After an introductory section, his book begins with a description of this research, then proceeds with an excellent general review of recent fear about satanic cults in the U.S. He concludes that there is no evidence for the actual existence of organized satanic cults". -- Choice

    He spent almost nine years of his life in prison because of his activities as a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). When he died on 5 May 1981, on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike against repressive prison conditions in Northern Ireland's H Block prisons, parliaments across the world stopped for a minute silence in his honor. Nelson Mandela followed Sands' example and led a similar hunger strike in South Africa, and Fidel Castro compared his suffering to that of Jesus. Bobby Sand's remarkable life and death have made him an "Irish Che Guevara." He is an enduring figure of resistance whose life has been an inspiration to millions around the world. In Hollywood, actors like Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke and Brad Pitt have flirted with a biopic of his life. But until the publication of Nothing But an Unfinished Song, no book has adequately explored the motivation of the hunger strikers, nor recreated this period of history from within the prison cell. Denis O'Hearn's powerful biography, with new material based on primary research and interviews, illuminates for the first time this enigmatic, controversial and heroic figure.

    Margot Weiss’s research entailed attending dungeon play parties, workshops on SM techniques, and business meetings of the Society of Janus, one of America’s oldest BDSM organizations. She interviewed more than sixty SM practitioners, including dungeon owners, well-known prodommes (professional dominants), and community experts. Weiss vividly evokes the feel of the BDSM scene in San Francisco area in the early 2000s.At the same time, she challenges notions of SM as inherently transgressive, revealing a technique-oriented community, largely organized around classes, rules, and the acquisition of expensive sex toys. Most members of the Bay Area’s BDSM community were white, heterosexual, middle-aged, well-off, and involved in long-term relationships.Weiss analyzed SM “scenes”—sexual encounters involving roles, costumes, and props—including dramatizations of slave markets and the creation of the Abu Ghraib photographs. She contends that such performances eroticize social inequality, reproducing hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, rather than offering a safe space, separate from real-world inequities.

    Until now, however, no one has written the story of this woman of extraordinary talent and notoriety. She was a great beauty, an aristocratic refugee of the Russian Revolution, and a frankly erotic painter who insisted upon Renaissance aesthetics, figuration, and painterly craft in modern art. The sky-high prices attached to her canvases in recent years have still not dispelled the suspicions that a woman of Lempicka's glamour and fame could be a truly serious artist. Yet the reviews of the early twentieth century tell a different story: her work was routinely singled out as competing with major figures of the School of Paris, including Léger, Laurençin, Kisling, and Picasso.In this first critical biography, Laura Claridge draws upon her exclusive access to Lempicka's family, friends, and archives to re-create the life that the painter carefully withheld even from her own daughter: the truth of her birth; her escape from Bolshevik Russia; her determination to become a New Woman; her lifelong bouts of depression; her numerous affairs with the women and men she painted; her flight from Nazi Europe via Havana; and her years in Hollywood and New York as the "Baroness with a brush," all informed by the artistic integrity and social anachronism that condemned her to being written out of the canons of modern art. Emblematic of '20s excess and indulgence, Tamara de Lempicka's life of great wealth, indiscriminate sexuality, and endless intrigue makes for a fascinating narrative. But her paintings have inspired fierce disagreements over issues of class, wealth, and gender in modern art, making her work ripe for critical re-evaluation.  In Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence, Laura Claridge has succeeded brilliantly on both counts, bringing to light the contradictions that fueled the life and work of this provocative painter.Though Paris in the early twenties certainly earned its bohemian reputation, Tamara was playing the game hard by anyone's standards. It seemed to her that she could have it all: respect, money, and sexual gratification on the side. She had arrived at the Gare du Nord only four years earlier, gifted with a painter's talent and a family history of feminine power. Encountering a cultural climate that affirmed art as a remunerative career for women, she also felt freed personally by the Modernist mantra to "make it new" that underwrote every aspect--trivial and profound--of daily life. She was determined to embody that icon of the age, the new woman.

