Her fist book, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns opened the door to Gibson's unapologetic voice, yet The Madness Vase manages to take an even more intimate look at the subjects of family, war, spirituality, gender, grief and hope. The poems' topics range from hate crimes to playgrounds, from international conflict to hometowns, from falling in love to the desperation of loneliness. Gibson's work seizes us by the collar and hauls us inside some of her darkest moments, then releases out the other side. Moments later, we find ourselves inhaling words that fill us with light. Her luminous imagery is a buoy that allows us to resurface from her world clutching new possibilities of our own. Throughout her career, Gibson's poems have always been a call to social justice. But this collection goes beyond awareness. Her images linger in our psyches and entreat us to action. They challenge us to grow into our own skin. The journey may be raw at times but we are continuously left inspired, held, and certain we are not alone. By the time you finish reading The Madness Vase, you too will believe, "Folks like us/We've got shoulder blades that rust in the rain/But they are still G-sharp/Whenever our spinal chords are tuned to the key of redemption/So go ahead world/Pick us/To make things better."

    In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman’s developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women. Her emergence as a writer evolves at the same time and takes the narrator on a journey of addiction, self-destruction, and ultimately survival that finally comes in the shape of love and motherhood.

    The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle."An exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity.... [T]he contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition."—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz"The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California"Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation."—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep BadlyEric A. Stanley is a radical queer activist, outlaw academic, and experimental filmmaker.Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee and is an organizer with Critical Resistance.

    This approach assumes that the state and its legal, policing, and social services apparatus—even its policies and documents of belonging and non-belonging—are neutral and benevolent. While we all have to comply with the gender binaries set forth by regulatory bodies of law and administration, many trans people, especially the most marginalized, are even more at risk for poverty, violence, and premature death by virtue of those same "neutral" legal structures.Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law raises revelatory critiques of the current strategies pivoting solely on a "legal rights framework," but also points to examples of an organized grassroots trans movement that is demanding the most essential of legal reforms in addition to making more comprehensive interventions into dangerous systems of repression—and the administrative violence that ultimately determines our life chances. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.An attorney, educator, and trans activist, Dean Spade has taught classes on sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty and law at the City University of New York (CUNY), Seattle University, Columbia University, and Harvard. In 2002 he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective that provides free legal services and works to build trans resistance rooted in racial and economic justice.

    We wanted to hear about folks’ experiences confronting abusers, both with cops and courts and with methods outside the criminal justice system."—The Revolution Starts at Home collectiveLong demanded and urgently needed, The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities finally breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the “secret” of intimate violence within social justice circles. This watershed collection of stories and strategies tackles the multiple forms of violence encountered right where we live, love, and work for social change—and delves into the nitty-gritty on how we might create safety from abuse without relying on the state. Drawing on over a decade of community accountability work, along with its many hard lessons and unanswered questions, The Revolution Starts at Home offers potentially life-saving alternatives for creating survivor safety while building a movement where no one is left behind. Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic. Kundiman Fellow Jai Dulani is an interdisciplinary storyteller and activist/educator. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of Consensual Genocide. Andrea Smith is the author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.

    and wakes up the next morning to find a lanky, dread-locked vagrant named TJ in his kitchen.TJ claims that the two have made a drunken pact to travel from Berkeley, California to Providence, Rhode Island. As it happens, Amal promised his sister he'd be in Providence for her graduation the following week. As for TJ... well, he's got 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.Volume 1 collects the first 13 chapters of EK Weaver's free online graphic novel.

    Jenna McGovern has spent her whole life training for the stage. She’s taken dance classes, voice lessons, and even earned her performance degree from one of the most prestigious musical theater programs in the nation. At graduation, she’s stunned when a chance audition lands her a prime supporting role in the hottest Broadway touring production in the country. In more exciting news, Jenna discovers acclaimed television star Adrienne Kenyon is headlining the production. Jenna settles easily in to life on tour and has a promising career laid out in front of her, if only she plays her cards right. She’s waited for this opportunity her entire life and will let nothing stand in her way. The one thing she didn’t prepare for, however, was Adrienne. Her new costar is talented, beautiful, generous, and the utmost professional. As the two women grow closer onstage and off, they must learn how to fit each other into a demanding lifestyle full of unexpected twists and difficult decisions. But is Jenna ready to sacrifice what she’s worked so hard for in exchange for a shot

    Managing her condition means living by a strict routine, and more importantly, abstaining from intimate relationships with human beings. Selene is convinced that love and friendship can only bring her pain.Forensic pathologist Eve Thomas is well-acquainted with the pain of romantic love. Swearing off relationships after having her heart broken by a cheating ex, Eve throws herself into her work: catching murderers. When Selene comes to her aid after an attack by a masked man in Golden Gate Park, Eve is shocked by how powerfully she is drawn to her mysterious savior.Shaken by her own feelings for Eve, Selene is even more terrified to realize she isn’t even close to being the scariest monster stalking San Francisco. There is someone out in the city who is killing for pleasure, and his next target is the one woman he thinks might be able to stop him: Eve

    In fourteen linked essays, If You Knew Then What I Know Now reinvents the memoir with all-encompassing empathy—for bully and bullied alike. A father pitches baseballs at his hapless son and a grandmother watches with silent forbearance as the same slim, quiet boy sets the table dressed in a blue satin dress. Another essay explores origins of the word "faggot" and its etymological connection to "flaming queen." This deft collection maps the unremarkable landscapes of childhood with compassion and precision, allowing awkwardness its own beauty. This is essay as an argument for the intimate—not the sensational—and an embrace of all the skinned knees in our stumble toward adulthood.Ryan Van Meter grew up in Missouri and studied English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. After graduating, he lived in Chicago for ten years and worked in advertising. He holds an MA in creative writing from DePaul University and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. His essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, and Fourth Genre, among others, and selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009. In the summer of 2009, he was awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in California where he is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco.

    Matthew Shepard’s death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of the town, the event was deeply personal. In the aftermath, Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie and conducted more than 200 interviews with its people. From the transcripts, the playwrights constructed an extraordinary chronicle of life in the town after the murder. Since its premiere, The Laramie Project has become a modern classic and one of the most-performed theater pieces in America.         Now, in this expanded edition, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later adds an essential sequel to the original work. Revisiting the town a decade after the tragedy, the troupe finds a community grappling with its legacy and its place in history. The two plays together comprise an epic and deeply moving theatrical cycle that explores the life of an American town over the course a decade.

    The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes--like "gleeful gay killers," "lethal lesbians," "disease spreaders," and "deceptive gender benders"--to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.

    Many young people endure bullying that makes them feel they have nowhere to turn--especially LGBT kids and teens who often hide their sexuality for fear of being bullied. Without openly gay mentors, they don't know what the future may hold. After a number of suicides by LGBT students who were bullied in school, syndicated columnist Dan Savage uploaded a video to YouTube with his partner, Terry Miller, to inspire hope for LGBT youth. The video launched the 'It Gets Better Project', initiating a worldwide phenomenon. This is a collection of expanded essays and new material from celebrities and everyday people who have posted videos of encouragement, as well as new contributors. We can show LGBT youth the happiness, potential, and positivity their lives will have if they can get through their teen years. "It Gets Better" reminds teenagers in the LGBT community that they are not alone--and it WILL get better.

    Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

    Through Texas and Tennessee, Alabama and the riverbeds of the Mississippi, these poems wrap themselves in cloaks of masks and comfort; garments we learn are flammable if we stand too close to flames.

    Cindy writes her zine like she is figuring out the human condition. She makes writing about the simplest and most common things--playing music, childhood, cooking, or sex--resonate with universal understanding. She helps us make sense of more complex things like the satisfaction from doing useful work, natural curiosity, the ability to use logic, gender dynamics, introspection, the need for challenge and change, combating depression and creating art and literature. She shares and explores the emotions involved with having an abortion, rape, dealing with the death of family, or sexual harassment in a context that is enlightening and personal, feeling like a close friend opening up to you. What's most impressive though is that she relates these things into every article in her zine seamlessly.

