Her plans to hide out and heal her wounds go by the wayside as she gets drawn into the daily lives of the quirky locals and becomes fast friends with Maddie Stevenson, the enigmatic physician who has returned to the backcountry community to take over her late father’s medical practice.Ann McMan weaves a story of life and love in the beautiful mountains of Virginia.

    In this first tale, Batwoman battles a madwoman known only as Alice, inspired by Alice in Wonderland, who sees her life as a fairy tale and everyone around her as expendable extras! Batwoman must stop Alice from unleashing a toxic death cloud over all of Gotham City -- but Alice has more up her sleeve than just poison, and Batwoman's life will never ever be the same again. Also, witness the origin of Batwoman in the shocking and tragic story "Go," in which young Kate Kane and her family are kidnapped by terrorists, and Kate's life - and the lives of her family - will never be the same! Detective Comics #854–860.

    It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

    Coyote is a master storyteller and performer; their beautiful, funny stories about growing up a lesbian butch in the Canadian north have attracted big audiences whether gay, straight, or otherwise. Missed Her is Ivan's fifth story collection, following 2008's Lambda-nominated The Slow Fix and Bow Grip, their novel that was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. Whether discussing the politics of being a butch with a pet lapdog or berating a gay newspaper for considering butches and trans people as "extreme," Ivan traverses issues of gender and identity with a wistful, perceptive eye.

    Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. In Gender Outlaws, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers — new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected mainstream news sources. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.

    According to The New York Times, Chin "is sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking." The Advocate wrote her poems, "combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform" and note "Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world."

    From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis--these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness. Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse, and hilarious artistic minds of our time.

    M. Forster came out as a homosexual— though that revelation made barely a ripple in his literary reputation. As Wendy Moffat persuasively argues in A Great Unrecorded History, Forster’s homosexuality was the central fact of his life. Between Wilde’s imprisonment and the Stonewall riots, Forster led a long, strange, and imaginative life as a gay man. He preserved a vast archive of his private life—a history of gay experience he believed would find its audience in a happier time. A Great Unrecorded History is a biography of the heart. Moffat’s decade of detective work—including first-time interviews with Forster’s friends—has resulted in the first book to integrate Forster’s public and private lives. Seeing his life through the lens of his sexuality offers us a radically new view—revealing his astuteness as a social critic, his political bravery, and his prophetic vision of gay intimacy. A Great Unrecorded History invites us to see Forster— and modern gay history—from a completely new angle.

    It is not just that Ocean can render pain as a kind of loveliness, but that his poetic line will not let you forget the hurt or the garish brilliance of your triumph; will not let you look away. These poems shatter us detail by detail because Ocean leaves nothing unturned, because every lived thing in his poems demands to be fed by you; to nourish you in turn. You will not leave these poems dissatisfied. They will fill you utterly.” -Roger Bonair-Agard, author of Tarnish and Masquerade and Gully“Vuong’s perfectly crafted poems are intensely personal, and intensely universal. What he has to whisper to us sears our eyes and minds like a branding iron, burning. Whether his words are of wars past or present, they are inescapably palpable. This is the work of a gifted cantor, singing of pain, singing of healing.” -Grady Harp, Amazon Top Reviewer and critic“Ocean Vuong is a poet of rare lyrical gifts and urgent stories to tell. “Memory,” he writes, “has not forgotten you.” No, it hasn’t forgotten the burning city or the taste of blood nor the hanging of rags or the violence of war. Vuong’s poems are testament to the enduring power of poetry and its place in this human universe.” -Hoa Nguyen, author of Hectate Lochia and As Long as Trees Last

    Sex is a very important part of my life, a very important part of all our lives, but so very little writing has been done on the sex lives of trans women that doesn’t write us off in one way or another. I found myself looking for a guide, an instruction manual, anything beyond essays on gender and problems. Fucking Trans Women is that guide." "Includes:-How-to guides-Sex stories-Instructions for various kinds of sex acts-The diversity of trans women's bodies-Trashy art & comic strips-Moments of triumph & tender anecdotes-Passionate explorations of our lusty bodies-Diagrams, and so much more!"

    . . manages to sound both epic and rooted in a specific place. Listen closely, and you might hear that thrilling sound that is one of the main reasons we go to the theater, that beautiful music of a new voice.”—The New York Times“Taut, expressive drama, The Brothers Size realizes the potential of theater to elevate the ordinary. . . . McCraney’s writing can be arresting.”—Time Out New YorkThis is the first collection by Tarell Alvin McCraney, a major new playwright of the American theater. Lyrical and mythic, provocative and contemporary, McCraney’s dramas of kinship, love, and heartache are set in the bayou of Louisiana and loosely draw on West African myths. In the Red and Brown Water charts the story of Oya, a fast and beautiful track star who must make difficult choices on her journey to womanhood. The Brothers Size dramatizes the struggle between brothers who have taken different paths: Ogun, single-mindedly running his auto shop, and Oshoosi, recently returned from prison and fallen back with trouble. Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet explores a young man’s relationship with his history and friends as he discovers his sexuality and true self against the backdrop of an impending storm.Tarell Alvin McCraney’s other works include Wig Out! and The Breach. His plays have been produced at The Public Theater in New York, internationally at the Royal Court Theatre and Abbey Theatre, and throughout the United States.

    Steward, The Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail.After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago’s notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros.Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow—but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1983, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, The Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.

    Kalen, Shannon’s overly social sister, is determined to play match-maker and find a special someone for her sister. After a disastrous date with one of Kalen’s recent selections, Shannon decides to take her love life back into her own hands by joining the local lesbian cyber match-maker.Mid thirties, still single, house broken but rabid. If you’re looking for something different then I’m your girl. Write me if you dare... P.U. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to build her profile after consuming half a bottle of her favorite wine... or to use a picture of herself at the age of six - after she had cut her own hair-as her online profile photograph.Hiding behind the online persona of Pitifully Ugly, Shannon finds the courage to meet new women and face the disaster called dating. As her charming personality surfaces, Shannon’s search for the perfect match may be closer than she realizes.

    It is an educational and instructional tool as much as it is a creative exploration of how we have sex.

