A Plain Brown Rapper


Rita Mae Brown - 1976
    --Hanoi to Hoboken: a round trip ticket --Living with other women --Take a lesbian to lunch --The last straw --The shape of things to come --Roxanne Dunbar --Gossip --Leadership vs. stardom --The last picture show --A manifesto for the feminist artist --Love song for feminists from Flamingo Park --I am a woman --The good fairy --It's all Dixie cups to me --The lady's not for burning.

Boys’ Secrets and Men’s Loves:: A Memoir


David A.J. Richards - 2019
    He has been a prominent advocate of gay rights and feminism, which joins men and women in resistance. A gay man born into an Italian American family in New Jersey, he relates in this book his own experience on how the initiation of boys into patriarchy inflicts trauma, leading them to mindlessly accept patriarchal codes of masculinity, and how (through art, philosophy, and experience—including mutual love) he and others (straight and gay men) come to join women in resisting patriarchy through the discovery of how deeply it harms men as well as women.

Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ + Culture


Amelia Abraham - 2019
    But is same-sex marriage, improved media visibility and corporate endorsement all it’s cracked up to be? At what cost does this acceptance come? And who is getting left behind, particularly in parts of the world where LGBTQ+ rights aren’t so advanced?Combining intrepid journalism with her own personal experience, Amelia Abraham searches for the answers to these urgent challenges, as well as the broader question of what it means to be queer in 2019. With curiosity, good humour and disarming openness, Amelia takes the reader on a thought-provoking and entertaining journey. Join her as she cries at the first same-sex marriage in Britain, loses herself in the world’s biggest drag convention in L.A., marches at Pride parades across Europe, visits both a transgender model agency and the Anti-Violence Project in New York to understand the extremes of trans life today, parties in the clubs of Turkey’s underground LGBTQ+ scene, and meets a genderless family in progressive Stockholm.

All In: An Autobiography


Billie Jean King - 2021
    But the world she wanted did not exist yet, so she set out to create it. In this spirited account, King details her life's journey to find her true self. She recounts her groundbreaking tennis successes that came at a breathtaking pace--six years as the top-ranked woman in the world, twenty Wimbledon championships, thirty-nine grand-slam titles, and her watershed defeat of Bobby Riggs in the famous Battle of the Sexes. King poignantly recalls the cultural backdrop of her career and the profound impact on her worldview from the women's movement, the assassinations and anti-war protests of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and, eventually, the LGBTQ+ rights movement.King describes the myriad challenges she hurdled, including entrenched sexism, an eating disorder, near financial ruin after being outed, and accepting her sexual identity. It was not until the age of 51 that she began to publicly and unequivocally acknowledge, I am gay. Today, King's life remains one of indefatigable service. She offers insights and advice on leadership, business, activism, sports, politics, marriage equality, parenting, sexuality and love. She shows how living honestly and openly has had a transformative effect on her relationships and happiness. Hers is the story of a pathbreaking feminist, world-class athlete, and an indomitable spirit whose impact has transcended her achievements in sports.

Pansy


Andrea Gibson - 2015
    Each turn of the page represents both that which as been forgotten and that which is yet to be released. While this book is a rally cry for political action, it is also a celebration of wonder and longing and love.

Jeremy Thorpe (Abacus Books)


Michael Bloch - 2014
    When he became leader of the Liberal Party in 1967 at the age of just thirty-seven, he seemed destined for truly great things. But as his star steadily rose so his nemesis drew ever nearer: a time-bomb in the form of Norman Scott, a homosexual wastrel and sometime male model with whom Jeremy had formed an ill-advised relationship in the early 1960s. Scott's incessant boasts about their 'affair' became increasingly embarrassing, and eventually led to a bizarre murder plot to shut him up for good. Jeremy was acquitted of involvement but his career was in ruins.Michael Bloch's magisterial biography is not just a brilliant retelling of this amazing story; ten years in the making, it is also the definitive character study of one of the most fascinating figures in post-war British politics.

The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age


Amy Sohn - 2021
    Postal Inspector, and the remarkable women who opposed his war on women's rights at the turn of the twentieth century.Anthony Comstock, special agent to the Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with harsh sentences and steep fines; his name was soon equated with repression and prudery.Between 1873 and the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920, eight remarkable women were tried under the Comstock Law. These "sex radicals" supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and a woman's right to sexual pleasure. They took on Comstock in explicit, bold, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, sex, and love for a new era.The Man Who Hated Women tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and the press. They were publishers, editors, and doctors, including the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the birth control activist Margaret Sanger; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to go against a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, they paved the way for modern-day feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined contraceptive access as a human civil liberty.

