He found his tribe in New York's East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and '80s for drugs, blight, and a burgeoning art scene. His creativity spilled out in paintings, photographs, films, texts, installations, and in his life and its recounting-creating a sort of mythos around himself. His circle of East Village artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance, and as right-wing culture warriors reared their heads. As Wojnarowicz's reputation as an artist grew, so did his reputation as an agitator-because he dealt so openly with his homosexuality, so angrily with his circumstances as a Person With AIDS, and so fiercely with his would-be censors.Fire in the Belly is the untold story of a polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture-and one of the most highly acclaimed biographies of the year.

    The book would go on to inspire legions of women for decades and would later become the subject and title of a hugely popular movie in the fall of 2010. While the film was selling out movie theaters, young black gay men were literally committing suicide in the silence of their own communities.When a young Rutgers University student named Tyler Clementi took his own life after a roommate secretly videotaped him in an intimate setting with another young man, syndicated columnist and author Dan Savage created a YouTube video with his partner Terry to inspire young people facing harassment. Their message, It Gets Better, turned into a popular movement, inspiring thousands of user-created videos on the Internet. Savage's project targeted people of all races, backgrounds and colors, but Boykin has created something special "for colored boys."The new book, For Colored Boys, addresses longstanding issues of sexual abuse, suicide, HIV/AIDS, racism, and homophobia in the African American and Latino communities, and more specifically among young gay men of color. The book tells stories of real people coming of age, coming out, dealing with religion and spirituality, seeking love and relationships, finding their own identity in or out of the LGBT community, and creating their own sense of political empowerment. For Colored Boys is designed to educate and inspire those seeking to overcome their own obstacles in their own lives.

    We search for "The One," but find ourselves staying single because nobody measures up. The reality of our relationships is not what we expected, and it becomes hard to balance it with all the other things that we want out of life. At the same time that marriage shows itself to be the one 'recession proof' industry; the rates of separation and break-up soar ever higher.Rewriting the Rules is a friendly guide through the complicated - and often contradictory - rules of love: the advice that is given about attraction and sex, monogamy and conflict, gender and commitment. It asks questions such as: which to choose from all the rules on offer? Do we stick to the old rules we learnt growing up, or do we try something new and risk being out on our own?This book considers how the rules are being 'rewritten' in various ways, for example the 'new monogamy', alternative commitment ceremonies, different ways of understanding gender, and new ideas for managing conflict and break-up where economics and child-care make complete separation a problem. In this way Rewriting the Rules gives the power to the reader to find the approach which fits their situation.

    Not a book exclusively about artists who identify themselves as gay or lesbian, Art and Queer Culture instead traces the shifting possibilities and constraints of sexual identity that have provided visual artists with a rich creative resource over the last 125 years.

    Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.

    We learn what it’s like for them to play football and come up short. We feel their lingering effects of bullying. We experience the undeniable power of seasons affecting their moods as they ache for a meaningful connection. We learn what it means to celebrate in spite of the odds against them. But more than anything, we discover anew through their poems the redemptive power of love and renewal among the leaves growing and falling.“The poetry in Among the Leaves crackles to life across plains both arid and wintry, from first crushes on grain-fed jock boys to fathers brandishing Bibles, guns, and catcher’s mitts. The Midwest is brought into sharp focus by a group of top-notch poets unafraid to explode the myth of the American heartland and expose the gritty, hard-scrabble realities of growing up gay there. I can’t remember an anthology so full of varied voices and styles that so deftly defines a region.” — Collin Kelley, author of Render and Slow to Burn http://www.squaresandrebels.com/

    The collection is edited by leading scholars in the field and presents:individual introductory notes that situate each work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical contextsessays grouped by key subject areas including Genealogies, Sex, Temporalities, Kinship, Affect, Bodies, and Borderswritings by major figures including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David M. Halperin, Jose Esteban Munoz, Elizabeth Grosz, David Eng, Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed.The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.

    Kumbier argues that queering the archive (thinking through queer interests, experiences, explanatory frameworks, and cultural practices) allows us to think critically about established archival principles and practices. This project describes -- and supports -- the work of archivists, community documentarians, activists, and scholars seeking to preserve materials documenting queer lives and experiences, and imagines how we might respond to the particular demands of archiving queer lives. Further, this project intervenes in the repetition of practices that may exclude LGBTQ constituencies, render our experiences less-visible/less-legible, or perpetuate oppressive power relations between archivists and users or documented subjects. The project aims to make work by scholars in history, performance studies, queer studies, and other areas of the humanities who are encountering the limits of archives -- and are developing strategies for working with them -- legible and relevant to archivists and librarians. The book supports its conceptual work with concrete examples of collecting and documentation projects, a research ethnography, and analyses of popular media that represent -- and critique -- archival spaces and practices.