    At the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital--perhaps viral--new strain of female poetics: the "Gurlesque," a term that describes writers who perform femininity in their poems in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking the grotesque to shake the foundations of acceptable female behavior and language. Built from the bric-a-brac of girl culture, these works charm and repel: this work is fun, subversive, and important. Poets include Brenda Coultas, Brenda Shaghnessy, Cathy Park Hong, Matthea Harvey, and Sarah Vap.

    Inspired and nurtured by the successes of the feminist and LGBT movements in the Jewish world, Jews who identify with the “T” now sit in the congregation, marry under the chuppah, and create Jewish families. Balancing on the Mechitza offers a multifaceted portrait of this increasingly visible community.The contributors—activists, theologians, scholars, and other transgender Jews—share for the first time in a printed volume their theoretical contemplations as well as rite-of-passage and other transformative stories. Balancing on the Mechitza introduces readers to a secular transwoman who interviews her Israeli and Palestinian peers and provides cutting-edge theory about the construction of Jewish personhood in Israel; a transman who serves as legal witness for a man (a role not typically open to persons designated female at birth) during a conversion ritual; a man deprived of testosterone by an illness who comes to identify himself with passion and pride as a Biblical eunuch; and a gender-variant person who explores how to adapt the masculine and feminine pronouns in Hebrew to reflect a non-binary gender reality.

    LGBT Studies. Like Tennyson's In Memoriam, Teare's book sees within a personal loss evidence of an epochal shift at work, a shift at once historical, political, and cosmological. Asserting the lover's body as a lost Eden, revisiting again and again the narrative of "the fall"--its iconic imagery as well as Gnostic reinterpretations--the book also records the eventual end of mourning and a return to the ecology not of myth but of the literal weather and landscape of California. The book is haunted throughout by the task of "writing the disaster" of AIDS; its lyrics link emergency to inquiry in an attempt to make a memorial "in language sufficient/to pain: not in itself the world: the thought of it."

    Like any teenagers, they both have troubles all their own. Marcus faces his share of conflict at school over his outward and...some might say obnoxious pride for his sexual orientation. Reis on all accounts is a healthy, average teenager...athletic, attractive, if a bit quiet. Beneath the surface, however, his home life is tearing him apart. Things get far more complicated when Reis's feelings for his friend begin to go deeper than friendship, and he comes to fear they will ruin the most important connection he has left in the world. What's worse, he'd always thought he was straight..

     She writes of making up her mind at a young age to become a country music star, knowing then that her feelings and crushes on girls were “sinful” and hoping and praying that she would somehow be “fixed.” (“Dear God, please don’t let me be gay. I promise not to lie. I promise not to steal. I promise to always believe in you . . . Please take it away.”) We see her, high school homecoming queen, heading out on her own at seventeen and landing a job as a featured vocalist on the Ozark Jubilee (the show that started Brenda Lee, Red Foley, and Porter Wagoner), being cast in Country Music U.S.A., doing four live shows a day, and—after only a few months in Nashville—her dream coming true, performing on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry . . .  She describes writing and singing her own songs for producers who’d discovered and recorded the likes of Reba McEntire, Shania Twain, and Toby Keith, who heard in her music something special and signed her to a record contract, releasing her first album and sending her out on the road on her first bus tour . . . She writes of sacrificing all for a shot at success that would come a couple of years later with her first hit single, “Shut Up And Drive” . . . her songs (from her fourth album, Single White Female) climbing the Billboard chart for twenty-nine weeks, hitting the #1 spot . . .   She writes about the friends she made along the way—Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, and others—writing songs, recording and touring together, some of the friendships developing into romantic attachments that did not end happily . . . Keeping the truth of who she was clutched deep inside, trying to ignore it in a world she longed to be a part of—and now was—a world in which country music stars had never been, could not be, openly gay . . . She writes of the very real prospect of losing everything she’d worked so hard to create . . . doing her best to have a real life—her best not good enough . . .  And in the face of everything she did to keep herself afloat, she writes about how the vortex of success and hiding who she was took its toll: her life, a tangled mess she didn’t see coming, didn’t want to; and, finally, finding the guts to untangle herself from the image of the country music star she’d become, an image steeped in long-standing ideals and notions about who—and what—a country artist is, and what their fans expect them to be . . . I am a songwriter,” she writes. “I am a singer of my songs—and I have a story to tell. As I’ve traveled this path that has delivered me to where I am today, my monument of thanks, paying honor to God, remains. I will do all I can with what I have been given . . .”  Like Me is fearless, inspiring, true.

    But when an individual raised by society to live, breathe and look at the world with female eyes transitions to male, some of the most enlightening, helpful and profound advice can only come in retrospect. Letter to my Brothers, features essays from respected transmen mentors who share the wisdom they wish they would have known at the beginning of their journey into manhood. 20% of the proceeds are donated to the FtM Mentors Project of TransMentors International.

    This pocket-sized book of archival texts lays out some of the historical foundations of queer resistance to the gay marriage mainstream alongside more contemporary inter-subjective critiques that deal directly with issues of race, class, gender, citizenship, age, ability, and more. In portable book form, the critical conversations that are happening so readily on the internet will no longer be withheld from those with little to no online access like queer and trans prisoners, people of low income, rural folks and the technologically challenged. Contributors include Kate Bornstein, Eric Stanley, Dean Spade, Craig Willse, Kenyon Farrow, Kate Raphael, Deeg, John D’Emilio, Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, Martha Jane Kaufman, Katie Miles, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.- - -"Against Equality makes the powerful argument that same-sex marriage is an essentially conservative cause, an effort to prop up a fundamentally unfair system. As an alternative, it offers us the inspiring vision of a truly radical queer politics, devoted to attacking injustice, not just allowing a few more gay people to benefit from it." – Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality"Rather than being merely anti-marriage, the book deliberately articulates multiple alternative visions – such as building and valuing our own grassroots familial 'networks of accountability' – thus edging us closer to true 'equality,' or dare I say liberation, celebrating our differences as queers. – Jessica Max Stein (Make/Shift Magazine)"A powerful, moving read from a side often overlooked by mainstream society. A must read for anyone 'for' or 'against' gay marriage." – Steve Mason (California State Inmate/Queer Librarian)[This Anthology] brings to light that a venomous black-and-white rhetorical split has developed on gay marriage. The dichotomous engagement with the issue is damaging to the cohesion of the GLBTQ community and stops discussions short. This collection offers valuable, if controversial, much needed nuance to a radically fractured debate." – Ericka Steckle (Bitch Magazine)

