Best of
Queer-Lit

2007

Ani DiFranco: Verses


Ani DiFranco - 2007
    For the first time, she releases a book of poetry and paintings capturing her essential artistry that has helped define and invigorate a new generation.Ani DiFranco: Verses rages, eulogizes, menaces, revels, and envisions. With a poet’s precision and a citizen’s stake, DiFranco finds the meeting places of intimacy and politics, of self and country, of resolve and compromise, and of the fickle and magnificent capacities of love and solitude.In 1990 at the age of eighteen, Ani DiFranco rewrote the rules of the record industry when she created her own label, Righteous Babe Records, as an alternative to beckoning corporate offices. Since then, RBR has released nineteen full-length DiFranco albums to critical acclaim, and is now home to over a dozen cutting-edge new artists. DiFranco was named one of the top twenty-five most influential artists of the past twenty-five years by CMJ New Music (alongside Nirvana and U2) and one of 21 Feminists for the 21st Century by Ms. Magazine. Together with Ani DiFranco: Verses, she released her first retrospective album, Canon, in September 2007, and proceeded on a twenty-city tour in the United States.

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History


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

Notebooks


Tennessee Williams - 2007
    In these pages Williams (1911-1981) wrote out his most private thoughts as well as sketches of plays, poems, and accounts of his social, professional, and sexual encounters. The notebooks are the repository of Williams’s fears, obsessions, passions, and contradictions, and they form possibly the most spontaneous self-portrait by any writer in American history.Meticulously edited and annotated by Margaret Thornton, the notebooks follow Williams’ growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments. At one point, Williams writes, “I feel dull and disinterested in the literary line. Dr. Heller bores me with all his erudite discussion of literature. Writing is just writing! Why all the fuss about it?” This remarkable record of the life of Tennessee Williams is about writing—how his writing came up like a pure, underground stream through the often unhappy chaos of his life to become a memorable and permanent contribution to world literature.

Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light


Cyril Wong - 2007
    Reminiscent of a concerto, an orchestra is invoked by poems that celebrate the lives of lovers distant and near, while a single narrative arises like a solo instrument amidst their chords, often blurring a distinction between the universal and the particular.This narrative is a love story that pierces through the shadow of the inevitable, accompanied by dreams and a reinterpretation of the myth of Shiva and Mohini, the fascinating female-incarnation of Vishnu.Interwoven with the motifs of time and death, these poems segue into each other like movements in a symphony, singing of equal parts tragedy and joy.

Kissing Dead Girls


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

Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word)


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

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


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

Skin Lane


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

A Question of Gravity and Light


Blas Falconer - 2007
    That is exactly the kind of poetry that Blas Falconer writes. In his first collection, Falconer presents 46 poems that are emotionally forthright and linguistically evocative but written without affectation or subterfuge. Although Falconer is formally trained and is aware of the structures and potential of both free verse and traditional poetic forms, he crafts exquisite, heartfelt poems that surprise us with their simple intensity. Whether writing about the mysteries of childhood or the pleasures of cruising for gay sex in a metropolitan airport, he surprises us with the delicacy of his touch, never obvious or heavy-handed. As a gay man who embraces his Puerto Rican heritage, Falconer stands at an edge of American society, and there is the tension of borders in his work: borders between peoples and nations as well as the less visible, more porous and deceptive borders between family members and lovers. There is not one point of view in these poems but many. It is the quality of their observational power that binds them together. Whether the setting is the hospital room of his dying grandfather or his own backyard teeming with garrulous tree frogs, Falconer transports us to the scene. It is easy for us to imagine what he sees. And we care, deeply, just as he does.

Water Witch: The Deceiver's Grave


Nene Adams - 2007
    The waters of the Caribbean are a haven for pirates; the most feared of them all is Bess O'Bedlam, known as the Water Witch. With a cutthroat crew and a fleet of ships at her command, Bess' lust for riches knows no bounds. She is on the trail of the greatest prize ever taken - silver, gold and jewels beyond imagining, plundered from a Spanish galleon by the infamous freebooter Fancy Tom Carew. His ship, the Deceiver, and her crew have been thought lost for twenty-five years, but an encounter in an Antiguan alley leads Bess to Marguerite de Vries, a Dutch thief who does not know she is the key to a king's ransom. The Water Witch will use any means to find Deceiver's grave, including seduction, however she had not reckoned on a fiery-tempered opponent determined to protect her heart at any cost. A search for lost treasure becomes a race against time as the women are pitted against a deadly magical curse, and must overcome many enemies in their quest for Deceiver... and each other's love.