's death, Collie turns for comfort to Robin Thompson, a gentle-hearted Christian co-worker at the upper-crust Foxton Arms restaurant. As Nickie is stalked by a pair of homicidal sociopaths, Robin finds herself entangled not only in Cinda's investigative machinations but also a murderous plot by former U.S Ambassador and tycoon Eamon Douglass to eradicate the hated college with a suicide detonation of a Cesium 137 dirty bomb. Lives and secrets hang in the balance until everything comes to a head on the morning of Windfield's annual spring picnic: April Fools Day. Filled with richly-drawn characters and building to a stunning climax, SHE'S MY DAD is a story about the destructiveness of hate, the power of love, and the redemptive triumph of good over evil. Like her title character Nickie Farrell, Iolanthe Woulff is a transsexual woman. A fifty-nine-year-old Princeton-educated English major, she lives in Palm Springs, CA, where for several years she wrote a column in a local magazine about the challenges of gender transition. As the eldest child of author Herman Wouk, storytelling has always been dear to Ms. Woulff's heart. Her hope is that besides providing a suspenseful read, SHE'S MY DAD will help to dispel some of the widespread misconceptions about transsexual people.

    Some want him stopped. Some want him dead. Some just want him.THE SOWER is the outrageous, twisted brand new thriller from Kemble Scott, author of the bestseller SoMa."Dark, subversive, and laugh-out-loud funny.”-- Raj Patel, author of the international bestseller Stuffed and Starved."The Sower is the Da Vinci Code as seen through the twisted eyes of John Waters and transcribed by the Marquis de Sade.”--David Henry Sterry, author of the bestseller Chicken."The Sower entertains, enlightens, and manages to push a whole lot of buttons in the process...one of those ‘can’t put it down’ books that runs the reader though the full slate of emotions from start to finish."--Kate Douglas, author of the bestselling Wolf Tales series.The Story:Bill Soileau is the last guy you’d expect to save the world.From the shocking opening chapter of The Sower, Bill is the ultimate scoundrel. A deviously handsome player in the world of San Francisco’s sexual underground, he doesn’t seem to care for anyone except himself.Then while on assignment working overseas in remote Armenia, he’s infected with a manmade supervirus that appears to be a cure for all diseases. With the help of a brilliant French doctor, Bill soon discovers he’s the sole carrier, and the only way to pass the miracle cure onto others is through sex.He’s the world’s least likely savior. Or perhaps his history makes him the best man on earth for the job. But when word gets out, Bill finds himself on the most wanted list. He’s the ultimate battle in the culture wars, pitting him against right wing ideologies, religious extremists, and the most famous pop star on the planet.

    Jay, another student at Bette and Rose’s school, has done his best to build a new life for himself after the devastating events of his childhood. When Bette and Jay’s lives crash headlong into the alluring, lethal underworld of the city’s vampires, they’re not afraid, but rather fascinated: could this subculture of hunters and predators, villains and heroes, finally be somewhere that they fit in? And if it’s not, can they get out alive?

    But that whiff of dishonor barely begins to tell the whole story. / In these pages Archbishop Weakland recounts his life from his childhood in rural Pennsylvania to his retirement from the archbishopric in 2002 at the age of 75, all in the context of the Church that he long served. Weakland takes readers with him to Rome, where he discovered the splendor of a whole new intellectual world, and then to New York for his extensive musical study at Julliard and Columbia University. From his early days in the priesthood to his struggles with pontiffs, Weakland details how he learned to become a leader and minister to his people and how his famously liberal beliefs affected his ministry. While he presents an honest account of the scandal he is so often recognized for, the complete picture beyond rumor and accusation may come as a surprise to many readers. / Throughout his memoir Weakland describes with poignant honesty his psychological, spiritual, and sexual growth. Candid and engaging, A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church offers a fascinating inside look at both Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II even as it tells the story of a life fully lived.

    verso.

    LGBT Studies. Improvising on a variety of poetic forms and traversing disparate landscapes--from Belfast to the clear-cuts of Vancouver Island, from the subterranean heat of Jules Verne's Iceland to the ventriloquism of the Alberta Rockies' echoing eastern slopes--John Barton documents the path of the male body in an increasingly unstable, supposedly tolerant contemporary world. HYMN stokes the fires of homoerotic romantic love with its polar extremes of intimacy and solitude.

