The Danish Girl


David Ebershoff - 2000
    Uniting fact and fiction into an original romantic vision, The Danish Girl eloquently portrays the unique intimacy that defines every marriage and the remarkable story of Lili Elbe, a pioneer in transgender history, and the woman torn between loyalty to her marriage and her own ambitions and desires.The Danish Girl is an evocative and deeply moving novel about one of the most passionate and unusual love stories of the 20th century.

The Zuni Man-Woman


Will Roscoe - 1991
    Through We'wha's exceptional life, Will Roscoe creates a vivid picture of an alternative gender role whose history has been hidden and almost forgotten."An important book that will bring to the field a better understanding of the role of the berdache in Pueblo culture."--John Adair, San Francisco State University

Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence


Nancy Manahan - 1985
    In new afterwords, the co-editors reveal how the book came to be and what happened to their lives when, for the first time in history, a lesbian book from a small publisher went mainstream. Each nun in these stories describes her individual and searing path in, or out of, the convent to discover and face the truth of herself. Still myth-shattering, the stories remind us of the courage required to live—and love—in congruence with our authentic selves. "Oblivious to the controversies that surrounded the initial publication of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, whether they originated within the Catholic Church or the lesbian feminist movement, thousands of readers across the decades have embraced the book and found their lives changed by its message of empowerment." - Joanne E. Passet, Ph.D., Professor of History, Indiana University East

My Almost Certainly Real Imaginary Jesus


Kelly Barth - 2012
    A typical Christian kid, that is, until she developed a searingly deep crush on another little girl playing afterhours in church, and more importantly, until Jesus—a tiny, imaginary Jesus, one that stays “safely tucked behind the baseboard or the petals of a peony”—became her invisible friend and constant companion.Heartbreakingly honest and hilarious, My Almost Certainly Real Imaginary Jesus shows just how easy it can be to fall headlong into fundamentalism, venturing into the very heart of enemy territory and the church’s false promises of altar calls and sexual cures. In the spirit of Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, this debut memoir is plainspoken, speaking with candor and insight. Barth particularly addresses the disconnect between the radical and very human Jesus of history and the church’s supernatural savior. She asks the question to all in the closet—both closet Christians and closet homosexuals: Which is more difficult, admitting to being Christian or admitting to being gay?An answer is found in her own hard-won journey, a hopeful answer that is an “attempt to leave a record of the early signs of the turning and softening of a collective heart.” Giving voice to many who have searched for sanctuary in a church that has largely rejected them, this story pauses at the threshold of one of a growing number of churches which, in opening the door to her and other homosexuals, welcome Jesus back inside as well.

Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence


Michael Rocke - 1996
    In the seventy years from 1432 to 1502, some 17,000 men--in a city of only 40,000--were investigated for sodomy; 3,000 were convicted and thousands more confessed to gain amnesty. Michael Rocke vividly depicts this vibrant sexual culture in a world where these same-sex acts were not the deviant transgressions of a small minority, but an integral part of a normal masculine identity.In 1432 The Office of the Night was created specifically to police sodomy in Florence. Seventy years of denunciations, interrogations, and sentencings left an extraordinarily detailed record, which Rocke uses to its fullest in this richly documented portrait. He describes a wide range of sexual experiences between males, ranging from boys such as fourteen-year-old Morello di Taddeo, who prostituted himself to fifty-seven men, to the notorious Jacopo di Andrea, a young bachelor implicated with forty adolescents over a seventeen-year period and convicted thirteen times; same-sex "marriages" like that of Michele di Bruno and Carlo di Berardo, who were involved for several years and swore a binding oath to each other over an altar; and Bernardo Lorini, a former Night Officer himself with a wife and seven children, accused of sodomy at the age of sixty-five. (Mortified, he sent his son Taddeo to confess for him and plead for a discreet resolution of his case.) Indeed, nearly all Florentine males probably had some kind of same-sex experience as a part of their "normal" sexual life.Rocke uncovers a culture in which sexual roles were strictly defined by age, with boys under eighteen the "passive" participants in sodomy, youths in their twenties and older men the "active" participants, and most men at the age of thirty marrying women, their days of sexual frivolity with boys largely over. Such same sex activities were a normal phase in the transition to adulthood, and only a few pursued them much further. Rather than precluding heterosexual experiences, they were considered an extension of youthful and masculine lust and desire. As Niccolo Machiavelli quipped about a handsome man, "When young he lured husbands away from their wives, and now he lures wives away from their husbands." Florentines generally accepted sodomy as a common misdemeanor, to be punished with a fine, rather than as a deadly sin and a transgression against nature. There was no word, in the otherwise rich Florentine sexual lexicon, for "homosexual," nor was there a distinctive and well-developed homosexual "subculture." Rather, sexual acts between men and boys were an integral feature of the dominant culture.Rocke roots this sexual activity in the broader context of Renaissance Florence, with its social networks of families, juvenile gangs, neighbors, patronage, workshops, and confraternities, and its busy political life from the early years of the Republic through the period of Lorenzo de' Medici, Savonarola, and the beginning of Medici princely rule. His richly detailed book paints a fascinating picture of a vibrant time and place and calls into question our modern conceptions of gender and sexual identity.

Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire


Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - 1985
    Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most influential texts in gender studies, men's studies and gay studies," this book uncovers the homosocial desire between men, from Restoration comedies to Tennyson's Princess.

Suck Less: Where There's A Willam, There's A Way


Willam Belli - 2016
    Sometimes it just sucks less. But I promise you: where there's a Willam, there's a way.But this isn't all about me (for once). It's about you and how you can SUCK LESS at a variety of things drag queens are so much better at than the average person. I've got clap backs and life hacks and tips on classing up a simple grab-and-run lifting spree to the much more dignified act of larceny. Super-important life stuff with my own special, secret fag- swag sauce. So welcome to Willam's School of Bitchcraft and Wiggotry. Class is in session. With a foreword from Neil Patrick Harris.

Uncle Mame: The Life Of Patrick Dennis


Eric Myers - 2000
    Tanner made millions, became the toast of Manhattan society, and had his works adapted into wildly successful plays, musicals, TV shows, and films. But he also spent every cent he made, worked incognito as a butler to the wealthy, and constructed a persona so elaborate that not even his wife and children ever quite knew the real Pat. Based on extensive interviews with coworkers, friends, and relatives, Uncle Mame is a revealing, intimate portrait of the man who brought camp to the American mainstream and even in his lowest moments personified—even in his lowest moments— the glamour and wit he captured on the page.

Midnight Salvage


Adrienne Rich - 1999
    Rich's work has long challenged social plausibilities built on violence and demoralizing power. In Midnight Salvage, she continues her explorations at the end of the century, trying, as she has said, "to face the terrible with hope, in language as complex as necessary, as communicative as possible—a poetics which can work as antidote to complacency, self-involvement, and despair. I have wanted to assume a theater of voices rather than the restricted I. To write for both readers I know exist and those I can only imagine, finding their own salvaged beauty as I have found mine." "In her vision of warning and her celebration of life, Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters."—Nadine Gordimer

The Sins of Jack Saul: The True Story of Dublin Jack and The Cleveland Street Scandal


Glenn Chandler - 2016
    This is the first full-length account of one of its key players, Jack Saul, a working class Irish Catholic rent boy who worked his way into the upper echelons of the aristocracy, and wrote the notorious pornographic memoir The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. Glenn Chandler, creator of Taggart, explores his colourful but tragic life and reveals for the first time the true story about what really went on behind the velvet curtains of Number 19 Cleveland Street.