Tom Rasmussen's honesty, vulnerability, and fearlessness jump out of every page and every word. It is the queer bible I've always needed." --Sam Smith, singer and songwriter Tom covers the nuance, doubt, and uncertainty of being a drag queen. Crystal covers the transcendence . . . Charisma and quick intelligence--two qualities that have long been prerequisites for drag . . . Diary puts on technicolor display. --Katy Waldman, The New YorkerIn these pages, find glamour and gaffes on and off the stage, clarifying snippets of queer theory, terrifyingly selfish bosses, sex, quick sex, KFC binges, group sex, the kind of honesty that banishes shame, glimmers of hope, blazes of ambition, tender sex, mad dashes in last night's heels plus a full face of make-up, and a rom-com love story for the ages. This is where the unspeakable becomes the celebrated. This is the diary of a drag queen--one dazzling, hilarious, true performance of a real, flawed, extraordinary life.I hope people like me will read this and feel seen and loved by it. I hope people who aren't like me will enjoy it, laugh with it, learn from it. And I hope people who don't like me will file lawsuits just so I can wear my brand-new leopard-print skirt suit and bust their asses in court.--Crystal Rasmussen, in Refinery29

    From the stirrings of his adolescent libido to his eventual death from AIDS, Oscar Moore's hero confronts his destiny with raw candour, shocking self-awareness, and frightening fatalism.

    Richard Bedard was a journalist in his mid-40s, living abroad, when he was diagnosed with patellofemoral pain syndrome, or chondromalacia patella. His burning joints made his life so miserable that he fantasized about hacking off his kneecaps. Four doctors failed to help; one said he would never get better. His physical therapist finally gave up too.Unable to sit normally, he quit his job. Unemployed and desperate, he launched a year-long, round-the-clock experiment to save his knees. He read from scores of clinical studies, medical textbooks, health newsletters. What he discovered left him stunned. There was a familiar story about what patellofemoral pain syndrome was and how to treat it: The advice to focus on strengthening the quads. To stretch. To take glucosamine. To forget about cartilage healing, because that never happened.And that story was completely wrong.Armed with this knowledge, he fashioned a plan to get better. Within two years, he fully recovered. This compelling story chronicles a long journey of healing and discovery. It shows that a patient’s true ally isn’t simply hope, but informed hope.

    The city's sizzling -- especially at the Kitsch-Inn, where the girls are mounting an all-female production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

    Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited features ten pieces never previously republished outside Christopher Street, as well as a new introduction keenly describing and evaluating a historical moment that still informs and defines today’s world-particularly its community of homosexuals, which, arguably, is still recovering from the devastation of AIDS.

    Stoner and Peter A. Conway tell for the first time in full detail the twisted story of a pair of young, aspiring gay adult film producers whose quest for fame at any cost leads to the gruesome murder of the man who stands in their way, gay porn entrepreneur Bryan Kocis.News of the killing of the forty-four-year-old (stabbed twenty-eight times, his throat slashed to near decapitation) in his suburban home sends shock waves through the bucolic Pennsylvania town. Neighbors were horrified to hear about the murder but equally astonished to learn that Kocis ran a small but thriving online porn operation from his home.The murder investigation leads police and prosecutors to the far reaches of the country, from Virginia to New York City, to Las Vegas, and ultimately to a nude beach in San Diego, where investigators facilitate an incredible clandestine suspect surveillance. The manhunt nets Harlow Cuadra and his lover Joseph Kerekes, both former military men, turned male models, turned hustlers, turned porn producers, who finally land at the bottom of a deadly conspiracy.Cobra Killer takes readers into the sometimes alluring, sometimes dangerous and often surprising world of gay porn and the deceit, schemes, and ultimate betrayals lying underneath the fantasy.

    Kept with other patients in a cult-like home in British Columbia, Canada, Gajdics was under the authority of a dominating, rogue psychiatrist who controlled his patients, in part, by creating and exploiting a false sense of family. Juxtaposed against his parents’ tormented past — his mother’s incarceration and escape from a communist concentration camp in post-World War II Yugoslavia, and his father’s upbringing as an orphan in war-torn Hungary — Gajdics’ story explores the universal themes of childhood trauma, oppression, and intergenerational pain. Told over a period of decades, the book shows us the damaging repercussions of conversion therapy and reminds us that resilience, compassion, and the courage to speak the truth exist within us all.

    How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express ourselves? Danger is everywhere in these poems, but never overwhelms them; the poet is always an anchor on the other side. And his story carries us relentlessly along.

    They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law.Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

    In 2010, at seventeen, Lucy Sutcliffe began an online friendship with Kaelyn, a young veterinary student from Michigan. Within months, they began a long distance relationship, finally meeting in the summer of 2011. Lucy's video montage of their first week spent together in Saint Kitts, which she posted to the couple's YouTube channel, was the first in a series of films documenting their long-distance relationship. Funny, tender and candid, the films attracted them a vast online following. Now, for the first time, Lucy's writing about the incredible personal journey she's been on; from never quite wanting the fairy-tale of Prince Charming to realising she was gay at the age of 14, through three years of self-denial to finally coming out to friends and family, to meeting her American girlfriend Kaelyn.

    Have you been feeling left out lately? Many is the vegetarian or vegan who has watched their meat-eating friends with envy as they followed the Atkins diet and the pounds dropped off. There's no doubt about it: a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet really does work. But what about vegetarians and vegans? Is it possible to follow a high-protein diet without the fry-ups or the meat? And can it really be a healthy way of life? The answer to all these questions is a resounding 'yes'. Top vegetarian cookery writer Rose Elliot has devised an easy to follow, meat-free answer to the Atkins diet. Scientifically formulated to make your metabolism stop burning carbs and start burning fat, her diet helps you to lose weight and make carb cravings, mood swings and energy lows a thing of the past. With over 80 delicious, mouth-watering recipes, top tips for losing weight and staying slim, carbohydrate counters, menu plans and an explanation of why the diet works, this is the must-have book for any vegetarian or vegan who wants to lose weight.

    Her mother, a distant relative of William Faulkner, told neighbors and family that her daughter had died. The two never saw each other again. Nearly twenty-five years later, after building her own family and happy home life, a lawyer called to say her mother was dead. In this story about the fragility of memory and the complexity of family, Beam decides to look back at her own dark history, and for the secret to her mother’s madness.

    By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is—just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.These two essays now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

    As a woman, a black, and a lesbian, Brand arrives at a rigorous and nakedly ruthless reclamation of the poetic.

    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.