    This book insightfully looks at the various kinds of microaggressions and their psychological effects on both perpetrators and their targets. Thought provoking and timely, Dr. Sue suggests realistic and optimistic guidance for combating--and ending--microaggressions in our society.Praise for Microaggressions in Everyday Life:"In a very constructive way, Dr. Sue provides time-tested psychological suggestions to make our society free of microaggressions. It is a brilliant resource and ideal teaching tool for all those who wish to alter the forces that promote pain for people." --Melba J. T. Vasquez, PhD, ABPPPresident, American Psychological Association"Microaggressions in Everyday Life offers an insightful, scholarly, and thought-provoking analysis of the existence of subtle, often unintentional biases, and their profound impact on members of traditionally disadvantaged groups. The concept of microaggressions is one of the most important developments in the study of intergroup relations over the past decade, and this volume is the definitive source on the topic." --John F. Dovidio, PhD Professor of Psychology, Yale University"Derald Wing Sue has written a must-read book for anyone who deals with diversity at any level. Microaggressions in Everyday Life will bring great rewards in understanding and awareness along with practical guides to put them to good use." --James M. Jones, PhD Professor of Psychology and Director of Black American Studies, University of Delaware"This is a major contribution to the multicultural discourse and to understanding the myriad ways that discrimination can be represented and its insidious effects. Accessible and well documented, it is a pleasure to read." --Beverly Greene, PhD, ABPP Diplomate in Clinical Psychology and Professor of Psychology, St. John's University

    See Expanded Edition, 2018, Bloof Books. Poetry. Wander with CAConrad and Frank Sherlock through this psychogeographical poem. Experience peoples' histories and magical traditions rooted in the first capital of the American possible--the city of Philadelphia. Visit landmarks that remain standing, revisit citizens that live on in memory, and participate in the future mappings of your city yet to be realized--the city real and imagined.

    MitchellIan Stanton is the earl’s dutiful second son, always doing the proper thing. One exquisite exception: Nicholas Chatham. Except the consummation of their two-year relationship left Ian convinced that their desires were never meant to be indulged. Five years later, Ian is home from war, wounded in body and spirit. Nicky never believed what they felt for each other was wrong, and he has plans to make things right. Now he has only twelve nights to convince Ian that happiness is not the price of honor and duty, but its reward.  The Dickens With Love by Josh LanyonThree years ago, antiquarian James Winter lost everything: his job, his lover and his self-respect. Now a rich collector wants him to do whatever it takes to buy a newly discovered Christmas story by Charles Dickens from the nutty professor who owns it. The catch: the buyer must remain anonymous. Sedgwick Crisparkle turns out to be totally gorgeous—and on the prowl. Faster than you can say “Old St. Nick”, they’re mixing business with pleasure. But once Sedgwick discovers James has been a very bad boy, their chance for happiness is disappearing quicker than Santa’s sleigh.

    Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature.

    His forty-year-old boyfriend, health care activist Kit Kramer, had once been romantically involved with another kind of writer entirely, the handsome experimentalist Sam D’Allesandro, now clinging onto the last shreds of life after several decades fighting off AIDS. The young, unstable art student Eric Avery, a fan of D’Allesandro’s, finagles a room in the vast California Street brownstone Isham and Kramer share. On the fringes of the story lurk two shady brothers—Gary Radley, a grifter who lives by selling fake anti-AIDS drugs to deluded New Age San Franciscans, and Adam Radley, a perfectionist porn director specializing in gay spanking videos. When D’Allesandro, who has lost his savings to Radley, threatens to expose the racket, things turn violent.Kevin Killian is a poet, novelist, critic, and playwright who most recently co-edited My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. He lives in San Francisco.

    God Loves Hair is a collection of 20 short stories following a tender, intellectual, and curious child as he navigates complex realms of sexuality, gender, racial politics, religion, and belonging.Told with the poignant insight and honesty that only the voice of a young mind can convey, each story is accompanied by a vivid illustration by Toronto artist Juliana Neufeld.

    In Haiti, carnivals offer an opportunity for people to come together-to hang out, sing, dance, laugh and to generally let go. Light years away from the government- sponsored, tourist inspired carnival floats of so many other cultures, the Haitian carnival is particularly notable for its more sober political dimension, as a venue for Haitian peasants to discuss local politics, or older, nagging, historical problems dating back to the slave revolts-and as an occasion to commune with ancestors both personal and historical. With oral histories from participants, Karnaval is a fascinating combination of photography, cultural analysis and anthropology.

    Featuring massive beasts who enjoy dainty, pretty jewelry and princesses who build rocket ships, this fun-for-all-ages coloring book celebrates those who do not fit into disempowering gender categorizations, from sensitive boys to tough girls.

    This book includes much previously unseen material from Williams's candid daily journal and also draws on rare in-depth interviews with friends and colleagues.

    61 pages of summaries and analysis on Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris.This study guide includes the following sections: Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Characters, Objects/Places, Themes, Style, Quotes, and Topics for Discussion.

    Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism.Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more—in addition to artists of more recent works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird. The authors argue that despite the late-nineteenth-century definition and legal codification of the “homosexual,” in reality, questions of sexuality always remained fluid and continually redefined by artists concerned with the act of portrayal. In particular, gay and lesbian artists—of but not fully in the society they portrayed—occupied a position of influential marginality, from which vantage point they crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits. Their resistance to society's attempt to proscribe them forced them to develop new visual vocabularies by which to code, disguise, and thereby express their subjects' identities—and also their own.Bringing together for the first time new scholarship in the history of American sexuality and new research in American portraiture, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists—both gay and straight—as well as of portraiture itself.

    Paperback edition of book, with the hardcover image.