    As a result of this condemnation, LGBT people have been subjected to great spiritual, emotional and physical abuse and violence. This issue has taken on a particular urgency in light of the horrific string of suicides over the last year of young LGBT people who were subjected to harassment and bullying by their classmates.Cheng argues that people need to be liberated from the traditional legal model of thinking about sin and grace as a violation of divine and natural laws in which grace is understood as the strength to refrain from violating such laws. Rather Cheng proposes a Christological model based upon the theologies of Irenaeus, Bonaventure and Barth, in which sin and grace are defined in terms of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.This book will serve as a useful resource for all people who struggle to make sense of the traditional Christian doctrines of sin and grace in the context of the 21st century.-ChurchPublishing.org

    This optimistic book challenges advocates for LGBT rights in the U.S. to aspire beyond the narrow framework of equality. It outlines a more substantive politics with race, class, and gender at its foundation, and suggests that such a politics will produce greater and more meaningful change for a larger number of people.Irresistible Revolution is intended for a broad and general audience. The book turns an experienced and thoughtful lens onto many common controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face contemporary social change movements: pursuit of broad or narrow agendas, integration of economic and racial justice, integrating sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights frameworks, the persistence of sexism, the dilemmas of bipartisanship, and the challenge of seeing beyond the short term to secure gains made for the long run.

    Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies.Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life."Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies is a very worthwhile book. Enke is knowledgeable about the field, and frames the issues nicely, explicitly addressing some of the core problems in feminism and women’s studies. This anthology shrewdly demonstrates how transgender studies can do feminist work, and it goes a long way toward furthering that important critical/political task."—Susan Stryker, Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, and author of Transgender History

    Dave examines the formation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Based on ethnographic research conducted with activist organizations in Delhi, a body of letters written by lesbian women, and research with lesbian communities and queer activist groups across the country, Dave studies the everyday practices that constitute queer activism in India.Dave argues that activism is an ethical practice comprising critique, invention, and relational practice. She investigates the relationship between the ethics of activism and the existing social norms and conditions from which activism emerges. Through her analysis of different networks and institutions, Dave documents how activism oscillates between the potential for new social arrangements and the questions that arise once the activists' goals have been achieved. Queer Activism in India addresses a relevant and timely phenomenon and makes an important contribution to the anthropology of queer communities, social movements, affect, and ethics.Naisargi N. Dave is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto."An excellent, detailed, and highly nuanced ethnography of the ethical and affective undercurrents of lesbian activism in Delhi, India, from the late twentieth century to the present. Naisargi N. Dave's focus on ethics provides a necessary intervention in the ethnography of social action and movements."—Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora"A beautifully written ethnography, offering a passionately detailed ethnographic perspective on queer politics, feminism, and social movements in India."—Kamala Visweswaran, author of Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference

    It assembles writings that explore the new queer vitalities within their wider context of structural violence and neglect. Moving between diverse geopolitical contexts—the US and the UK, Guatemala and Palestine, the Philippines, Iran and Israel—the chapters in this volume interrogate claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and everyday.Queer Necropolitics mobilises the concept of 'necropolitics' in order to illuminate everyday death worlds, from more expected sites such as war, torture or imperial invasion to the mundane and normalised violence of racism and gender normativity, the market, and the prison-industrial complex. Contributors here interrogate the distinction between valuable and pathological lives by attending to the symbiotic co-constitution of queer subjects folded into life, and queerly abjected racialised populations marked for death. Drawing on diverse yet complementary methodologies, including textual and visual analysis, ethnography and historiography, the authors argue that the distinction between 'war' and 'peace' dissolves in the face of the banality of death in the zones of abandonment that regularly accompany contemporary democratic regimes.The book will appeal to activist scholars and students from various social sciences and humanities, particularly those across the fields of law, cultural and media studies, gender, sexuality and intersectionality studies, race, and conflict studies, as well as those studying nationalism, colonialism, prisons and war. It should be read by all those trying to make sense of the contradictions inherent in regimes of rights, citizenship and diversity.

    The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.

    This first issue sees the introduction of the poet and photographer 'laureates', Chris Black and Seanen Middleton, fiction and poetry from an eclectic mix of genre and styles, and an inventive selection of six word short stories (including entires from Paul Magrs and Bob Smith).

    Recapitulating her life, weaving threads and themes, she searches. Born just after the death of Gandhi, she hears an unrelenting call to service. From a Catholic vocation to Liberation Theology, from the Peace Movement to Feminism, from LGBT rights to intersectionality, Zoe is plugged into Social Justice as it unfolds throughout her 64 years. Only in conscious retrospect does she see that it is all the same – no matter the time or place, humanity longs for freedom, liberty and happiness.Zoe’s experience confirms that change happens from the inside out. After spending almost 12 years with a controversial teacher, focusing on discipline, mindfulness and meditation, she leaves on her own terms. Never stepping away from spiritual practice, driven by her passion and hunger for justice, she embraces Engaged Buddhism. For her it means living in the world awake and involved.Zoe has made brave choices; fasting, marching, speaking loudly for Equality. She is a teacher, activist and mentor. She is a satyagrahi, a changemaker and visionary. The Engaged Heart invites you in and sends you out inspired.The Engaged Heart includes many of her speeches and 120 personal photos.