    Although killing them is no longer an option, he's as determined as ever to stop the spread of vampirism.Wild Bill is a lover, not a fighter-so he's tickled when Michael's new agenda, to dispense condoms and sterile phlebotomy gear among vampires, replaces the old "heads will roll" approach. It takes courage to track down vamps in their own territory and deliver a lecture on safe sex, and more importantly, safe bloodletting. Michael's never been short on audacity...but he's finding that he and Wild Bill aren't the only ones with agendas.

    She later sang with The Gr'ups and Cypher in the Snow, and toured with Sister Spit, a raucous all-woman group of writers headed by Michelle Tea.The Vicious Red Relic, Love, re-enacts Springer's relationship with [Gil], a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she'd tested positive for HIV. Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.

    Its declarative sentences—seductive, abject, caustic, moving, informative, and utterly inventive—herald a new world, one in which we are blessedly 'here with outfits like strings of light and no future.' I hail its weirdness, its 'armpit frankess,' its indelible portrait of occulted relation, and above all, its impeccable music."—Maggie NelsonConstruction becomes quiet, the saw buzz and the bang little white wisps that stop at my edges. We'll get used to most anything, at least enough to keep going. The will of the wisp. I want to poke a hole in my words so that people notice you are not here. Comfortable divots you could fill some day, if you wanted to. My mother sighs, my friends sigh. "You're so sad," they say. I'm not, I'm really not. I'm just trying to breathe fully. The shadow of the mountain turns with the day, encroaching. When it settles on me I put the hammer down and walk to where it is still warm.In Syzygy, Beauty, T Fleischmann builds an essay of prose blocks, weaving together observations on art, the narrator's construction of a house, and a direct address to a lover. Playing with scale and repetition, we are kept off-center, and therefore always looking, as the speaker leads us through an intimate relationship that is complicated and deepened by multiple partners, gender transitions, and itinerancy.

    LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. In these poems, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of color resist and transform violence through love and desire. Remembering and testifying about the damage caused by the racial profiling of South Asian and Arab people post 9/11, border crossings and internal and external wars in Sri Lanka and the diaspora, LOVE CAKE also documents the persistence of survival and beauty--especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of color loving and desiring. LOVE CAKE maps the joys and challenges of reclaiming the body and sexuality after violence, examining a family history of violence with compassion and celebrating the resilient, specific ways we create new families, take our bodies back, love, fight, and transform violence.

    But over time it can change.The hot Texas nights were lonely for Ben before his heart began beating to the rhythm of two words; Tim Wyman. By all appearances, Tim had the perfect body and ideal life, but when a not-so-accidental collision brings them together, Ben discovers that the truth is rarely so simple. If winning Tim’s heart was an impossible quest, keeping it would prove even harder as family, society, and emotion threaten to tear them apart.Something Like Summer is a love story spanning a decade and beyond as two boys discover what it means to be friends, lovers, and sometimes even enemies.

    This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialogue—a “writing in conversation”—among a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few. Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. By answering critical turns in Indigenous scholarship that center Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, contributors join in reshaping Native studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and Indigenous feminisms. Based on the reality that queer Indigenous people “experience multilayered oppression that profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival,” this book is at once an imagining and an invitation to the reader to join in the discussion of decolonizing queer Indigenous research and theory and, by doing so, to partake in allied resistance working toward positive change.

    It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book’s publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two.Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today’s Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century. Contributors:, Indira Allegra, Louise Esme Cruz, Paula Gunn Allen, Qwo-Li Driskill, Laura Furlan, Janice Gould, Carrie House, Daniel Heath Justice, Maurice Kenny, Michael Koby, M. Carmen Lane, Jaynie Lara, Chip Livingston, Luna Maia, Janet McAdams, Deborah Miranda, Daniel David Moses, D. M. O’Brien, Malea Powell, Cheryl Savageau, Kim Shuck, Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp, James Thomas Stevens, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, William Raymond Taylor, Joel Waters, and Craig Womack

    Moraga, one of the most influential figures in Chicana/o, feminist, queer, and indigenous activism and scholarship. Combining moving personal stories with trenchant political and cultural critique, the writer, activist, teacher, dramatist, mother, daughter, comadre, and lesbian lover looks back on the first ten years of the twenty-first century.Moraga considers decade-defining public events such as 9/11 and the campaign and election of Barack Obama, and she explores socioeconomic, cultural, and political phenomena closer to home, sharing her fears about raising her son amid increasing urban violence and the many forms of dehumanization faced by young men of color. Moraga describes her deepening grief as she loses her mother to Alzheimer’s; pays poignant tribute to friends who passed away, including the sculptor Marsha Gómez and the poets Alfred Arteaga, Pat Parker, and Audre Lorde; and offers a heartfelt essay about her personal and political relationship with Gloria Anzaldúa.Thirty years after the publication of Anzaldúa and Moraga’s collection This Bridge Called My Back, a landmark of women-of-color feminism, Moraga’s literary and political praxis remains motivated by and intertwined with indigenous spirituality and her identity as Chicana lesbian. Yet aspects of her thinking have changed over time. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness reveals key transformations in Moraga’s thought; the breadth, rigor, and philosophical depth of her work; her views on contemporary debates about citizenship, immigration, and gay marriage; and her deepening involvement in transnational feminist and indigenous activism. It is a major statement from one of our most important public intellectuals.

    Rubin, a pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies since the 1970s. Rubin first rose to prominence in 1975 with the publication of “The Traffic in Women,” an essay that had a galvanizing effect on feminist thinking and theory. In another landmark piece, “Thinking Sex,” she examined how certain sexual behaviors are constructed as moral or natural, and others as unnatural. That essay became one of queer theory’s foundational texts. Along with such canonical work, Deviations features less well-known but equally insightful writing on subjects such as lesbian history, the feminist sex wars, the politics of sadomasochism, crusades against prostitution and pornography, and the historical development of sexual knowledge. In the introduction, Rubin traces her intellectual trajectory and discusses the development and reception of some of her most influential essays. Like the book it opens, the introduction highlights the major lines of inquiry pursued for nearly forty years by a singularly important theorist of sex, gender, and culture.

    Her plant allies among the nightshades are described in a full herbarium.The attractions and dangers for both men and women who make cult to her are presented, as are her many faces. Pomba Gira has origins in the witchcraft of Portugal, the Basque Country as well as Congo and the native influences of Brazil.The witchcraft fusion makes her cult particularly accessible to Westerners whose own traditions share much ground with Quimbanda.Frisvold carefully unravels the skeins, revealing her origin in historical figures such as Maria Padilha, but more deeply still through archetype and myth to the very essence of her skin shedding nature.He finds the origin of her name in Congo, the cult of divine possession amongst the slave camps of Brazil, and brings us through to her more modern manifestations and his personal work with the Queen of the Fig Tree in Hell. As an initiate and devotee, he gives an insider's view with the same respect and experience he demonstrates in Palo Mayombe: The Garden of Blood and Bones.We walk through the Queendoms of Lyre, Cemetery, Sepulchres, Streets, Crossroads, Wilderness, Soul, Oceanshore and Calunga.The workings of twenty four different Pomba Giras are given, from Cigana the gypsy to the split skull face of Rosa Caveira.Through the razor blades in honey, the cigarette smoke and the sweet anisette spilt in the graveyard, Pomba Gira takes seductive shape.Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold is an anthropologist and psychologist who over the course of the last fifteen years been studying, both academically and practically, African and Afro-derived cults in the New World. This has led to a multiplicity of initiations into Vodou, both from Benin and Haiti, Santeria, Kimbanda, Palo Mayombe and Ifá. He makes part of the council of elders in the Ogboni society of Abeokuta, Nigeria. This is a significant expansion of the material first presented by Frisvold in his early work on the subject Kiumbanda which focussed on Exu. He has for the last decade lived in Brazil where his studies and involvement in traditional forms of metaphysics, faith, cult and witchcraft is a constant theme in his life.