    It happened to San Francisco artist Page Hodel when she found the love of her life, Madalene Rodriguez. She expressed her devotion in an unusual way: Early every Monday morning, Page would create a heart for Madalene and leave it for her to discover somewhere near her front door. Tragically, Madalene died of ovarian cancer less than a year after she and Page met. But Page's love goes on, beautifully symbolized in the hearts she continues to create from a plenitude of objects. Here are photographs of one hundred of Page's hearts for Madalene, fashioned from a magical, surprising diversity of materials: acorns and asparagus; berries, buttons, and bungee cord; cardboard, clothespins, corks, and candy corn. True love embraces the world, and Page's art is testimony to its enduring faith.

    Modern women really can have it all - work, family, friends and fans - but having a sense of humour helps! By popular demand, Shamim Sarif's collected blogs from 2009 are all here, together with full colour photos and captions."Hilarious and insightful, the blogs follow Shamim's work as a writer, director, mother and wife - the 21st Century musings of an exhausted Renaissance woman.

    From Philip F. Clark's introduction: "[Borland] shows us a rogue's gallery of men, all captured in that flash of insight that is both a mirror and a door." This book includes 70 poems. Details and samples of Borland's work at www.bryanborland.com

    Common explanations for this disparity range from biological differences between the sexes to the conscious and unconscious biases that guide hiring and promotion decisions. Just One of the Guys? sheds new light on this phenomenon by analyzing the unique experiences of transgender men—people designated female at birth whose gender identity is male—on the job.Kristen Schilt draws on in-depth interviews and observational data to show that while individual transmen have varied experiences, overall their stories are a testament to systemic gender inequality. The reactions of coworkers and employers to transmen, Schilt demonstrates, reveal the ways assumptions about innate differences between men and women serve as justification for discrimination. She finds that some transmen gain acceptance—and even privileges—by becoming “just one of the guys,” that some are coerced into working as women or marginalized for being openly transgender, and that other forms of appearance-based discrimination also influence their opportunities. Showcasing the voices of a frequently overlooked group, Just One of the Guys? lays bare the social processes that foster forms of inequality that affect us all.

    Corwin’s years of experience with same-sex couples help women overcome common issues around orgasm, body image, identity, aging, and parenthood. Dr. Corwin dispels myths, examines the intricacies of female desire, and gives advice to help couples achieve long-lasting, healthy, and fulfilling relationships.

    Join the Undisputed Mistress of Lesbian Romance in a literary dessert buffet with short stories featuring characters you fell in love with.Inspired by classics like Touchwood, Painted Moon and Unforgettable, as well as bestsellers and award winners like The Kiss That Counted, Warming Trend and Substitute for Love, Karin’s second volume of follow-up stories is sure to satisfy your craving for more.Karin Kallmaker is a three-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for both novels and short stories, as well as numerous other accolades over her twenty-year devotion to lesbian romance.

    

    Enszer's second collection mines the multiple meanings of sisterhood, exploring the burdens and joys of sisters, real and imagined. These poems ache with loss: of a sister, of friends from AIDS, of elder poets, of innocence, of exuberance and idealism in middle age. But at the same time, these poems affirm life: the desire of humans to live, to hold one another tightly, to build new ways of living amid fragile remains.

    Carry a swarm / in your pocket to feed the beasts you meet." Sweet is a gravity-clutched leap into personal emergency and the turbulent landscape surrounding ambivalence, including what lives in that landscape — invited or not. Dani Couture's second collection of poetry takes the traveller from the emerald ash-borer infested trees of Essex County, Ontario, to the frozen lakes of Alaska and to points in-between. Dogged by tree-snapping winds, garbage-hungry bears, global uncertainty and war movie prophecy, the heart bends toward greater and deeper persistence through the intimate and at times anxious metre of Couture's new poems."Couture’s . . . poems are precise, taut with meaning, and quietly filled with curiosities of fact and phrase . . ."  - Books in Canada

    Although best known for appearing in John Waters's early films, Cookie Mueller made a more substantial mark as a writer and performer in New York from the late 1970s to her tragic death from AIDS in 1989. With her zany stories, essays, plays, club performances, underground-film roles, fashion designs, and health and art columns in the East Village Eye, Details, and High Times, Cookie became a downtown icon, mixing with luminaries such as David Armstrong, Patti Astor, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Max Blagg, David Bowes, Dianne Brill, Francesco and Alba Clemente, Gregory Corso, Scott Covert, Jackie Curtis, Dennis Dermody, Katy Dierlam, Divine, Annie Flanders, Patrick Fox, Jedd Garet, Nan Goldin, Robert Hawkins, Pat Hearn, Richard Hell, John Heys, Peter Hujar, Gary Indiana, Peter Koper, Joseph Kosuth, H.M. Koutoukas, Susan Lowe, Taylor Mead, Eric Mitchell, Stephen Mueller, Vali Myers, Glenn O'Brien, Gennaro Palermo, Amos Poe, Dean Rolston, Stephen Saban, Julian Schnabel, Willoughby Sharp, Mark Sink, Bill Stelling, Gordon Stevenson, Mink Stole, Billy Sullivan, Teri Toye, Chi Chi Valenti, David Wojnarowicz and Linda Yablonsky. In addition to exploring aspects of Cookie's life, including her eight-year live-in relationship with Sharon Niesp and subsequent marriage to Vittorio Scarpati, and providing a publishing history of her work, this encyclopedia serves as an overview of the '80s lower Manhattan art scene, examining Cookie's take on every artist whose work she sought out for her monthly "Art and About" column (1982-1989). 536 p., well illustrated, including many photographs never before published.

