Outline of My Lover


Douglas A. Martin - 2000
    In the sleepy town of Athens, Georgia, a young man goes off to a college miseducation and is drawn into a world of rich vicarious living. The unspoken relationship between this adolescent and his luminous rock star boyfriend fast becomes the marking tale of world tours and plush continental hotel rooms. However, the relationship falters under celebrity's harsh, shape-shifting light. Real life fills in the outline of the boy's expectations.

Begging for It


Alex Dimitrov - 2013
    A Bulgarian immigrant, Dimitrov writes as both observer of and fervent participant in this "American Youth," as his speakers navigate both the physical and emotional landscapes of desire, intimacy, and longing--whether for a friend, a lover, or a self, "Saint or stranger, I still recklessly seek you."

The War Within


Yolanda Wallace - 2014
    She went to Saigon in 1967 looking to help those in need. She didn’t expect to meet the love of her life along the way. Forty-seven years later, a summer vacation with her granddaughter, Jordan Gonzalez, puts Meredith on a collision course with someone from her past and sends Jordan on a journey toward an uncertain future.When Meredith comes face-to-face with Natalie Robinson, a woman whose heart she once broke, can a love once lost be regained? When Jordan meets Natalie’s niece Tatum, wheelchair-bound as a result of injuries she suffered when her Marine unit came under fire in Afghanistan, will her anti-war beliefs prevent her from falling in love?

Indecency


Justin Phillip Reed - 2018
    In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful―the author unpacks his intimacies, weaponizing poetry to take on masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex and unmask all the failures of the structures into which society sorts us.

Read Between the Lines


Rachel Lacey - 2021
    And ever since she took over her mother’s beloved Manhattan bookstore, they’ve become her home too. The only thing missing is her own real-life romance like the ones she loves to read about, and Rosie has an idea of who she might like to sweep her off her feet. She’s struck up a flirty online friendship with lesbian romance author Brie, and what could be more romantic than falling in love with her favorite author?Jane Breslin works hard to keep her professional and personal lives neatly separated. By day, she works for the family property development business. By night, she puts her steamier side on paper under her pen name: Brie. Jane hasn’t had much luck with her own love life, but her online connection with a loyal reader makes Jane wonder if she could be the one.When Rosie learns that her bookstore’s lease has been terminated by Jane’s family’s business, romance moves to the back burner. Even though they’re at odds, there’s no denying the sparks that fly every time they’re together. When their online identities are revealed, will Jane be able to write her way to a happy ending, or is Rosie’s heart a closed book?

I Love Led Zeppelin


Ellen Forney - 2006
    This book includes full-page comics published in prestigious weeklies such as the L.A. Weekly and Seattle's The Stranger, as well as the leading feminist magazine Bust, and the Oxford American. Her strips are characterized by bold, sensual brushstrokes and striking images of powerful, butt-kicking women. While most of the stories sprang from Forney's own inspiration, some are collaborations with such luminaries as comedian Margaret Cho, novelist (and Al Gore's daughter) Kristin Gore, writer and editor Dan Savage, writers David Schmader and Tamara Paris, Forney's beloved Grandma Florence, and Camille Paglia. Several of Forney's strips fall into the "How-To" category, although this is not your standard advice column fare: topics range from the practical ("How to Tip Your Server") to the whimsical ("How to Twirl Your Tassles in Opposite Directions") to the fascinating but hopefully never-needed ("How to Sew On an Amputated Finger"). Other strips include "The Final Soundtrack," a death fantasy involving blood, glamour, and Led Zeppelin; "How to Smoke Pot and Stay Out of Jail"; "How to Talk About Drugs with Your Kid"; "How to Fuck a Woman with Your Hands"; "How to Be a Fabulous Fag Hag" (an illustrated interview with Margaret Cho); "Seattle's Erotic Landmarks"; and "Memories of Love," a graphic tour of Courtney Love's rise and fall of celebritydom.