    The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.

    Full of highs, lows and sex thrown in the middle of, "black girl love" contains over twenty-five stories and poems covering life, love and sex, featuring characters you will love, hate and want to fuck all at the same time.If you love "black girl love" then you will love Kat's second tale weaving down loves gentle path in "SistaGirl", released August 2013.

    Take Me There is an erotica collection unlike any other that celebrates the pleasure, heat, and diversity of transgender and genderqueer sexualities. The power of seeing and being seen is a central theme in the anthology; it’s not simply about passing or not passing (an idea often explored with transgender characters), but about being acknowledged and desired in a sexual context.The book takes you from San Francisco to Israel, from heartache to lust, from stranger sex to a 10 year anniversary, from ballet shoes to butt plug bondage tables, from fumbling teenagers to leatherclad bears, from MTF and FTM—and in between and beyond.Featuring renowned authors Kate Bornstein (Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation), Patrick Califia (Speaking Sex to Power), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Ivan Coyote (Missed Her), Julia Serrano (Whipping Girl), Laura Antoniou (The Marketplace), Helen Boyd (My Husband Betty), Rachel Kramer Bussel (Gotta Have It), Toni Amato (Pinned Down by Pronouns), Alicia E. Goranson (Supervillianz), filmmaker Tobi Hill-Meyer, musician Rahne Alexander, songwriter Shawna Virago, bloggers Andrea Zanin and Sinclair Sexsmith, and more.

    Congress. However, Bijal's first unforeseen obstacle is her profound and unexpected attraction to their opponent—incumbent Congresswoman Colleen O'Bannon—who is outspoken, charismatic, and openly lesbian.An even greater hurdle is the subterfuge and pretense that pervades the climate in Washington, D.C., where small missteps are readily painted as major gaffes, and lies are explained away as "in the public's best interest." During the heated campaign, both Bijal and Colleen struggle not to cross the lines of propriety—and perhaps more importantly, their party lines.

    Early the next year, Madonna had one of the biggest hits of her career, with the single Vogue, and when Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning arrived in cinemas the same year, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, the mainstream got hip to New York City's extraordinary ball culture, from which the film and McLaren and Madonna's songs had arisen. Paris Is Burning documented a gay ballroom scene that emerged in Harlem in the mid-1980s, which drew African American and Latino gay and transgender communities to compete against one another for their dancing skills, the verisimilitude of their drag and their ability to walk on the runway. Photographer Chantal Regnault spent many years recording this scene, from which the dance style known as voguing arose. A visual riot of fashion, polysexuality and subversive style, Voguing and the Ballroom Scene of New York 1989-1992 is also an extraordinary document on sexuality and race. The wild years of voguing are vividly captured in hundreds of Regnault's amazing, previously unpublished photographs. The book also features interviews with key figures from the movement, essays, flyers and ephemera. Photographer and documentarist Chantal Regnault was born in France. She left Paris after the 1968 uprisings and lived in New York for the next 15 years. At the end of the 1980s she became immersed in Harlem's voguing scene. Also around this time, Regnault developed an interest in Haitian voodoo culture and began to divide her time between Haiti and New York. Her widely published photographs have appeared in major magazines and newspapers, including Vanity Fair and the New York Times.

    The original trilogy is available here for the first time as a fully revised one-volume novel. The story of the struggle for the green world of the Everland, home of the forest-dwelling Kyn, is an adventure tale that bends genre and gender.

    So we set out to make our own.the GENDER book is a fun, colorful, community-based resource, which illustrates the beautiful diversity of gender - a gender 101 for anyone and everyone.

    But not only that: Michaelson also shows that the vast majority of our shared religious traditions support the full equality and dignity of LGBT people. In this accessible, passionate, and provocative book, Michaelson argues for equality, not despite religion but because of it.

    Rarely has a book about lust been full of so much love, conflict, and intelligence. If you think you already know what's in these stories, or you think you don't need to know, you're wrong."—Patrick Califa, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of TransgenderismExploring the crossroads of gender and sexuality, Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary offers unusually engaging narratives that create a raw and honest depiction of dating, sex, love, and relationships among members of the gender variant community. FTM, MTF, thirdgender, genderqueer, and other non-traditional identities beyond the gender binary of traditional male and female are included in this often heartwarming, occasionally heartbreaking, always heartfelt groundbreaking anthology. From monogamous love and marriage to anonymous sex and one-night hook-ups (and everything in between), these stories offer readers insight into the precarious emotional and practical mechanics of intimacy among gender-variant experiences.Features contributions from award-winning authors including Julia Serano, Sassafras Lowery, and Max Valerio, alongside outstanding new writing by Tribe 8 guitarist and acclaimed film director Silas Howard, activist Joelle Ruby Ryan, filmmaker Ashley Altadonna, SisterSpit alum Cooper Lee Bombardier, and many other unique and talented voices.

    It uses research, life stories, and artistic expression—including essays, case studies, poetry, news clips, songs, fiction, memoirs, letters, interviews, short film scripts, and photographs—to examine dominant and deviant sexualities and investigate the intersections between sex, power, masculinities, and femininities. It also opens a space, particularly for young people, to think about African sexualities in different ways.

    Its update rate is somewhat irregular.The story (not counting the prologue) begins when Leona, a jobless belle, and her neurotic friend Colin buy a poster labeled "Prague Race" from a strange shop that is manned by even stranger people. Soon enough odd roach-like creatures start appearing all over Leona's apartment and the group of friends (with gentle animal-lover Miko completing the Trio) find themselves involved with weird shenanigans that surround the shop, and the "other side" that it appears to be a portal to.

    The work interrogates the social and linguistic space between regimes of power enacted on the body, and thereby the soul.

    The major texts in sexuality studies, including queer theory, rarely mention disability, and foundational texts in disability studies do not discuss sex in much detail. What if "sex" and "disability" were understood as intimately related concepts? And what if disabled people were seen as both subjects and objects of a range of erotic desires and practices? These are among the questions that this collection's contributors engage. From multiple perspectives—including literary analysis, ethnography, and autobiography—they consider how sex and disability come together and how disabled people negotiate sex and sexual identities in ableist and heteronormative culture. Queering disability studies, while also expanding the purview of queer and sexuality studies, these essays shake up notions about who and what is sexy and sexualizable, what counts as sex, and what desire is. At the same time, they challenge conceptions of disability in the dominant culture, queer studies, and disability studies.Contributors. Chris Bell, Michael Davidson, Lennard J. Davis, Michel Desjardins, Lezlie Frye, Rachael Groner, Kristen Harmon, Michelle Jarman, Alison Kafer, Riva Lehrer, Nicole Markotić, Robert McRuer, Anna Mollow, Rachel O’Connell, Russell Shuttleworth, David Serlin, Tobin Siebers, Abby L. Wilkerson

    The queer anarchist project embodied by Bash Back! is first and foremost a refusal of victimhood and a reclamation of the violence taken from us by progressive ideology and used against us by queerbashers and the State. It was a crucial shift for Bash Back! to break with those who refused to recognize the importance of this reclamation. It served to cohere and solidify the insurrectional queer tendency around the question of violence…

     Glen Retief's childhood was at once recognizably ordinary--and brutally unusual.Raised in the middle of a game preserve where his father worked, Retief's warm nuclear family was a preserve of its own, against chaotic forces just outside its borders: a childhood friend whose uncle led a death squad, while his cultured grandfather quoted Shakespeare at barbecues and abused Glen's sister in an antique-filled, tobacco-scented living room.But it was when Retief was sent to boarding school, that he was truly exposed to human cruelty and frailty. When the prefects were caught torturing younger boys, they invented "the jack bank," where underclassmen could save beatings, earn interest on their deposits, and draw on them later to atone for their supposed infractions. Retief writes movingly of the complicated emotions and politics in this punitive all-male world, and of how he navigated them, even as he began to realize that his sexuality was different than his peers'.

