Best of
Queer-Lit
2004
That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation
Mattilda Bernstein SycamoreBenjamin Shepard - 2004
This timely collection of essays by writers such as Patrick Califia, Kate Bornstein, Carol Queen, Charlie Anders, Benjamin Shepard, and others shows what the new queer resistance looks like. Intended as a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia, the book challenges the commercialized, commoditized, and hyper objectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models. Essays include "Dr. Laura, Sit on My Face," "Gay Art Guerrillas," "Legalized Sodomy Is Political Foreplay," and "Queer Parents: An Oxymoron or Just Plain Moronic?"
Becoming a Visible Man
Jamison Green - 2004
Jamison Green combines candid autobiography with informed analysis to offer unique insight into the multiple challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience, ranging from encounters with prejudice and strained relationships with family to the development of an FTM community and the realities of surgical sex reassignment.For more than a decade, Green has provided educational programs on gender-variance issues for corporations, law-enforcement agencies, social-science conferences and classes, continuing legal education, religious education, and medical venues. His comprehensive knowledge of the processes and problems encountered by transgendered and transsexual people--as well as his legal advocacy work to help ensure that gender-variant people have access to the same rights and opportunities as others--enable him to explain the issues as no transsexual author has previously done.Brimming with frank and often poignant recollections of Green's own experiences--including his childhood struggles with identity and his years as a lesbian parent prior to his sex-reassignment surgery--the book examines transsexualism as a human condition, and sex reassignment as one of the choices that some people feel compelled to make in order to manage their gender variance. Relating the FTM psyche and experience to the social and political forces at work in American society, Becoming a Visible Man also speaks consciously of universal principles that concern us all, particularly the need to live one's life honestly, openly, and passionately.
Locker Room Nudes: The French National Rugby Team
François Rousseau - 2004
Each image taken by leading French photographer Francois Rousseau depicts the rugby player―alone or with teammates―undressing, lounging on the bench, showering. Locker Room Men is at once a celebration of athletes and the beauty of the male form as well as the fulfillment of the fantasy of going behind the scenes in a winning team's locker room.Sure to appeal to both gay men and straight women, these photos are unusual because the men are not models. They don't work out just to look good―and look good they do―their bodies are sculpted by winning victories on the field. They aren't made up, shaved, or prettified in any way. These are some of the world's best rugby players―brawny, tough, competitive.Since 1999, the French national rugby team has posed nude or semi-nude for an annual calendar. The purpose behind the calendar was to get wider -exposure- for rugby and the team. In 2004, Francois Rousseau was selected as photographer, and he successfully brought out the sensual beauty and sexiness inherent in the rugby players' rough and tumble exterior. The calendar became a cult hit, and thus the book was born so that even more of these unparalleled images could be savored. Whether or not rugby will become more popular in this country remains to be seen, but this book will certainly raise the game's profile...
Complaint in the Garden (Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry Series)
Randall Mann - 2004
These meditations--harsh, honest, explicit (though never vulgar), dark, and astute--reflect a sentiment for the urbane and the primitive in nature, history, love, and humankind. Mann invites readers into lush landscapes, sundry histories, and a contemporary gay San Francisco populated by those things and people loved and lost.
Dirk Bogarde: The Authorised Biography
John Coldstream - 2004
Fiercely protective of his privacy, and that of his partner of 40 years, he left England in the 1960s to live on the continent, where he carved a second career for himself as a bestselling autobiographer and successful novelist. Although Bogarde destroyed many of his papers, his family has made available his personal archive to John Coldstream, who knew him well in his last years.