    As a species it has ravaged the world and its own societies. From the ruins of civilisation arises a new race: Wraeththu. Androgynous, powerful and deadly, Wraeththu must rebuild or start anew. But when they are steeped in tribal warfare and gang culture - remnants of their human past - many cannot see beyond the moment, and it is up to the few who can to attempt to initiate change and growth.Based on the world created by Storm Constantine for her Wraeththu novels, the stories in this collection are set in the very early days of Wraeththu history. Struggling to come to terms with their new condition, fighting to survive amid the hostile humans who remain, and the often equally-hostile hara of other tribes, Wraeththu must learn quickly how to master their powerful abilities or succumb to the same fate that destroyed humanity. With an introduction by TV producer Brad Carpenter, who is working on a TV mini-series inspired by the Wraeththu novels, and stories from ten writers, many of whom are well-known within Wraeththu fandom, and including a new story from Storm herself, Paragenesis expands upon the mythology of the novels, telling the stories of the prime movers whose lives altered the fate of Wraeththu for ever and the hara whose tenacity and strength helped shape the future of their race.Featuring stories by Storm Constantine, Wendy Darling, Christopher Coyle, Fiona Lane, Maria Leel, Martina Luise Pachali, Gwyn Harper, Suzanne Gabriel, Kristi Lee and Andy Bigwood. With cover by Ruby and interior illustrations by Ruby, Danielle Lainton and Andy Bigwood.Full Contents:Paragenesis by Storm Constantine; The First by Wendy Darling; A Sickle Blade by Christopher Coyle; The Dawn of Hope by Suzanne Gabriel; The Burned Boy by Gwyn Harper; Building Immanion by Martina Luise Pachali; Specimen 16 by Andy Bigwood; You Can Never Go Back by Christopher Coyle; Conservation of Momentum by Fiona Lane; Song of the Sulh by Maria J Leel; The Rune-Throwing by Kristi Lee; Something's Coming by Wendy Darling; Pro Lucror by Storm Constantine.Bonus articles: The Future of our Dark, Delirious Imaginings by Wendy Darling; Early Wraeththu Inspirations by Storm Constantine.

    In The Optic Trilogy, the surfacing of buried secrets and repressed memories profoundly alters the way a man and woman see each other. In Fugitives, the members of a family discover that their self-definition relies on their interactions with ‘outsiders’ who exist beyond their comfort zones. In Homesick, a diasporic Singaporean family, quarantined during the SARS crisis, evaluate the meanings of home. And in sex.violence.blood. gore, the facade of a rigid, orderly society is peeled away to reveal chaotic passions.

    This collection is comprised of two sets of twelve essays each. Materials reflects on the history and animate nature of the objects we use in the act of writing, from computers, to pens and pencils, right down to paper. Warland subverts our assumptions about these tools by making the case that our materials are also our collaborators. Concepts investigates, names, and addresses the powerful forces at work beneath the language of craft. Warland shows that what ultimately determines whether a piece of writing succeeds or flounders is a writers ability to be humbled, overcome, or guided by these forces.

    The edition, limited to 1,000 copies presents a diverse and powerful collection of drawings, paintings, sculptures, decorative objects, illustrations and photographs that are remarkably varied in style, and quite contradictory in mood and tone.

    It welcomes the reader in and this book is bursting full of relationships whether between siblings or internet dates or married men. Its subject might be the loneliness of how much everybody knows.--Eileen Myles, author of Sorry, Tree and SkiesSteven Reigns’ Inheritance sizzles with the unsparing heat of memory. This impressive and soulful collection displays a queer poetics so precise and deft it leaves the reader almost singed by how close to the mark the words flare.--Tim Miller, author of Body Blows and 1001 Beds

    LGBT Studies. Winner of Tupelo Press's Snowbound Chapbook Award selected by Dana Levin. Stacey Waite's THE LAKE HAS NO SAINT is a study in grief--a work of poetic archaeology that traces the artifacts of the past into the relationships of the present. Embedded in a powerfully modulated sequence addressing a "you" who shifts in location and identity, many of these poems feel like forms of request, imploring. The speaker's androgynous self-awareness--and wary attention to the gendered assumptions elicited by bodies--disclose in each poem a recognizable but disorienting (and pressurized) situation. THE LAKE HAS NO SAINT will unsettle a reader's sense of the certainty and stability of gender, as grammar and phrasing are also disrupted and blurred, often requiring us to read closely to hear where one sentence ends as another begins. Yet despite its formal and thematic iconoclasm, this is a book that clearly elucidates a story both heart-rending and ultimately--in its vatic honesty--triumphant.

    Sexy and subversive, colorful and controversial, passionate and provocative, Pedro Almodóvar’s world is unlike any other director's. Thanks to his remarkably cohesive and consistent œuvre, the Manchegan maverick has become a reliable brand, his name a byword for the visual opulence, experimentation and eroticism of post-Franco Spanish cinema. Almodóvar found fame with self-penned, gender-bending plots depicting the often comic misfortunes of junkies, nuns, housewives, whores, transvestites and transsexuals. Praised by critics, championed by fellow film-makers, adored by actors and adorned with international awards, he is the most successful Spanish film-maker since Luis Buñuel, with films such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, and Volver. A self-taught auteur, Almodóvar draws on influences as diverse as Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin, Andy Warhol and John Waters. His feature films borrow liberally from, and frequently invert, traditional genres of classic American cinema—including film noir, melodrama and screwball comedy. Yet they remain unmistakably Iberian, rooted predominantly in the director's beloved Madrid, exploring Spanish myths and modernity to the rhythms of bolero-laden soundtracks. Most recently, the enfant terrible of the 1980s arthouse scene has matured into the Academy Award-winning director of All About My Mother, a film universally acknowledged for its emotional resonance, sophistication and craftsmanship. Almodóvar’s distinctive, once marginalized world has finally entered the mainstream. For this unprecedented monograph, Pedro Almodóvar has given TASCHEN complete access to his archives, including never-before-published images, such as personal photos he took during filming. In addition to writing captions for the photos, Almodóvar invited prominent Spanish authors to write introductions to each of his films, and selected many of his own texts to accompany this visual odyssey through his complete works.

    Mistress of the Shadows. Lady of Bones and Dust. Frightening One of the Far Places Where Men Fear to Go. Strong One Who Builds the Boundaries and Knows How to Tear Them Down. Queen of the Great Below is a collection of poems, essays and personal ritual experiences by modern devotees in honor of Ereshkigal. Once worshipped as Ruler of the Underworld from the shores of the Euphrates to the banks of the Nile, Ereshkigal is now known primarily for her role as the antagonist in The Descent of Inanna. In this unique devotional anthology, however, Ereshkigal is revealed to be a multi-faceted deity of transformation, boundary-keeping, and passion, a teacher of harsh but necessary lessons. You stand at the brink of the Underworld, on the shadowed path that few walk willingly. Those who have contributed to this devotional have walked this road and returned, bearing the blessings of the Queen. We invite you to walk this path, as well. Ereshkigal awaits .... [Editor's Note: This text contains references to BDSM and the ordeal path.]