The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle


Lillian Faderman - 2015
    Based on rigorous research and more than 150 interviews, The Gay Revolution tells this unfinished story not through dry facts but through dramatic accounts of passionate struggles, with all the sweep, depth, and intricacies only an award-winning activist, scholar, and novelist like Lillian Faderman can evoke.The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when law classified gays and lesbians as criminals, the psychiatric profession saw them as mentally ill, the churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with irrational hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.In the words of the eyewitnesses who were there through the most critical events, The Gay Revolution paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movement. A defining account, this is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind.

Women Don't Owe You Pretty


Florence Given - 2020
    In a world that tells women we're either not enough or too much, it's time we stop directing our anger and insecurities onto ourselves, and start fighting back to re-shape the toxic structures of our patriarchal society.Florence's book will help you to tackle and challenge the limiting narrative you have been bombarded with your whole life, and determine feminism on your own terms. After all, you are the love of your own life.

Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice


Loretta J. Ross - 2004
    But, if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.”—Lila Watson, Aboriginal ActivistVibrant. Strong. Fierce. Undivided Rights captures the evolving and largely unknown activist history of women of color organizing for reproductive justice—on their own behalf.Undivided Rights presents a fresh and textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of color—-starting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities—have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women-of-color.The book details how and why these women have defined and implemented expansive reproductive health agendas that reject legalistic remedies and seek instead to address the wider needs of their communities. It stresses the urgency for innovative strategies that push beyond the traditional base and goals of the mainstream pro-choice movement—strategies that are broadly inclusive while being specific, strategies that speak to all women by speaking to each woman. While the authors raise tough questions about inclusion, identity politics, and the future of women’s organizing, they also offer a way out of the limiting focus on “choice.”Undivided Rights articulates a holistic vision for reproductive freedom. It refuses to allow our human rights to be divvied up and parceled out into isolated boxes that people are then forced to pick and choose among.

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color


Andrea J. Ritchie - 2017
    Amid growing awareness of police violence, individual Black men including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and Freddie Gray have been the focus of most media-driven narratives. Yet Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color also face daily police violence. Invisible No More places the individual stories of women and girls such as Sandra Bland, Dajerria Becton, Mya Hall, and Rekia Boyd into broader contexts, centering women of color within conversations around the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration. Invisible No More also documents the evolution of a movement for justice for women of color targeted by police that has been building for decades, largely in the shadows of mainstream campaigns for racial justice and police accountability. Informed by twenty years of research and advocacy by Black lesbian immigrant and police-misconduct attorney Andrea Ritchie, this groundbreaking work demands a sea change in how police violence is understood by mainstream media, policymakers, academics, and the general public, as well as a radical rethinking of our visions of safety and the means we devote to achieving it."

What Runs Over


Kayleb Rae Candrilli - 2017
    Unfurling and unrelenting in its delivery, Candrilli has painted “the mountain” in excruciating detail. They show readers a world of Borax cured bear hides and canned peaches, of urine-filled Gatorade bottles and the syringe and all the syringe may carry. They show a violent world and its many personas. What Runs Over, too, is a story of rural queerness, of a transgender boy almost lost to the forest. The miracle of What Runs Over is that Candrilli has lived to write it at all."When Roethke said 'energy is the soul of poetry,' he might have been anticipating a book like What Runs Over, which is so full of energy it practically vibrates in your hand. Here, Candrilli’s speaker sticks their tongue 'into the heads / of venus fly traps just to feel the bite,' then later, burns holy books in the backyard and rolls around in the ashes until they become 'a painted god.' This is the verve of an urgent new poetic voice announcing itself to the world. As Candrilli writes: 'This is what I look like / when I’m trying to save myself.'"-Kaveh Akbar

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice


Shon Faye - 2021
    Despite making up less than 1% of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarised 'debate', which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system, and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalised people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.

A Burst of Light


Audre Lorde - 1988
    Essays. 1989 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.

Small Changes


Marge Piercy - 1973
    Set against the early days of the feminist movement, it tells of two women and the choices they must make. Intelligent, sensual Miriam Berg trades her doctorate for marriage and security, only to find herself hungry for a life of her own but terrified of losing her husband Shy, frightened Beth runs away from the very life Miriam seeks to a new world of different ideas, and a different kind of love--the love of another woman...