    A worthy successor to James Schuyler, Trinidad writes soulfully and sometimes photorealistically about the melancholy threshold where dolls and stars become inner objects—dirty, glamorous, destructible. Jacqueline Susann meets Sei Shonagon? Trinidad manages to combine neo-formalist abstraction with dripping gorgeous figuration: Bonnard's wet dream."—Wayne Koestenbaum"This is a volume celebratory in tone, panoramic in scope, funny, and genuinely moving. Trinidad is at the center of what's relevant in his art. And this collection is more vital and more enjoyable than any single performance he has given thus far."—D.A. Powell"Trinidad attends to the present to see into the past with such needle point precision it's like encountering a perfectly appointed movie set where personal memory crosses intimately with cultural memory. Poetic form in Trinidad's hands is a metaphor for staking a claim on the material world even as it slips away in a shimmery Hollywood dissolve—a desperate, doomed reclamation of all that can never be held long enough."—Robyn Schiff"Utterly deadpan and astonishingly fine" is how Publishers Weekly described the poems of David Trinidad. And here is the collection all David Trinidad fans have been waiting for—the first book to have works from all his previous books along with forty new poems: Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems.

    If you're looking for a funny, well-written novel . . . give this a try!"—AfterEllen.comJust when you thought it was safe to pitch your tent, the Santora family shows up. Lisa's taken over a rundown campground, baby sister Marie's been dumped (again!) by the actress, and the Santoras don't know the meaning of minding their own business. When the whole clan decides to fix things for their girls, it's a hilarious recipe for havoc. Camptown Ladies is the sequel to Greetings From Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer.Mari SanGiovani lives the crazy Italian family lifestyle and writes about it like no one else.

    George Platt Lynes was the preeminent celebrity portraitist of his day, shooting for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and creating distinctive photographs of iconic cultural figures such as Diana Vreeland, Salvador Dalí, and Orson Welles. But he also produced a separate body of work, kept largely hidden during his lifetime: photographs of the male nude. Many of these photos were shot in the studio and, like his fashion and dance work, were painstakingly posed and lit. They have a cinematic allure that evokes 1940s Hollywood and the lost era of New York’s café society. Many seem to illustrate some unwritten mythology. Others reveal private obsessions of the photographer, who was always alert to the sculptural qualities of a young man at his most vital. This is the only Platt Lynes book to focus on the male nude images in a comprehensive and carefully considered manner. It is the first book to be published with the cooperation of the artist’s estate, which has provided unprecedented access to institutional and private collections, including the Kinsey Institute and the Guggenheim Museum. The result: a trove of unpublished images that are sure to cause a sensation.

    I hope you learn a little and laugh A LOT!

    Told in a series of prose poems, "Nickels'"lyrical and inventive language conveys the dissociative states born of a world formed by persistent and brutal incest and homophobia. The dissociative states enable the child's survival and, ultimately, the adult's healing. The story is both heartbreaking and triumphant. Nickels is the groundbreaking debut of Minneapolis-area author and artist Christine Stark. "Christine Stark has crafted a language and a diction commensurate with the shredding of consciousness that is a consequence of childhood sexual abuse. She brings us a wholly original voice in a riveting novel of desperation and love. Every sentence vibrates with a terrible beauty. Every sentence brings the news."--Patricia Weaver Francisco, author of "Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery" "To be taken into the mind of a child can be an enchanting adventure, but to be taken into the mind of a child who is abused, confused, and taken for granted is a lingering, livid journey. I applaud her fortitude to bring an olden--too long ignored--truth out of the darkness with blazing, innovative light."--MariJo Moore, author of "The Diamond Doorknob" "In "Nickels," Christine Stark, powerfully portrays the story of abuse and its impact on our lives. When this beautifully written and compelling story leaves, you are left wanting more. It's riveting; a book that will capture you from the beginning and carry you through the end. Everyone should read this book."--Olga Trujillo, author of "The Sum of My Parts" From the Reflections of America Series at Modern History Press http://www.ModernHistoryPress.com Learn more at http://www.ChristineStark.com FIC044000 Fiction: Contemporary WomenFIC018000 Fiction: LesbianSOC010000 Social Science: Feminism & Feminist Theory

    They expose the absurdity of our rituals, our definitions of sexuality, and above all, our expectations of happiness and self-fulfillment.       Cain’s protagonists are destined to suffer—and sometimes enjoy—the consequences of their own restless discontent.  In the title story, Lisa, a city dweller, is dissatisfied with her life and relationships. Her attempt at self-rejuvenation takes her on a hiking excursion through a foreign land. Lisa discovers a remote village where the ritualized and generous bisexual love of its inhabitants entrances her. She begins to abandon thoughts of home.      In “Cultivation,” Frances, a divorced mother strapped with massive credit card debt, has become an expert at growing pot. When she packs her three children and twelve pounds of homegrown into the minivan and travels cross-country to sell the stash, their journey becomes one of anguish, revelation, and ultimately transformation. “Cultivation,” like many of the stories in The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, follows a trail of broken relationships and the unfulfilled promises of modern American life.       Told in precise, evocative prose, these memorable stories illuminate the human condition from a compelling, funny, and entirely original perspective.

    She writes about queerness, Jewish heritage, and embodied femininity, with a critique of power that blends humor, the mess of confession, and a reverence for tension. Ellis is a new poet to watch out for.

    Despite his doctor's proclamations to the contrary and rumors of a promising new HIV drug cocktail, all it takes is one glance into the mirror to tell Gabe everything he needs to know. His ass, once the talk of West Hollywood, now looks suspiciously like a Shar-Pei, prompting even more talk around town.Back in his 20's, life had been so easy. Caught up in the 1980's world of LOVE! MONEY! SEX!, Gabe thought he'd have it all. But every effort to better himself ended in self-sabotage, and every attempt at love left him with only a fake number, scrawled on a realtor's notepad. The only happiness he could remember was in high school, where he'd met Keith, his first love. Only Keith had recognized the goodness within, and knew of the brutal attack Gabe had faced, the effects of which still rule his life today.Now almost 40, and with the clock ticking, Gabe begins to finally peel back the layers and tackle his demons - with a little help from the music of the Divine Miss M and his mom's new wife, a country music-loving priest.

    With a cast that includes patron saints for country girls and criminals, a Revolutionary War hero, the Wolfman, a sin-eater, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash, these poems swagger and sulk through an educational film turned film noir, replete with femme fatales in love.The Alphabet Conspiracy is about the ways in which language itself can function as a plot, keeping us estranged from ourselves, but also about the way it can be used as a tool for recovering our truest selves.

    His Friend Sally is a girl who is attracted to Kyle but is at a loss to know why he doesn’t seem to notice her.Fed up with not knowing what his problem is, she confronts him and is astounded when he confesses his inner turmoil.Completely unaware that Kyle has always felt he should have been a girl, Sally rises to the challenge and begins to help Kyle become the person he always wanted to be.Fearing the reaction of family, friends and the world at large, Sally devises a cunning plan for Kyle to become his Swedish cousin, Kayla. But Kayla is everything the shy and retiring Kyle is not, and not unreasonably, she begins to be noticed... by just about everyone.They have no alternative to bring his parents in on the act, and they in turn draw in an unexpected ally in the form of the school's headmaster.Then things get very complicated.A gentle tale of yearning, discovery and love.

    Three lies. One chance to tell the truth. For thirty years Foreign Correspondent Greer Madison has competed brilliantly in a man’s world. But the hardships of a life spent reporting from war zones have caught up to her and she returns to the States to recuperate at the home of her best friend, Darlene Richardson. Darlene has secrets of her own and for the first time in their thirty-year friendship keeps Greer at a distance. Kate, Darlene’s spontaneous, willful daughter is desperate to bring her struggling family together after the death of her brother, Chris. The bonds the three women share are strained, reforged, and ultimately strengthened as they struggle to choose between the lives they think they should have and the lives they want. But first they must choose whether to stay on the safety of the known shore or to dive into the uncharted but healing waters of The River Within.