    Kicked Out brings together the voices of current and former homeless LGBTQ youth and tells the forgotten stories of some of our nation's most vulnerable citizens. Diverse contributors share stories of survival and abuse with poignant accounts of the sanctuary of community and the power of creating chosen families. Kicked Out highlights the nuanced perspectives of national organizations such as The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force and The National Alliance Against Homelessness, and regional agencies, including Sylvia's Place, The Circus Project and Family Builders. This anthology, introduced by Judy Shepard, gives voice to the voiceless and challenges the stereotypical face of homelessness. To learn more, visit us online at KickedOutAnthology.com.

    Because these fantasies are deeply charged, they are among the riskiest and most challenging to enact. Yet it is possible, and often very rewarding, to do so. In this guide, Mollena Williams, a Black woman who enjoys roleplaying racism and slavery with the right person, explains ways to safeguard these difficult scenes to ensure the emotional and physical safety of all concerned. With sections on playing with sexual taboos like age and rape, cultural taboos like race and identity, and physical taboos like scat play, this is a thorough and responsible guide to BDSM's furthest regions.

    Inspired by the pioneering work of Jewish feminists, using the same narrative tools as the rabbis of old, Ramer has crafted stories that anchor LGBT lives in the three thousand year old history of the Jewish people. "The universe is made up of stories, not atoms," wrote poet Muriel Ruckeyser. The stories in this book will transport you to a new universe the one we are striving to create, right here and now.

    

    nation-state, of Native peoplehood, and of the roles culture plays in processes of political expression and identification. Recent bans on same-sex marriage within the Cherokee and Navajo nations suggest the importance of charting the relationship between discourses of sexuality and dominant ideologies of political legitimacy. Exploring how marriage, family, homemaking, kinship, personal identity, and everyday experience are linked to legal institutions and public policy, the contributors investigate the complex interweaving of histories of queerness and indigeneity.Challenging operative assumptions in these two fields by putting them into dialogue, the collection opens up new ways of approaching the matrix of settlement, sexuality, and sovereignty. One essay cross-examines the heterosexism of the Cherokee government’s outlawing of same-sex marriage by revisiting that culture’s traditional embrace of variation. Another essay theorizes the politics of visibility surrounding Native writers whose work takes a queer turn but who do not publicly contest the presumption of their straightness. Several essays address the possibilities and limits of queer theoretical frameworks in conceptualizing the legacies of settler colonialism. The final essay traces the history of gendercide in Native California and argues for the recovery of traditional notions of two-spirit identity within contemporary projects of decolonization.

    When the religion is Orthodox Judaism, the task is even more daunting. This anthology takes on that challenge by giving voice to genderqueer Jewish women who were once silenced—and effectively rendered invisible—by their faith. Keep Your Wives Away from Them tells the story of those who have come out, who are still closeted, living double lives, or struggling to maintain an integrated "single life" in relationship to traditional Judaism—personal stories that are both enlightening and edifying. While a number of films and books have explored the lives of queer people in Orthodox and observant Judaism, only this one explores in depth what happens after the struggle, when the real work of building integrated lives begins. The candor of these insightful stories in Keep Your Wives Away from Them makes the book appealing to a general audience and students of women’s, gender, and LGBTQ studies, as well as for anyone struggling personally with the same issue. Contributors include musician and writer Temim Fruchter, Professor Joy Ladin, writer Leah Lax, nurse Tamar Prager, and the pseudonymous Ex-Yeshiva Girl.Keep Your Wives Away from Them official website: http://www.keepyourwivesawayfromthem....

    This book ranges from her early work to the late pieces, and features many of Dickinson's most famous pieces. This new edition includes many new poems.Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886) was born in Amherst, MA. Much of her later life was led in privacy, in the family home in Massachusetts. For some, she was a recluse, famous among locals for wearing white clothes, seldom travelled, preferred correspondence to meeting people in the esh, and was known for talking to visitors thru a door. She wrote nearly 1800 poems, but only a few were published during her lifetime.The poetry of Emily Dickinson is among the strangest, the most compelling and the most direct in world literature. There is nothing else quite like it. Dickinson writes in short lyrics, often just eight lines long, often in regular quatrains, but often in irregular lines consisting of two half-lines joined in the middle by a dash (such as: ''Tis Honour - though I die' in "Had I presumed to hope"). Her subjects appear to be the traditional ones of poetry, blocked in with capital letters: God, Love, Hope, Time, Death, Nature, the Sea, the Sun, the World, Childhood, the Past, History, and so on. Yet what exactly is Dickinson discussing? Who is the 'I', the 'Thee', the 'we' and the 'you' in her poetry? This is where things become much more ambiguous. Dickinson is very clear at times in her poetry, until one considers deeper exactly what she is saying - but this ambiguity is one of the hallmarks and the delights of her art.Includes an Introduction, bibliography, notes. ISBN 9781861713636. www.crmoon.com

    Grady Wrenn is a cultural anthropologist, enthralled by a local ghost story about a vengeful spirit known as the River Walker. Elena Montalvo, a spiritual healer, is that tortured spirit’s only defender. Together, Grady and Elena must find a way to end the River Walker’s murderous vendetta— and overcome a maze of cultural barriers to find each other.

    It's a story about young media student Dylan and vampire Joa, who died in the 80's. Despite the rough start with threatening and snarking their relationship will develop from cute awkwardness to a beautiful romance.

    Mel, sees a woman on a park bench staring at Drift High School where her teenage son, Alex Weber, died five years ago.Alex Weber's death has never been discussed in the town or at the school. But Mel and her best friend Frank become obsessed with Alex's grave and consumed by the why of his suicide. When Mel happens upon a pair of Alex's cargo pants, she takes them. And what she finds inside the pockets brings into focus the story of Alex's brief life and his death.Determined to pressure the school and the town into recognizing why Alex died, Mel embarks on a journey and confronts a world of adult secrecy and deception. Mel also contends with a peer group who greet Mel's assertion of her identity—her buzz cut and the pants she wears—by scrawling DYKE across her locker.But anyone who thinks Mel Bird will retreat from disapproval or opposition is badly mistaken.