    She gives voice to many of us who took up the vocation of revolution and who have remained true to the vision of a radically transformed world.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Blood on the BorderIn June 1985, Diana Block, her two-week old son and five companions—all of them active in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence—fled L.A. after finding a surveillance device in their car. Facing the possibility of arrest because of her militant activities, Diana spent the next decade living underground, on the run from the FBI, raising two children and juggling security, solidarity and motherhood. In a perfect demonstration that the personal is political, Diana's memoir offers unique insights into the reasons why many people took up arms against the U.S. government in the 1960's and 1970's in response to racism, male supremacy and war. The book also traces Diana's political development on either side of her time underground, offering a fresh look at the history of the 1970's and an analysis of the social terrain of the 1990's when she resurfaced and tried to reintegrate into a very different world.Relayed with emotional depth and a poetic style, Arm the Spirit brings a woman's perspective to a subject typically dominated by heroic, male discourse. The book paints a vivid, complex picture of underground life and its many challenges. What is it like to raise children who don't know their mother's real name and birthday? How does it feel to see your own history distorted on an episode of "America's Most Wanted"? Which aspects of underground life are terrifying, which are stultifying, and which ultimately strengthen the spirit and will to resist? A captivating tale of struggle and solidarity - told from the inside.Diana Block has been an activist for thirty-eight years. She has written for political journals and women’s magazines and currently edits The Fire Inside, the newsletter of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.

    "In her second full-length collection, Levitsky challenges readers with an expansive sequence of poems that vigorously dissemble and reassemble notions of what a poem is and does [ ... ] A decisively innovative book; NEIGHBOR is brimming with sharply reported discoveries"--Publishers Weekly. "NEIGHBOR is a sweet saga of disconnection. A collectivity of loss. Rachel should be working for the city of New York. 'I've decided to use my obsession/with my neighbor as the context/ for a discussion of the State.' That in itself is incredible"--Eileen Myles. "In and outside the window of Rachel Levitsky's apartment lie sadness, amusement and conflicted regard for the weirdo constructs of faith and scum politics. Her poet energy is a sweet intellect with lazy compulsive lines dropping onto a free and wishful page, ok with semi-resolve amidst the minor clatter of daily lust"--Thurston Moore.

    Looking at the dramatic transformations of the era—changes in the family and in the law, the emergence of the world's first police force, the growth of a national media, and more—Charles Upchurch asks how perceptions of same-sex desire changed between men, in families, and in the larger society. To illuminate these questions, he mines a rich trove of previously unexamined sources, including hundreds of articles pertaining to sex between men that appeared in mainstream newspapers. The first book to relate this topic to broader economic, social, and political changes in the early nineteenth century, Before Wilde sheds new light on the central question of how and when sex acts became identities.

    Josh Lanyon, Samantha Kane, Victor J. Banis and George Seaton look at love when lives are at their worst and men are at their best.This book is dedicated to those gay men who by not telling continue to serve our country with pride and honor. To those gay men who found the strength to tell and the courage to hold their heads high while being discharged in disgrace. To those gay men who have sacrificed their lives to maintain our freedoms while sacrificing their freedom to be heard.Till we are judged for the honor and strength of our character and not by the prejudice and weakness of others...I wish you Fair Seas, Following Winds, Safe Harbor & Silent Running.

    Challenging the notion of what a young woman runs from, the collection takes on complex settings from which it explores themes of poverty, pop and sub-culture, madness, and normative sexuality.

    Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with small quantities of illicit substances, the party is shut down and the remaining partygoers disperse into the city streets. For Kane Race, the Azure Party drug search is emblematic of a broader technology of power that converges on embodiment, consumption, and pleasure in the name of health. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he illuminates the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state. As he demonstrates, the state’s performance of moral sovereignty around substances designated “illicit” bears little relation to the actual dangers of drug consumption; in fact, it exacerbates those dangers. Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.

    Fandom: Merlin--------------------------------------------------In which Prince Arthur meets Merlin and all hell promptly breaks loose.

    Children with two fathers or two mothers.With a single parent or with four.Families, interwoven of stories, links, projects and bodies.Families in all respects but not by law.

    Harris has written an amazing book. As Sterling Plumpp tells us, her work "is a twenty-first century literary text emerging out of the prism of race, gender, and social class. It is eloquently postmodern funk and intimately original." She does this while telling us in poetry of extraordinarily high order an intimate, personal history, probing with her heart and intelligence into matters she has half passed over or forgotten. Perhaps Amnesiac is a term for tragic hero. In this case the tragic hero is a woman, a poet, and a singer.

