Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of 1969, the five years before, and the five years after. Jason Baumann, the NYPL coordinator of humanities and LGBTQ collections, has edited and introduced the volume to coincide with the NYPL exhibition he has curated on the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation movement of 1969.

    No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.From the Trade Paperback edition.

     The last thing Tori wants is to live her life by anyone else’s rules but her own. Ever since she left the world of country clubs and debutante balls behind, she has lived free of the standards imposed by others. But something is missing… …and that something is Madeleine, a carefree grad student from the same upper class social circles. The attraction is unexpected and, to Tori’s surprise, more liberating than the life she has cultivated for herself. Piece by piece, Madeleine takes down the wall that conflict and heartbreak have built around Tori’s emotions. Is loving Madeleine the key to Tori’s healing and happiness? And is Tori willing to step back into that world, even just a little, to take a chance on a love that could last?

    When she comes to, she explains that she was on her way to the island, to pray to the Goddess at the temple on the hill. Her name is Ashleigh. She cannot remember anything else. Only one person, local historian and past life regression therapist Andrew Monaghan, understands what this could really mean. He asks his colleague, New Yorker Kathleen Edwards, to fly over to help him with this unusual, and potentially extraordinary case. From the start, it is obvious that the two women share a deep, meaningful, yet troubling connection. But who is Ashleigh, really? And will the dark secrets of her past eventually catch up with her, and cost her the life, and love she has always been searching for?

    Erin Hughes, a local history professor with a passion for old houses. Dhari’s life is complicated enough without meeting such an attractive and intelligent woman: Her mother needs her, her father relies on her and her girlfriend worries her. But when Erin finds old letters and a diary, Dhari knows she can’t leave until she finds out the truth . . .Marianne K. Martin is the best-selling author of five novels including Mirrors and Love in the Balance.

    At a little after one a.m. on the morning of June 28, 1969, the police carried out a routine raid on the bar. But it turned out not to be routine at all. Instead of cowering -- the usual reaction to a police raid -- the patrons inside Stonewall and the crowd that gathered outside the bar fought back against the police. The five days of rioting that followed changed forever the face of lesbian and gay life. In the years since 1969, the Stonewall riots have become the central symbolic event of the modern gay movement. Renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman now tells for the first time the full story of what happened at Stonewall, recreating in vivid detail those heady, sweltering nights in June 1969 and revealing a wealth of previously unknown material. This landmark book does even more: it unforgettably demonstrates that the Stonewall riots were not the beginning -- just as they were certainly not the end -- of the ongoing struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Duberman does all this within a narrative framework of novelistic immediacy. Stonewall unfolds through the stories of six lives, and those individual lives broaden out into the larger historical canvas. All six came of age in the pre-Stonewall era, and all six were drawn into the struggle for gay and lesbian rights as a result of the upheaval at the Stonewall bar and the events that followed.

    The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.”So begins Susan Faludi’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father—long estranged and living in Hungary—had undergone sex reassignment surgery, that investigation would turn personal and urgent. How was this new parent who identified as “a complete woman now” connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known, the photographer who’d built his career on the alteration of images?Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father’s many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. When the author travels to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hell-bent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful—and virulent—nationhood. The search for identity that has transfixed our century was proving as treacherous for nations as for individuals.Faludi’s struggle to come to grips with her father’s metamorphosis self takes her across borders—historical, political, religious, sexual--to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you “choose,” or is it the very thing you can’t escape?

    In 1937, on the instructions of the matron, a nurse at a maternity hospital in London smuggles out an orphaned baby. Now, in Wales, an old lady pieces together these stories and is about to discover the surprising ways in which they link to her own.

    There’s the time the FBI showed up at her door because of something she tweeted about Game of Thrones. The pop songs that have been the soundtrack to the worst moments of her life. And of course, the pivotal day when Orange Is the New Black hit the airwaves and broke down the door to Jill’s own sexuality. In these honest examinations of identity, desire, and self-worth, Jill explores perhaps the most monumental cultural shift of our lifetimes: the mainstreaming of lesbian culture. Dusting off her own personal traumas and artifacts of her not-so-distant youth she examines how pop culture acts as a fun house mirror reflecting and refracting our values—always teaching, distracting, disappointing, and revealing us. Girls Can Kiss Now is a fresh and intoxicating blend of personal stories, sharp observations, and laugh-out-loud humor. This timely collection of essays helps us make sense of our collective pop-culture past even as it points the way toward a joyous, uproarious, near—and very queer—future.