    Can a love of food overcome the pain of a dad and son pulled apart?

    Winner of the 2010 Exquisite Disarray First Book Poetry Contest, selected by Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken.

    Written in spare phrasal passages, these poems have an ephemeral musicality. The verses create images for the reader that are quick, fleeting flickers—like viewing a painting with flashbulbs. Reflecting on human relationships, these poems show them to be like an empty harbor into which ships carrying unexpected cargo sail.

    "Life, Leather and the Pursuit of Happiness" is the first book by award-winning leather columnist Steve Lenius, whose "Leather Life" column has appeared in the pages of "Lavender" Magazine since 1995. Now he's chosen selections from fifteen years of Leather Life columns and other writings, newly updated and annotated, to create this book: a humorous, touching, revealing and enlightening tour through the alternative sexual and social worlds of contemporary leather, BDSM, fetish and kink. Read "Life, Leather and the Pursuit of Happiness" and discover: --A recipe for a leather vest --What's your LPT (leather personality type)? --The hankie code (in poetic form) --International Mr. Leather and International Ms Leather: A handy comparison chart --Are your sex toys hazardous to your health? --An open letter to Senator Larry Craig --Christian BDSM (Christian? Yes. Vanilla? Not necessarily.) --The feng shui of leather . . . and much, much more.

    A beautiful adventuress from the ancient city of New Dalli sets off to reclaim her missing lover. What secrets does she hide beneath her silk skirts? A gay cowboy flees the Great War in search of true love and the elusive undead poet Whit Waltman, but at what cost? A talking statue sends an abused boy spinning through a great metropolis, dodging pirates and search for a home. On these quests, you will meet macho firefighters, tiny fairies, collapsible musicians, lady devils and vengeful sea witches. These are stories to stir the heart and imagination.

    A high school AU.Words: 90198 complete

    Reveals the author's own experience of coming out as a gay man, of meeting and falling in love with the man who would become his husband, and of growing into a social and political activist.

    notions of normality and shifting forms of Native American governance and self-representation. Examining a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, andanthropological tracts), Mark Rifkin offers a cultural and literary history of the ways Native peoples have been inserted into Euramerican discourses of sexuality and how Native intellectuals have sought to reaffirm their peoples' sovereignty and self-determination.

    Yet as deeply personal as these poems are, they are universal enough to move any reader. Both sacred and profane, it is a compelling and confessional collection from a daring and ambitious voice in contemporary poetry.

    The Body Reader is a compelling, cutting-edge, and timely collection that provides a close look at the emergence of the study of the body.From prenatal genetic testing and "manscaping"; to televideo cybersex and the "meth economy," this innovative work digs deep into contemporary lifestyles and current events to cover key concepts and theories about the body. A combination of twenty one classic readings and original essays, the contributors highlight gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality, paying special attention to bodies that are at risk, bodies that challenge norms, and media representations of the body. Ultimately, The Body Reader makes it clear that the body is not neutral--it is the entry point into cultural and structural relationships, emotional and subjective experiences, and the biological realms of flesh and bone.Contributors: Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Dias, H. Hugh Floyd, Jr., Arthur Frank, Sander L. Gilman, Gillian Haddow, Richard Huggins, Matthew Immergut, L: ea Kent, Kristen Karlberg, Steve Kroll-Smith, Mary Kosut, Jarvis Jay Masters, Lisa Jean Moore, Tracey Owens Patton, William J. Peace, Jason Pine, Eric Plemons, Barbara Katz Rothman, Edward Slavishak, Phillip Vannini, and Dennis Waskul.

    Same-sex relations, transvestism and cross-gender behaviour have long been noted amongst a wide range of Indonesian peoples. This book explores the nature of gender diversity in Indonesia, and with the world's largest Muslim population, it examines Islam in this context. Based on extensive ethnographic research, it discusses in particular calalai - female-born individuals who identify as neither woman nor man; calabai - male-born individuals who also identify as neither man nor woman; and bissu - an order of shamans who embody female and male elements. The book examines the lives and roles of these variously gendered subjectivities in everyday life, including in low-status and high-status ritual such as wedding ceremonies, fashion parades, cultural festivals, Islamic recitations and shamanistic rituals. The book analyses the place of such subjectivities in relation to theories of gender, gender diversity and sexuality.

    Emma Donoghue brings to bear all her knowledge and grasp to examine how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross-dressing knights to contemporary murder stories. Donoghue looks at the work of those writers who have addressed the “unspeakable subject,” examining whether such desire between women is freakish or omnipresent, holy or evil, heartwarming or ridiculous as she excavates a long-obscured tradition of (inseparable) friendship between women, one that is surprisingly central to our cultural history.Donoghue writes about the half-dozen contrasting girl-girl plots that have been told and retold over the centuries, metamorphosing from generation to generation. What interests the author are the twists and turns of the plots themselves and how these stories have changed—or haven’t—over the centuries, rather than how they reflect their time and society. Donoghue explores the writing of Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Bowen, and others and the ways in which the woman who desires women has been cast as not quite human, as ghost or vampire.She writes about the ever-present triangle, found in novels and plays from the last three centuries, in which a woman and man compete for the heroine’s love . . . about how—and why—same-sex attraction is surprisingly ubiquitous in crime fiction, from the work of Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers to P. D. James.Finally, Donoghue looks at the plotline that has dominated writings about desire between women since the late nineteenth century: how a woman’s life is turned upside down by the realization that she desires another woman, whether she comes to terms with this discovery privately, “comes out of the closet,” or is publicly “outed.”She shows how this narrative pattern has remained popular and how it has taken many forms, in the works of George Moore, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith, and Rita Mae Brown, from case-history-style stories and dramas, in and out of the courtroom, to schoolgirl love stories and rebellious picaresques. A revelation of a centuries-old literary tradition—brilliant, amusing, and until now, deliberately overlooked.