    Loren A. Olson has frequently been asked two questions: How could you not know that you were gay until the age of forty? Wasn't your marriage just a sham to protect yourself at your wife’s expense? In Finally Out, Dr. Olson answers these questions by telling the inspiring story of his evolving sexuality, into which he intelligently weaves psychological concepts and gay history. This book is a powerful exploration of human sexuality, particularly the sexuality of mature men who, like Dr. Olson, lived a large part of their lives as straight men—sometimes long after becoming aware of their same-sex attractions. Readers will come to understand: - That there is no universal model for coming out - Why many older LGBTQ men came out late, do not come out at all, or come out to varying degrees in different environments - How stigma has created mental health problems for isolated and closeted men who have sex with men, particularly in geographical areas and cultures where there is little or no acceptance of homosexuality - How sexual function changes but perhaps even improves for older men - That aging creates opportunities that one has never had and may never have again, e.g., freedom from the tyranny of ambition - That some people consistently prefer an older sexual partner and this can lead to stable, intergenerational relationships - How same-sex sexual activity was considered prior to the Stonewall uprising in 1969 contrasted with the way it is perceived after Stonewall - How age, culture, geographical location, heterosexual marriage, and children impact a person’s decision to come out - Why "conversion therapy" does not work and may be harmful - The difference between homophobia and homonaïveté - The archetypes of self-identified straight men who seek occasional or regular sex with other men - How to overcome the shame and guilt experienced by men who are sexually attracted to other men

    The Horizontal Poet won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award.Jan Steckel is a retired Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician, an activist for disability and bisexual rights, a poet, and a writer. Her poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review and elsewhere. She has won multiple national awards for her chapbooks and poems and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband, Hew Wolff.

    More to the point, the field of children's literature needs such a collection."---Katherine Capshaw Smith, University of ConnecticutIn spite of the growing critical interest concerning gender and sexual nonnormativity in and around narratives written for young readers, no book-length volume on the subject has yet appeared. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature is the first collection of essays dedicated to LGBTQ issues in children's literature. Bringing together significant essays and introducing new work, Over the Rainbow is intended to serve both as a scholarly reference and as a textbook for students of children's studies; gender/queer studies; and related disciplines such as English, history, sociology, and education. Editors Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd showcase important essays on the subject of LGBTQ children's and young adult literature ---including Harriet the Spy, Rainbow Boys, Little Women, the Harry Potter series, and A Separate Peace---while providing a provisional history of both the literature and the scholarship and examining the field's origins, current status, and possible future orientations.Over the Rainbow collects essays by Jes Battis, Robin Bernstein, Thomas Crisp, June Cummins, Elizabeth A. Ford, Sherrie A. Inness, Christine A. Jenkins, Vanessa Wayne Lee, Biddy Martin, Robert McRuer, Claudia Nelson, Jody Norton, Tison Pugh, Catherine Tosenberger, Eric L. Tribunella, Roberta Seelinger Trites, and Andrea Wood. These pieces will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of children's literature, American Studies, LGBTQ and queer studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.Cover art: Original title page of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Frank L. Baum, illustrated by W. W. Denslow. New York: George M. Hill, 1900.

    Adam said that he was gay, and that he was leaving The United Methodist Church, which had just pronounced that “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” could not be ordained. He would not be part of a community that excluded him. Creech found himself instinctively supporting Adam, telling him that he was sure that God loved and accepted him as he was. Adam’s Gift is Creech’s inspiring first-person account of how that conversation transformed his life and ministry.Adam’s visit prompted Creech to re-evaluate his belief that homosexuality was a sin, and to research the scriptural basis for the church’s position. He determined that the church was mistaken, that scriptural translations and interpretations had been botched and dangerously distorted. As a Christian, Creech came to believe that discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people was morally wrong. This understanding compelled him to perform same-gender commitment ceremonies, which conflicted with church directives. Creech was tried twice by The United Methodist Church, and, after the second trial, his ordination credentials were revoked. Adam’s Gift is a moving story and an important chapter in the unfinished struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil and human rights.

    There are some weird and unexplored thought patterns happening here. Gurba is a fierce pioneer in the gooey guts of our emotional and sexual zeitgeist."Myriam Gurba just blows me away. Her wit, her perversion, her sharp female smarts, her total fearlessness. I gasp and I gasp as I read her work because I can't believe she said that! It's not shocking, it's a relief. Okay it's a little bit shocking, too. All the best writing makes you come undone a little and Myriam is not afraid to stick her fingernails into your psyche and pull." --Michelle Tea"Wish You Were Me is funny. Achingly funny. Uncomfortably funny, and that's the best kind of funny. It's the kind of humor you'll never forget and it's the kind of book you'll find necessary to subject your friends to." --Mary Van NoteMyriam Gurba lives in Long Beach, California and is the author of Dahlia Season (Future Tense/Manic D Press), which won the Edmund White Award for debut fiction. She has toured and performed with Sister Spit and her writing has appeared in anthologies and magazines such as make/shift and Garage.

    Irwin Krieger is a clinical social worker with many years of experience helping transgender teens. This book brings you the insights gained from his work with these teenagers and their families. According to the author, "Today's teens have access to a wealth of information on the internet. Teenagers who are wondering about gender identity soon find out what it means to be transgender or transsexual. Parents, on the other hand, know little about this topic. When a teenager declares he or she is transgender, parents fear that their child is confused and is choosing a life fraught with danger. I wrote this book to help parents of transgender teens gain an understanding of this complex subject." "Helping Your Transgender Teen" begins with the basic information you and your family need. The central chapters of the book address the fears and concerns most parents of transgender teens share. The final chapters guide you through the steps you can take to discover what is best for your child. Although written for parents, this book is also useful for pediatricians, therapists, educators and others who work with teenagers and young adults. "Helping Your Transgender Teen" provides answers to many of your questions about adolescent gender identity.

    But one crucial element was missing in the life of the butch Chicana lesbian—the sperm. This candid and humorous memoir follows Karleen’s challenges, adventures, successes, failures, humiliations, and triumphs while attempting to fulfill her dream of becoming a mother. Though at times lighthearted, such as when Karleen considers all of the potential options for ferilization—some anonymous, some not—it is a weighty topic, and one that will change her life forever. The book is her confession of desire, humility, and a search for perfection.

    But without a doubt Tom of Finland has to be included, the man whose amazing drawings tell us everything about love, lust and life of those hunks who have a good heart and live a simple life. Tom of Finland - Life and Work of a Gay Hero is a detailed anthology which is dedicated to his body of work from its early beginnings to the last years. With many drawings, a lot of photos and an extensive biography it gives you a portrait of this unique artist, which is as many-sided and life-embracing as the artist himself.

    Take a common factor: - both recognised that they had been born into the wrong gender. As they grow up, they realise that their bodies are in imminent danger of changing into something neither wants.Result: - Two very unhappy souls.Their dreams are the only place they can find solace. Then they start to dream of each other, and to get a little glimpse of the other’s life.Over time they learn how to crossover at will and not just when asleep. They start to leave childhood behind as puberty beacons. The lines become blurred, who is where?Solution: - One of them takes the bold step and suggests they try to live each other’s lives.Will it work?

