Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives


Nia King - 2014
    Mixed-race queer art activist Nia King left a full-time job in an effort to center her life around making art. Grappling with questions of purpose, survival, and compromise, she started a podcast called We Want the Airwaves in order to pick the brains of fellow queer and trans artists of color about their work, their lives, and "making it" - both in terms of success and in terms of survival.In this collection of interviews, Nia discusses fat burlesque with Magnoliah Black, queer fashion with Kiam Marcelo Junio, interning at Playboy with Janet Mock, dating gay Latino Republicans with Julio Salgado, intellectual hazing with Kortney Ryan Ziegler, gay gentrification with Van Binfa, getting a book deal with Virgie Tovar, the politics of black drag with Micia Mosely, evading deportation with Yosimar Reyes, weird science with Ryka Aoki, gay public sex in Africa with Nick Mwaluko, thin privilege with Fabian Romero, the tyranny of "self-care" with Lovemme Corazon, "selling out" with Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik, the self-employed art activist hustle with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, and much, much more. Welcome to the future of QPOC art activism.

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."

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex


David Henry SterryR.J. Martin Jr. - 2009
    They're PhDs and dropouts, soccer moms and jailbirds, $2,500-a-night call girls and $10 crack hos, and everything in between. This anthology lends a voice to an underrepresented population that is simultaneously reviled and worshipped.Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys is a collection of short memoirs, rants, confessions, nightmares, journalism, and poetry covering life, love, work, family, and yes, sex. The editors gather pieces from the world of industrial sex, including contributions from art-porn priestess Dr. Annie Sprinkle, best-selling memoirist David Henry Sterry (Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent), sex activist and musical diva Candye Kane, women and men right off the streets, girls participating in the first-ever National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth, and Ruth Morgan Thomas, one of the organizers of the European Sex Work, Human Rights, and Migration Conference.Sex is a billion-dollar industry. Meet the real people who are its flesh and blood.