    It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, martially resistant men, and male nurses. It explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his articulation, over the course of his career, of homoerotic desire.Holly Furneaux places Dickens's writing in a broad literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life-writing, journalism, and legal and political debates, Queer Dickens argues that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it contends that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness.Queer Dickens intervenes in current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of the histories of the family and of sexuality. It makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life-affirming trajectory in queer theory.

    Beginning with one of the foundations of queer theory—his famous meditation on how sex leads to a shattering of the self, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”—this volume charts the inspired connections Bersani has made between sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics.   Over the course of these essays, Bersani grapples with thinkers ranging from Plato to Descartes to Georg Simmel. Foucault and Freud recur as key figures, and although Foucault rejected psychoanalysis, Bersani contends that by considering his ideas alongside Freud’s, one gains a clearer understanding of human identity and how we relate to one another. For Bersani, art represents a crucial guide for conceiving new ways of connecting to the world, and so, in many of these essays, he stresses the importance of aesthetics, analyzing works by Genet, Caravaggio, Proust, Almodóvar, and Godard.   Documenting over two decades in the life of one of the best minds working in the humanities today, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays is a unique opportunity to explore the fruitful career of a formidable intellect.

    This anthology by former members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) captures the history and spirit of the revolutionary time just after Stonewall, when thousands came out of the closet to claim their sexuality, and when queer resistance coalesced into a turbulent, joyous liberation movement—one whose lasting influence would ultimately inform and profoundly shape the LGBT community of today.Personal essays explore the philosophy and culture of the stridently anti-assimilationist GLF: the actions, demonstrations, and marches; views on marriage, religion, and gender; the drugs, orgies, and communes; and GLF’s relationship to the hippies, the Black Panthers, the straight Left, the women’s movement, civil rights, and the antiwar struggle.The collection includes contributions from Martha Shelley, Cei Bell, Paola Bacchetta, Susan Stryker, Tom Ammiano, Nikos Diaman, Mark Segal, Barbara Ruth, and Perry Brass.

    No autopsy was performed. The family diagnosis was God’s will.As a boy, Downing rigorously trained as a spiritual athlete, preparing to vault into heaven. But eventually he escaped the religious dogma, and the family arena — until one of his brothers died in 2003, suddenly and inexplicably. No autopsy was performed.Alarmed, Downing pursued a diagnosis: Drawn into a world of researchers, clinicians, and manufacturers with their own arcane ethics and faith, Downing discovered he had inherited a mutant protein from his father, and the first symptom would be his sudden death.To save his life, a defibrillator was hard-wired to his heart. Within weeks, he needed emergency surgery to remove the device and the life-threatening infection he got with it. Two months later, he was re-implanted — only to read in his morning newspaper that the new wires anchored to his heart were prone to failure. His device might be powerless, or it might deliver a series of unwarranted, possibly fatal, shocks. From a bedeviled boyhood in the Berkshires to a grim comedy of errors in one of Boston’s best hospitals, Life with Sudden Death is a wild ride.

    Contributors bring into sharp focus the multiple and meaningful ways that LGBTQ people are choosing to become parents and raise children. This is without a doubt a timely and important.

    He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS.Challenging the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom, Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson, Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.

    However, with the advent of AIDS came the notion of blood donation as a potentially dangerous process. Bennett argues that the Food and Drug Administration, by employing images that specifically depict gay men as contagious, has categorized gay men as a menace to the nation. The FDA's ban on blood donation by gay men remains in effect and serves to propagate the social misconceptions about gay men that circulate within both the straight and gay communities today.Bennett explores the role of scientific research cited by these banned-blood policies and its disquieting relationship to government agencies, including the FDA. Bennett draws parallels between the FDA's position on homosexuality and the historical precedents of discrimination by government agencies against racial minorities. The author concludes by describing the resistance posed by queer donors, who either lie in order to donate blood or protest discrimination at donation sites, and by calling for these prejudiced policies to be abolished.

    A spirit of flame made flesh through powerful magic, Matthew escapes bondage only to discover that he is being pursued by a fanatical Order bent on destroying all of his kind. Embroiled in the Victorian underbelly of clandestine magic and illicit sex, Matthew searches for a place where people with different passions can live and love as they please. His quest leads him to America, where one exclusive club promises revelations he never expected to gain about himself - and about his very world.