    And with possession comes the animation, the childlike doll-play, the habitation by foreign spirits. Part of the power and pathos of these investigations lies in their restraint and tonal complexity, the asbestos of their wit, the intelligence of detail that illuminates even as it mystifies the closeness with which objectification haunts the desiring imagination. A rare thing. This book will widen the gaze that reads it.” Bruce Bond, author of Radiography and Peal“Brand: as in a mark. Branded: as in burned on an animal, a criminal, someone enslaved. Branding: as in a trademarking, a commodification. In Laura Madeline Wiseman’s terrifying Branding Girls , the poet demonstrates that our femininity is defined by advertising, name brands, and material desires. From the figure of the Japanese “elevator girls,” we learn that contemporary women are in danger of becoming a series of negations: ‘Not geisha. Not madams… / Not call girls / or masseuses. Not school girls / in pleated skirts.’ I love this collection for the same reasons I love TV’s “Mad Men”: its elegance, its dark humor, and its pain.” Jehanne Dubrow, author of Stateside and From the Fever-World

    Short stories

    When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women’s Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s. Brash and ambitious, activist Jeanne Córdova is living with one woman and falling in love with another, but her passionate beliefs tell her that her first duty is "to the revolution”---to change the world and end discrimination against gays and lesbians. Trying to compartmentalize her sexual life, she becomes an investigative reporter for the famous, underground L.A. Free Press and finds herself involved with covering the Weather Underground and Angela Davis, exposing neo-Nazi bomber Captain Joe Tomassi, and befriending Emily Harris of the Symbionese Liberation Army. At the same time she is creating what will be the center of her revolutionary lesbian world: her own newsmagazine, The Lesbian Tide, destined to become the voice of the national lesbian feminist movement.By turns provocative and daringly honest, Cordova renders emblematic scenes of the era---ranging from strike protests to utopian music festivals, to underground meetings with radical fugitives---with period detail and evocative characters. For those who came of age in the 70s, and for those who weren’t around but still ask, "What was it like?", Outlaws takes you back to re-live it. It also offers insights about ethics, decision making and strategy, still relevant today.With an introduction by renowned lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, When We Were Outlaws paints a vivid portrait of activism and the search for self-identity, set against the turbulent landscape of multiple struggles for social change that swept hundreds of thousands of Americans into the streets.

    Moving beyond disciplinary and national limits, Fatima El-Tayeb explores structures of resistance, tracing a Europeanization from below in which migrant and minority communities challenge the ideology of racelessness that places them firmly outside the community of citizens.Using a notable variety of sources, from drag performances to feminist Muslim activism and Euro hip-hop, El-Tayeb draws on the largely ignored archive of vernacular culture central to resistance by minority youths to the exclusionary nationalism that casts them as threatening outcasts. At the same time, she reveals the continued effect of Europe’s suppressed colonial history on the representation of Muslim minorities as the illiberal Other of progressive Europe.Presenting a sharp analysis of the challenges facing a united Europe seen by many as a model for twenty-first-century postnational societies, El-Tayeb combines theoretical influences from both sides of the Atlantic to lay bare how Europeans of color are integral to the continent’s past, present, and, inevitably, its future.

    The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the tasks of critiquing the racial configurations generated by neocolonialism and contesting its inequities. Contemporary regimes of power produce racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and labor exploitation, and they render subjects redundant and disposable by creating new, nominally nonracialized categories of privilege and stigma. The editors of Strange Affinities contend that the greatest potential for developing much-needed alternative comparative methods lies in women of color feminism, and the related intellectual tradition that Roderick A. Ferguson has called queer of color critique. Exemplified by the work of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective, these critiques do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups. Instead, they offer powerful relational analyses of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized valuation and devaluation of human life.ContributorsVictor BascaraLisa Marie CachoM. Bianet Castellanos Martha Chew Sánchez Roderick A. FergusonGrace Kyungwon HongHelen H. JunKara Keeling Sanda Mayzaw Lwin Jodi Melamed Chandan Reddy Ruby C. TapiaCynthia Tolentino

    LGBT Studies. The first anthology of its kind, with poets representing several countries (the United States, Singapore, Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, Japan and elsewhere), COLLECTIVE BRIGHTNESS gathers over 100 established and emerging contemporary LGBTIQ poets writing from and about various faiths, religions and spiritual traditions. Says Rigoberto Gonzalez of National Book Critics Circle, "COLLECTIVE BRIGHTNESS sheds a shining light on a journey that no longer takes place in the dark. The glory of holding Kevin Simmonds's anthology in one's hands is that it burns as the sacred text of our queer times: heavy with burden, luminous with hope."

    In language flickering with love, loss, and liminality, and with adamantine accuracy, this work bridges many seemingly distant land masses: female and male, girl and boy, music and silence, body and space. Territories embodies the poet's transition “from woman to something less visibly female” and reveals the cyclic journeys of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the person contextualized by an outward societal framework. “Having lived through the funnel both ways,” TC Tolbert acknowledges and bravely challenges traditional schemes of hegemony with a conscious commitment to the unique multiplicity of the self, who is at once (and always) transitory and timeless.

    Seeing Gertrude Stein, the companion book to an exhibition of the same name, illuminates less familiar aspects of her life. Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer analyze the portraits for which Stein posed, the domestic settings she created with Alice B. Toklas, her partner, and the signature styles of dress the two women adopted. Corn and Latimer also explore Stein’s engagement with multiple art forms and the bonds she formed with younger artists. Focusing on portraits in a range of media, photo essays, press clippings, snapshots, clothing, furniture, and other visual artifacts, this pathbreaking study reveals Stein’s sophistication in shaping her public image and cultural legacy. Lavishly illustrated throughout, these “five stories” represent Stein’s life on a human scale while tracing her influence on a wide variety of visual artists of her own and subsequent generations.

    As she navigates her Märchen landscape, she goes through varied transformations, becoming at times a wolf, a thief, an amputee, a hunter, a rabbit and a runaway. She sleeps with swans and suffers a sister that bites the back of her knees. The world of this book is unstable, delicious and carries with it an inexplicit sense of danger. Printed in an edition of 500 with silk screen covers by Aay Preston-Myint, this book hosts a series of color plate collages made by the author.

    Cross-Genre. Fiction. Drama. "It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Bronte, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage on the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses"--Aaron Kunin.

       Photographer Scott Pasfield traveled 54,000 miles across all fifty states over a two-year span gathering stories and documenting the lives of 140 gay men from all walks of life. At turns joyful and somber, reflective and celebratory, each narrative and image is an enlightening look into the variety of gay life in the United States.   Pasfield’s striking and perceptive portraits reflect the same beautiful diversity found in any sampling of our population. Each of these men is unique and whole, complex and fallible, just as we all are. They come in every size and shape, every religion, color, profession, and background. There are farmers, writers, doctors, lawyers, artists, teachers, students; there are fathers and husbands, activists, and business men. Some are successful, some are struggling, some are political, some are wealthy, some are wounded, and some are deeply content.   Their commonality draws from a single shared trait: their homosexuality. These are men who are attracted to men, and have chosen not to disguise that truth. For many, there have been harsh consequences to this decision, but also deep rewards. The message that prevails is one of great hope that true equality is close within our reach, if only we would grasp it.

    In the story, "From Kissing," a sixth-grader named Butch has his first homosexual tongue kiss during a monster truck show and, after a bout of the flu, he is convinced he has somehow contracted AIDS. With "Curls and Curls," nine-year-old Lee hates his kinky, brown head of hair and is seemingly possessed with magic, casting spells to unfurl his evil tresses. In "A Snow Day," eleven-year-old Cassidy longs to be the next mega-watt, teen pop star, but is forced to deal with her crazy classmates, her gay father, and her dog that continually vomits in the driveway. "Do It" follows a tween named Denise as she seeks her first sexual experience with a boyfriend who can never remain erect. Denise strives for high school greatness while her gay best friend is crowned king of all local paper routes. These selections join five more, constructing the remarkable world of Dirty One.