Some Go Hungry


J. Patrick Redmond - 2016
    While visiting, Grey must confront a painful past riddled in homophobia, secrets, religious hypocrisy and fear."-- Queerty "Anyone who has come out in small-town America will understand how difficult it is to be who you are when the majority of customers at your family restaurant are the same ones you just saw in church....Some Go Hungry is at its best when confronting religious prejudice, and is even pulse-quickening when the narrator sits through one of his friend's sermons aimed directly at him....Only someone who has grown up in rural America could write so convincingly of the pressures there. It's also refreshing to find a book that relates the experience of being gay somewhere other than in a large city."-- Gay & Lesbian Review "A gay murder mystery that takes readers from Miami Beach, Florida to Fort Sackville, Indiana, as Grey Daniels 'struggles to live his authentic, openly gay life' amidst the fundamentalist Christians in his hometown."-- Bay Area Reporter "Captivating debut...[Protagonist] Grey's tale is a lesson for us all that only when we consider our own feelings first will we find happiness--and acceptance."--Edge Media Network"Redmond's fiction isn’t an attempt to recap historical events. The fictional news reports of character Robbie Palmer's alleged murder interspersed between chapters, and the 'homophobia' that engulfs the fictional town of Fort Sackville, is a platform from which the author can express his sincere concern regarding real-life situations that occur in our modern world."-- Boomer Magazine "I was totally engrossed in what I read...An important tale that in some ways is timeless...We read of bigotry, religion, murder, and personal redemption in small-town America as told by a new writer who is a master storyteller and whom I expect to be hearing about in the near future."--Reviews by Amos Lassen"Patrick Redmond has filled his first novel with passion--the passion to tell a story that resonates far beyond the confines of the small Indiana town where it is set. Some Go Hungry tells an important tale that in some ways is timeless, and in other ways could have been ripped from today's headlines."--Mark Childress, author of Crazy in AlabamaPart of Akashic's Kaylie Jones Books imprint.Some Go Hungry is a fictional account drawn from the author's own experiences working in his family's provincial Indiana restaurant--and wrestling with his sexual orientation--in a town that was rocked by the scandalous murder of his gay high school classmate in the 1980s.Now a young man who has embraced his sexuality, Grey Daniels returns from Miami Beach, Florida, to Fort Sackville, Indiana, to run Daniels' Family Buffet for his ailing father. Understanding that knowledge of his sexuality may reap disastrous results on his family's half-century-old restaurant legacy--a popular Sunday dinner spot for the after-church crowd--Grey struggles to live his authentic, openly gay life. He is put to the test when his former high school lover--and fellow classmate of the murdered student--returns to town as the youth pastor and choir director of the local fundamentalist Christian church.Some Go Hungry is the story of a man forced to choose between the happiness of others and his own joy, all the while realizing that compromising oneself--sacrificing your soul for the sake of others--is not living, but death.

Guillotine: Poems


Eduardo C. Corral - 2020
    Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels,” with Corral’s seamless integration of Spanish and English, poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. A harrowing second collection, Guillotine solidifies Corral’s place in the expanding ecosystem of American poetry.

The Girls Next Door: Into the Heart of Lesbian America


Lindsy Van Gelder - 1996
    But for all the interest in who's out and who's not (yet), there's been surprisingly little understanding of the diversity and richness of lesbian experience. This funny, lively, and perceptive book will change all that. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with women around the country, and on their own keen wits and eyes, Van Gelder and Brandt have composed an unprecedented portrait of how gay women today—lipsticked and flannel-shirted alike—think, feel, love, and live. Three major "tribal" events—the long-running Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, "Dinah" (the annual Dinah Shore Golf Tournament and party circuit, a mecca for upwardly mobile luppies), and a cross-country trek with the activist Lesbian Avengers en route to the 1994 Stonewall commemoration—provide points of entry into an exploration of lesbian identity, social dynamics, and politics that's as entertaining as it is revealing. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait that will resonate with lesbians themselves and reveal to their "neighbors" a world of unsuspected vibrancy and depth.

Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities


Kazim Ali - 2009
    Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes. Bright Felon is literally "autobiography" because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Lyn Hejinian's My Life, and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. A reader's companion is available at http: //brightfelonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

To Have and to Hold


Peggy J. Herring - 1999
    You can stay can't you? she whispered breathlessly as she unbuttoned Dorian's shirt. It was hard to understand why a woman as attractive and likable as successful civil engineer Dorian Sandier would still be living single. Her friends think it's because she's clueless when it comes to picking up on the romantic signals women were always sending her way. But in reality, Dorian has yet to recover from a disastrous relationship that left her numb and empty inside. Enter Lorraine Niles, a beautiful single mom with just the right tools to break down the wall around Dorian's heart. With Lorraine taking the lead, their friendship grows to intense passion, and Dorian begins to fall in love. But, by finally letting down her defenses, is she opening herself up to a devastating betrayal?

From This Moment On


P.J. Trebelhorn - 2010
    Three years later when offered a business opportunity she can't pass by, she decides it's finally time to return home—even though she’s far from sure of her welcome.Katherine Hunter took a different path in the face of loss, throwing herself into her work to fill the emptiness in her heart. She doesn't have the time to date, even if she wanted to. But then fate drops Devon on her doorstep—literally—and Kat begins to question if the life she has painstakingly rebuilt is really enough.Despite Devon and Kat’s powerful attraction, the past stands between them—preventing them from taking a chance on the future. Will what is growing between them be enough to convince them that from this moment on, anything is possible, even love?

The Songs of Bilitis


Pierre Louÿs - 1894
    Classic of erotic literature (1894), celebrating lesbian love, translation of original edition, complete with 161 sensuous illustrations by Willi Pogany.

Crybaby Butch


Judith Frank - 2004
    With a disparate group of adult learners as the backdrop, Frank examines, with warmth and wit, the relationship between education and gender, class, and racial identity. With Crybaby Butch, Judith Frank creates a deeply human, bravely unsentimental story while at the same time investigating the meaning of butch identity as it reinvents itself from one generation to the next. ~ Carol Anshaw Fearless and unflinching, Crybaby Butch rigorously explores butch/femme dynamics over two generations. Judy Frank's debut novel is searing and memorable. ~ Claire Messud