    In the campy and carnivalesque Dreamplay, history is turned upside-down as a goddess travels through time to ‘save gay men from themselves’. In Landmarks, geography takes centrestage, as eight short plays explore the spaces that have been claimed, colonised, and trespassed by those at the margins of the mainstream. In Happy Endings, the playwright’s adaptation of the novel Peculiar Chris evolves into a meditation on the relationship between life and literature. With clear-eyed compassion and eloquent outrage, this collection of plays charts the coming-of-age of a community finding its voice.

    The Brigade embraced bank robberies and armed insurrection to wage war against what they felt was an unjust government. Through a wide array of surveillance reports, feature articles from mainstream and alternative presses, and the organization’s prolific, spontaneous communications and substitutive political statements, this collection reveals this body of propaganda and meditations on praxis.

    While increased longevity brings new hope, it also raises unanticipated challenges, particularly for gay men who never thought they would live this long: How do Ideal with all the physical changes? Who can I rely on as I get older? Is a relationship still in the cards for me? What about sex? How should I prepare for old age? A one-of-a-kind guide for gay men aging with HIV, Aging with HIV offers an upbeat, down-to-earth approach for adapting to change, whether driven by age, AIDS, or both. Psychotherapist James Masten and physician James Schmidtberger shed light on the many common assumptions and fears of agingwith HIV. Aging with HIV provides concrete solutions for facing midlife with a positive outlook, offering a wealth of advice for breaking unhealthy habits and coping mechanisms. The book describes the nine changes common to gay men as they age with HIV, discusses the four challenges of aging, andoffers a unique ten-step path to optimal aging with HIV, helping the reader to tailor the book's suggestions to the realities of their lives. Woven throughout the book are first-person narratives from men who recount what worked--and did not work--for them. In addition, Rapid Research, Fast Fact, and Self-Reflection boxes highlight the latest research and challenge readers to take stock of the present--and plan for the future.An invaluable tool to keep handy and to refer to often, Aging with HIV is an inviting, confident companion to navigating midlife and beyond with HIV.

    By examining representations of erotic and romantic love between women in popular films, elite and pulp fiction, and television dramas, Fran Martin shows how youthful same-sex love is often framed as a universal, even ennobling, feminine experience. She argues that a temporal logic dominates depictions of female homoeroticism, and she traces that logic across texts produced and consumed in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the twentieth century and the early twenty-first.

    In modern-day London, Robert searches for fulfillment in a world of sex, drugs, designer clothes, and hip gay clubs, during which he records his experience on his blog. Half a century earlier, Michael kept a secret diary in which he chronicled the dangers of negotiating the closet and the laws that could land himself and his friends and lovers in prison. Past and present collide when Robert moves into a new block of flats and discovers that history is alive and kicking on his doorstep. Funny, sexy, and moving, this tale demonstrates how much the world has changed, and remarkably, how much it can remain the same.

    Reading his journals, she learns of his dark days as a soldier on the Russian front and in war-torn Berlin. She cannot condone him for his crimes and secrets though, for while she is learning of his demons, she is discovering her own.

    While the cartographer is obsessed with keeping the world in order---her sister's unexpected visit is equated with a sign of chaos---her sister has a firm grip on the real world and, perhaps, a greater sense of order. Presented within a world of obsession and trauma, this narrative explores whether anyone is immune to the forces of destruction.

    Intending to refuel on gas and coffee and just keep driving, she is drawn instead to a pile of discarded carousel horses at the junkyard next door. Her find begins a ripple of gossip, mystery, and a restorative journey for the horses, herself, and the curious collection of townspeople taking the tumultuous ride of hope, patience and a chance to grab the brass ring.

    LGBT Studies. Silence is always a powerful statement, but even more so in the hands of Raymond Luczak, who demonstrates in his third collection what it's like to navigate between the warring languages of confusion and clarity. As a deaf gay man in the hearing world, he lends an unforgettable voice to his reality of ache and loss beyond the inadequate translation of sound.

    Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power--indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, "power" assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter-intuitive power--as a resource for the political present--found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.

    As a young actor and psychology student, Hector was seized by the military, held in secret, and tortured. He survived and went on to find meaning in his ordeal as he channeled his desire for revenge into nonviolent activism both in his homeland and during decades of exile in the United States.While challenging the State-sponsored causes of much suffering in the world, Hector reached out to some of society's most marginalized--at-risk and incarcerated youth, immigrants, and many others--using his theatrical skills and psychotherapeutic training to help people shape their own stories and identities. He sought to understand his own identity as well as that of one brother who was a revolutionary and another who was gay--and how his belief in personal integrity and political freedom might square with the realities of a country under the yoke of toxic ideologies. Hector was forced finally to examine his own motivations and commitments, and begin to heal his own gaping wounds.Shockingly honest, heartbreaking, and vibrantly told, The Blessing Next to the Wound is a passionate and evocative memoir that, amid enormous suffering and loss, is a full-throated affirmation of life.

    "'Philosophy never confesses / its delicate condition' writes Eleni Stecopoulos, as she takes on the inherently vulnerable role of investigative poet, asking whether the body, personal and politic, is irrevocably split off in its systemic afflictions. In this book Stecopoulos deploys the paradoxical force/fragility of poetry at all too familiar sites of our abjection. She does this with historically aware wisdom and humor. Can words help, not as palliative or consolation, but as source of transfiguring energy? 'Levitating girls' hover over 'lines gathering / all the intelligence' of an intellectually astute imagination steeped in, among many aesthetic legacies, that of ancient Greece, where the fact 'that the god descends on creaking pulleys in no way undermines the apparition.' This poet has the guts and strategy (persistent courage) of what she calls 'choric goals...waiting in the echo / for a tone, ' subtending towards love"--Joan Retallack

    In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism.Assembling evidence from diverse realms--visual culture (cartoons, greeting cards, costume design), medicine and botany (treatises and their illustrations), literature, letters, lexicography, and the visual arts--this book situates the metaphors that structure Sargent's paintings in a broad cultural context. It offers in-depth readings of particular paintings and analyzes related projects undertaken by Sargent's friends in the field of painting and in other disciplines, such as gynecology and literature.

    In Night Gears Simmers' first collection, her lines demand the reader's attention, whether she is cataloguing roadkill on a trip to the arctic, revelling in the intensity of a thunderstorm at a fire lookout, or unfolding the silent pain of small-town life.