    A founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Russo lived at the center of the most important gay cultural turning points in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His life as a cultural Zelig intersects a crucial period of social change, and in some ways his story becomes the story of a developing gay revolution in America. A frequent participant at “zaps” and an organizer of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) cabarets and dances—which gave the New York gay and lesbian community its first social alternative to Mafia-owned bars—Russo made his most enduring contribution to the GAA with his marshaling of “Movie Nights,” the forerunners to his worldwide Celluloid Closet lecture tours that gave gay audiences their first community forum for the dissection of gay imagery in mainstream film.            Biographer Michael Schiavi unravels Vito Russo’s fascinating life story, from his childhood in East Harlem to his own heartbreaking experiences with HIV/AIDS. Drawing on archival materials, unpublished letters and journals, and more than two hundred interviews, including conversations with a range of Russo’s friends and family from brother Charlie Russo to comedian Lily Tomlin to pioneering activist and playwright Larry Kramer, Celluloid Activistprovides an unprecedented portrait of a man who defined gay-rights and AIDS activism. “Schiavi tells a compelling story in this biography—from his re-creation of life on the streets of East Harlem and in Greenwich Village of the 1960s and 1970s to the way he conveys Russo’s excitement about his film research and popular education to his account of the AIDS years in New York City.”—John D’Emilio, Italian American Review  “In [Schiavi’s] hands Russo’s life is both fascinating in its own right and a window into a larger milieu of activism during two critical decades.”—Italian American Review Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Awards Finalist, Over the Rainbow Selection, American Library Association

    Feminist Studies. Poetics. A MEGAPHONE collects a number of enactments that Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young did between the years of 2005-2007. In these enactments, they attempted to think with the playful dogmatism of a feminist tradition that they call "crotchless pants and a machine gun" (obviously referencing Valie Export) in order to locate what might still be useful today about the somewhat beleaguered "second wave" feminist traditions. To that end, Spahr and Young lectured in Oulipian slenderized baby talk about figures such as Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramovic; they counted the numbers of women and men and tansgendered people in various poetry anthologies; and they invited writers from outside the US to talk about being a writer where they live (over seventy-five writers from Puerto Rico to Morocco to Croatia to South Africa to Syria to Micronesia to Korea responded). Also included in A MEGAPHONE are discussions of that always contested relationship between feminism and "experimental" poetry by Julian T. Brolaski, E. Tracy Grinnell, Paul Foster Johnson, Christian Peet, Barbara Jane Reyes, Dale Smith, and A. E. Stallings. The book ends with a (soma)tic writing exercise from CAConrad, one designed to encourage readers and writers to create open, yet still meaningful, feminist alliances.

    The first part of the book documents the tortuous and sometimes harrowing journey to achieve this unusual occupation. It is a tale that ultimately moves through surviving and into thriving. Cassandra’s past experiences directly inform her present practice and are intrinsic to being a wisewoman – she acquires wisdom from actively experiencing and observing the vagaries of life. As part of her work she travels around the country giving talks about her profession, and without exception is asked each time what brought her to become a village wisewoman.Many people want to hear about that journey and this is one of the reasons for deciding to write the book. Following on from this, Cassandra tells of the practice of her craft, which includes many stories and observations regarding the day-to-day experiences of a traditional wisewoman including her personal approach to magic. At present the market is flooded with ‘how-to-do’ books on witchcraft and associated themes. Almost without exception they inform in an authoritative way often including a cookbook of spells. There is far more to the Craft of the Wise than simply following someone else’s recipes for performing magic. It entails old-fashioned qualities such as hard work, discipline, dedication and commitment. This book differs in that it describes the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’ and in that sense challenges the reader to question and explore their own experiences of the worlds magical.

    Following a hundred years of vociferous social reform, including a 1947 law that criminalized their lifestyles, the women in devadasis communities contend with severe social stigma and economic and cultural disenfranchisement. Adroitly combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical research, Davesh Soneji provides a comprehensive portrait of these marginalized women and unsettles received ideas about relations among them, the aesthetic roots of their performances, and the political efficacy of social reform in their communities. Poignantly narrating the history of these women, Soneji argues for the recognition of aesthetics and performance as a key form of subaltern self-presentation and self-consciousness. Ranging over courtly and private salon performances of music and dance by devadasis in the nineteenth century, the political mobilization of devadasis identity in the twentieth century, and the post-reform lives of women in these communities today, Unfinished Gestures charts the historical fissures that lie beneath cultural modernity in South India.

    Filled with romance, passion, and lots of lust,Afternoon Pleasuresis irresistably erotic yet celebrates the coming together of souls as well as bodies.Two husbears travel down south to meet up with a horned up twink in Jeff Mann’s, “One Afternoon in the Bible Belt.” A sneaky environmentalist is sandwiched between rock-hard dick hounds, Eddy and Dale in Bob Vickery’s salacious tale, “Loggers.” Two life partners have a Sunday morning roll in the sack in “Hank Edward’s “Breakfast in Bed.” Erotic bard, Rob Rosen’s “Skyrockets in Flight,” is delicious with naughty bits in every throbbing line. These are just a few of the tawdry stories of male on male sex that grace the pages of this anthology. So lie back with the one you love or the one you lust after and enjoy. Clothing is optional.

    Blanco's third collection, Looking for the Gulf Motel, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012.

    Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990), Berube also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, who were close colleagues and friends of Berube, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing. The book provides a retrospective on Berube's life and work while it documents the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, the essays attest to the power of history to mobilize individuals and communities to create social change.

    He is a creature both rare and beautiful and now he must avoid detection at all costs, whilst choosing his life partners and dealing with impending pregnancy at sixteen. What's a boy to do?

    like, the works, baby. But, despite what the papers said, his death was no accident. Thirty years on, Damon's back, and he was murdered - or so he says.Ellis Ross, daughter of Damon's biggest fan, is busy trying to finish her dissertation. She doesn't need to find a dead pop star in lurex pants chain-smoking in her window seat.Of course, it's funny what life'll throw at you.Damon wants Ellis to find out exactly who killed him and, as she quickly discovers, when you're being haunted by a man wearing more eyeliner than you are, it's hard to say no.As the unlikely sleuth delves into years of secrets, grudges, and broken dreams, Ellis finds almost everyone from Damon’s past has something to hide... and he's not exactly being honest with her, either. But, when they start to close in on the truth, Ellis realises she may be risking much more than just her sanity.

    Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of “Native” and “settler” define the status of being “queer,” Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society.Morgensen’s analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people.Presenting a “biopolitics of settler colonialism”—in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers—Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.

    Through fascinating interviews and stunning portrait photography, The L Life introduces us to the women who are changing our view of the world. This candid collection is a celebration of real women, alongside headline-makers such as breast cancer researcher and bestselling author Dr. Susan Love; groundbreaking authors Alison Bechdel and Ann Bannon; entertainers such as actress Jane Lynch and comedian Kate Clinton; Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin and longtime activist Phyllis Lyon; award-winning film producer Christine Vachon; and many more.

    Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn's first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering "new information for me." Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted's star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted—to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time—and what it looked like when it collapsed.

    In "Drive-Through", a late-night run for barbecue takes an unexpected turn, while "The Line of the Hunt" tells the tale of a were-cheetah struggling to maintain a normal life despite his bestial nature, and how a chance encounter with another of his kind threatens to bring his house of cards tumbling down. "Happy Birthday" returns the reader to the romantic leads of "The Vampire Fred" for a brief but important night in Fred's life. The collection finishes with the novella "Let the River Run", the story of an incubus accused of murder who recounts his story and origins in an attempt to prove his innocence. Warning: This work contains scenes of explicit erotic content.