    The Disappearing L explores the rise and fall of the hugely popular women-only concerts, festivals, bookstores, and support spaces built by and for lesbians in the era of woman-identified activism. Through the stories unfolding in these chapters, anyone unfamiliar with the Michigan festival, Olivia Records, or the women’s bookstores once dotting the urban landscape will gain a better understanding of the era in which artists and activists first dared to celebrate lesbian lives. This book offers the backstory to the culture we are losing to mainstreaming and assimilation. Through interviews with older activists, it also responds to recent attacks on lesbian feminists who are being made to feel that they’ve hit their cultural expiration date.“The Disappearing L is both an ‘insider’ story and a well-written analysis of a neglected piece of cultural history. Morris delivers convincing arguments about why the lesbian-feminist era was important not only to the individuals who lived it but also to a broader understanding of what has come to be called ‘LGBT’ history. No one could be better positioned to write this book than Morris.” — Lillian Faderman, author of The Gay Revolution: The Story of the StruggleBonnie J. Morris is Adjunct Professor of Women’s Studies at both George Washington University and Georgetown University. She is the author of several books, including Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals and Lubavitcher Women in America: Identity and Activism in the Postwar Era, also published by SUNY Press.

    A member of the first astronaut class to include women, she broke through a quarter-century of white male fighter jocks when NASA chose her for the seventh shuttle mission, cracking the celestial ceiling and inspiring several generations of women.After a second flight, Ride served on the panels investigating the Challenger explosion and the Columbia disintegration that killed all aboard. In both instances she faulted NASA's rush to meet mission deadlines and its organizational failures. She cofounded a company promoting science and education for children, especially girls.Sherr also writes about Ride's scrupulously guarded personal life-she kept her sexual orientation private-with exclusive access to Ride's partner, her former husband, her family, and countless friends and colleagues. Sherr draws from Ride's diaries, files, and letters. This is a rich biography of a fascinating woman whose life intersected with revolutionary social and scientific changes in America. Sherr's revealing portrait is warm and admiring but unsparing. It makes this extraordinarily talented and bold woman, an inspiration to millions, come alive.

    Based on her popular column, which ran in lesbian and gay periodicals across the country, this series of fictional comedy/adventures stars femme author Leslea Newman and her beloved butch, Flash.

    Beth was a fat, pro-choice, sexually confused choir nerd with a great voice, an eighties perm, and a Kool Aid dye job. Her single mother worked overtime, which meant Beth and her five siblings were often left to fend for themselves. Beth spent much of her childhood as a transient, shuttling between relatives, caring for a sickly, volatile aunt she nonetheless loved, looking after sisters, brothers, and cousins, and trying to steer clear of her mother’s bad boyfriends.   Her punk education began in high school under the tutelage of a group of teens—her second family—who embraced their outsider status and introduced her to safety-pinned clothing, mail-order tapes, queer and fat-positive zines, and any shred of counterculture they could smuggle into Arkansas. With their help, Beth survived high school, a tragic family scandal, and a mental breakdown, and then she got the hell out of Judsonia. She decamped to Olympia, Washington, a late-1990s paradise for Riot Grrrls and punks, and began to cultivate her glamorous, queer, fat, femme image. On a whim—with longtime friends Nathan, a guitarist and musical savant in a polyester suit, and Kathy, a quiet intellectual turned drummer—she formed the band Gossip. She gave up trying to remake her singing voice into the ethereal wisp she thought it should be and instead embraced its full, soulful potential. Gossip gave her that chance, and the raw power of her voice won her and Gossip the attention they deserved.   Marked with the frankness, humor, and defiance that have made her an international icon, Beth Ditto’s unapologetic, startlingly direct, and poetic memoir is a hypnotic and inspiring account of a woman coming into her own.

    LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. In these poems, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores how queer people of color resist and transform violence through love and desire. Remembering and testifying about the damage caused by the racial profiling of South Asian and Arab people post 9/11, border crossings and internal and external wars in Sri Lanka and the diaspora, LOVE CAKE also documents the persistence of survival and beauty--especially the dangerous beauty found in queer people of color loving and desiring. LOVE CAKE maps the joys and challenges of reclaiming the body and sexuality after violence, examining a family history of violence with compassion and celebrating the resilient, specific ways we create new families, take our bodies back, love, fight, and transform violence.

    She would like to tell the whole, freaking queer as hell story. Her story. Not the sidebar to a straight person's rebirth-she doesn't give a makeover or plan a wedding or get a couple back together. This isn't a queer tragedy. She doesn't die at the end of this book, having finally decided to kiss the girl. It's the sexy, honest, bumpy and triumphant dyke's tale her younger, theology major self needed to read. Because there was a long time when she thought she wouldn't make it. Not as a comic, but as a human.SAVE YOURSELF is full of funny and insightful recollections about everything from coming out (at a Catholic college where being gay can get you expelled) to how joining the circus can help you become a better comic (so much nudity) to accepting yourself for who you are--even if you're an awkward tween with an eyepatch (which Cameron was). Packed with heart, humor, and cringe-worthy stories anyone who has gone through puberty can relate to, Cameron's memoir is for that timid, fenced-in kid in all of us--and the fearless standup yearning to break free.