    As Madame deSade, however, she was Canada's most famous dominatrix, a well-known public figure. These are her long-awaited memoirs.Terri-Jean was born into abject poverty and put into a foster home at age six, where she suffered abuse. She was later moved into facilities for children and lived there until she was sixteen, when she left to make it on her own. She survived by working numerous unskilled jobs, until she entered the world of prostitution. Her talents and interests helped her move into the elite world of the professional dominatrix, and her life would never be the same. Located just outside of Toronto, her elaborate Bondage Bungalow became the target of a spectacular raid. Six highly publicized years of trials and appeals later, she was convicted under bawdy-house laws and paid a small fine. In 1999, she opened a similar facility in downtown Toronto, one that closed without police interference in 2002. She remains a vocal advocate for civil rights and the disenfranchised. She has been a plaintiff in a major constitutional challenge, and, as a result, Canada's prostitution laws were struck down in 2010.Because of Terri-Jean's failing health, Madame deSade hung up her whips and is now happily retired. Today, Terri-Jean leads a quieter life, enjoying the company of her daughter and grandson. Hers is a story of survival, trial, and triumph.

    Special ordered copies from her webpage, both her grapic novels combined to one.Based on a story with the same name from Edgar allan Poe and here and there are citats from him in the novel, you can read the whole story on Wendys homepage.To buy the special order book: http://www.elfquest.com/storeinfo.htmlTo read free: http://www.masque-of-the-red-death.co...

    Shaw is an engaging performer and inspired writer."---Gay Community NewsObie-award-winning performer and writer Peggy Shaw has been playing her gender-bending performances on Off Broadway, regional, and international stages for three decades. Co-founder of the renowned troupe Split Britches, Shaw has gone on to create memorable solo performances that mix achingly honest introspection with campy humor, reflecting on everything from her Irish-American working-class roots to her aging butch body.This collection of Shaw's solo performance scripts evokes a 54-year-old grandmother who looks like a 35-year-old man (in her classic Menopausal Gentleman); a mother's ambivalent ministrations to a daughter she treated like a son (in the raw You're Just Like My Father); Shaw's love for her biracial grandson, for whom she models masculinity (in the musically punctuated To My Chagrin); and a mapping of her body's long, bittersweet history (in the lyrical Must: The Inside Story, a collaboration with the UK's Clod Ensemble). The book also includes a selection of Shaw's other classic monologues and an extensive introduction by Jill Dolan, Professor of English and Theater and Dance at Princeton University and the blogger behind The Feminist Spectator website.A volume in the series Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/PerformanceCover photos by Eva Weiss (top) and Robin Holland/robinholland.com (bottom).

    In this travel diary, Mari illustrates the highs and lows of life on the road with a group of strangers.

    But their friendship will be put to the test when Vyv runs away and continues to communicate with Chris in secret. All summer, as the search for Vyv mounts, Chris tries to avoid the pressure by working for Albert, an off-the-grid survivalist writer building an anarchist compound from an abandoned house and barn. But as Albert's plans for the future grow more apocalyptic, and Vyv's emails gradually become more terrifying, Chris will face the complete upheaval of everything he's ever known. The Chicago Center for Literature and Photography is proud to present Have You Seen Me, the debut novella of local author Katherine Scott Nelson. Download for free if you'd like at [cclapcenter.com/haveyouseenme].

    It is a labor of love, a celebration of possibility, an offering to the ancestors.

    But with the pain of her past and her family fragmented after the death of her mother, Megume finds that she doesn't really mind being lost. Yet strange encounters with others in the woods - including Kat, a woman who seems stuck in the moment Pearl Harbor was bombed - and incidents that feel right out of fairytales and Japanese stories she heard as a child, combined with her own vivid dreams, leave Megume to sort out the difference between her own mind and reality, all while trying to navigate her way out of this deceptive forest. Shortlisted for a 2012 Lambda Literary Award in Debut Fiction.

    With love and rage combined, Duncan uses words like knives to strip the flesh from the gods themselves. This poetry should not be spoken; it must be shouted, chanted, and sung in every graveyard, in every pulpit, in every home.

    Each essay investigates a single term (e.g., feminism, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality) by asking how it has come to be understood and mobilized in Women’s and Gender Studies and then explicates the roles it plays in both producing and shutting down possible versions of the field. The goal of the book is to trace and expose critical paradoxes, ironies, and contradictions embedded in the language of Women’s and Gender Studies—from its high theory to its casual conversations—that relies on these key terms. Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies offers a fresh approach to structuring Feminist Theory, Senior Capstone, and introductory graduate-level courses in Women’s and Gender Studies.

    There are few realms of human experience other than sex in which religion has greater reach and influence. The role of religion, of any faith, to prohibit, regulate, condemn, and reward, is unavoidably prominent in questions of sex—namely with whom, when, how, and why.  In Sex and Religion, Dag Øistein Endsjø examines the myriad and complex religious attitudes towards sex in cultures throughout the world.Endsjø reflects on some of the most significantly problematic areas in the relationship between sex and religion—from sex before or outside of marriage to homosexuality. Through many examples from world religions, he outlines what people mean by sex in a religious context, with whom it’s permissible to have sex, how sex can be a directly religious experience, and what consequences there are for deviance, for both the individual and society. As Endsjø explains, while Buddhist monks call attention to gay sex as a holy mystery, the Christian church questions a homosexual’s place in the church. Some religions may believe that promiscuity leads to hurricanes and nuclear war, and in others God condemns interracial marriage. Sex and Religion reveals there is nothing natural or self-evident about the ways in which various religions prescribe or proscribe and bless or condemn different types of sexuality. Whether sex becomes sacred or abhorrent depends entirely on how a religion defines it. Sex and Religion is a fascinating investigation of mores, meanings, rituals, and rules in many faiths around the globe, and will be of interest to anyone curious about the intersection of these fundamental aspects of human history and experience.

    Drawing on ethnographic research with Dominicans in New York City, Carlos Ulises Decena explains that while the men who shared their life stories with him may self-identify as gay, they are not the liberated figures of traditional gay migration narratives. Decena contends that in migrating to Washington Heights, a Dominican enclave in New York, these men moved from one site to another within an increasingly transnational Dominican society. Many of them migrated and survived through the resources of their families and broader communities. Explicit acknowledgment or discussion of their homosexuality might rupture these crucial social and familial bonds. Yet some of Decena’s informants were sure that their sexuality was tacitly understood by their family members or others close to them. Analyzing their recollections about migration, settlement, masculinity, sex, and return trips to the Dominican Republic, Decena describes how the men at the center of Tacit Subjects contest, reproduce, and reformulate Dominican identity in New York. Their stories reveal how differences in class, race, and education shape their relations with fellow Dominicans. They also offer a view of “gay New York” that foregrounds the struggles for respect, belonging, and survival within a particular immigrant community.

    But he wanders too far, over the borders to a Faerie land that could only exist in Appalachia.Faerie-napping, cold knives, underground oppressors, horror stories, and unwilling affections threaten to suck him forever into their desolate Company Town. If they do, he’ll lose himself in every way possible.You might escape the fae, but you can never go home. Not really.

    

    And giving us a tiny window on that. It feels like a shell-game. Friendship and language. Stealth is excited and joyous, while dying, dragging one’s tired ass through a desert, hallucinating. It feels like The Wasteland but the footnotes are fun. Stealth is more boy than girl. I don’t think Philip Marlowe, I think of Philip Whalen with a pilot’s silk scarf tied around his neck. Man or a girl’s doll. These multiples never get solved, only raised here. I think I mean that stealth is simply the past tense of steal or living finally with everything you stole—living well in a paradise of your own. — Eileen MylesAce and Seaton define stealth as the ability to “witness without being seen.” It is a phantom state, even a statelessness, enviable until the point that the subject realizes that he or she must pay the price by kissing agency goodbye. In a series of miraculously suggestive poems, the authors problematize the human invisible, using the dreamscapes of Brigadoon, Fantasia, and the painter Agnes Martin to take us there. Stealth is a book of passing—passing for straight, passing for black or white, male or female, passing unobserved, ignored, yet despised. It is a heartbreaking book, an angry one, and yet one that enchants and elevates with its manufactured “jungle—somewhere safe to hide—frond by frond.” — Kevin Killian

    A memoir from the noted psychologist and co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex about the author's activism on gay issues in the medical and psychiatry professions and his personal relationship with a younger man and his partner's decline intoaddictions.