    When the hospital was forced to close the children that had survived were taken to the death-camps. Blady-Szwajger became a reluctant courier for the resistance. She left the ghetto and began to carry paper money pinned into her clothing to those in hiding. She and her flat-mate pretended to be good-time girls having fun and threw parties to disguise the coming and going of their male visitors. This heroic memoir pays tribute to all the men and women who paid with their lives for the safety of others.

    Part coming-of-age story, part mind-altering manifesto on gender and sexuality, coming directly to you from the life experiences of a transgender woman, Gender Outlaw breaks all the rules and leaves the reader forever changed.26 black-and-white illustrations.

    From bringing your boyfriend home to your father's funeral, to being the only gay couple at a family wedding, to surviving couples counseling, Smith's decidedly wry spin on the events of our lives resonates with keen observation and hilarious truth."So Mom says to me on the phone, 'Just because you're coming home for your father's funeral doesn't mean we can't have fun!'"Sex education, meteor showers, lesbian ventriloquist dummies, fleamarket shopping, body piercing, pot -smoking drag queens, environmental correctness, Judgment Day, Samuel Beckett, Newt Gingrich, Coco Chanel, Sigmund Freud--nothing and no one escapes Smith's incisive eye in this very human collection of comic essays.

    Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

    Dylan's story—which is, sadly, not that unusual—has already received attention from such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Today, and Leeza. But his memoir, bound to become a classic, tells the story in a funny, ironic, unforgettable voice that "isn't all grim; Scholinski tells [his] story in beautifully evocative prose and mines [his] experiences for every last drop of ironic humor, determined to have the last laugh." (Time Out New York)

    Stone Butch Blues traces a propulsive journey, powerfully evoking history and politics while portraying an extraordinary protagonist full of longing, vulnerability, and working-class grit. This once-underground classic takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride of gender transformation and exploration and ultimately speaks to the heart of anyone who has ever suffered or gloried in being different.

    Pop culture fans will delight in author Trina Robbinss chronological commentary (with attitude) on the authors, artists, trends, and sassy, brassy characters featured in comic books for the last half-century. Meet the bubble-headed bombshells of the '40s, the lovelorn ladies of the '50s, the wimmin libbers of the '70s, and the grrrowling grrrlz of today. Her commentary is paired with a ton of rare comic book art pulled from the best girl comics published since World War II. Bridging the gap between Ms. and Sassy, between Miss America and Naomi Wolf, From Girls to Grrrlz reminds us how comic book characters humorously—and critically—reflect our changing culture.

    Young gay sex and super mundane details--two things I love, together."--Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man"Stephen van Dyck's meticulous sexual records reveal the true recent histories of America, the Internet, the nearly-defunct nuclear family and the author himself. Surprisingly touching, People I've Met From the Internet is a brilliantly written, taxonomic account of growing up queer in turn-of-the-millennium Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and beyond."--Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick"This is an impressive work, modern, relevant, powerfully startling in its effect."--John Rechy, author of City of Night "Bold, brave, sexy. . .This annotated bibliography of encounters bridging the virtual and real worlds of desire feels like a nineteenth-century erotic novel transposed onto the present, filled with salacious stories and characters. A truly remarkable adventure."--D. A. Powell, author of Cocktails"A brilliant, deadpan account of sexualized youth. . . If it wasn't so effortlessly funny and wry, People I've Met From the Internet would horrify; as it stands, every sentence--every checked-off box of kissing? oral? anal?--brings on the warm flush a real writer gives you." --Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World"As the internet transformed the gay world from a limited number of spaces to a virtually unlimited homotopia, things were gained and things were lost, but van Dyck was one of its argonauts. . . There's a new kind of queer text here, one needed for a new queer age." --Matias Viegener, author of 2500 Random Things About Me Too"A glowing diorama that is continuously unfolding with mountains, living, men, cities, and sex. I love the sense of absolute openness in Stephen van Dyck's People I've Met From the Internet, how direct it is, how witty, and at times how sweet." --Amina Cain, author of Creature"Stephen van Dyck's People I've Met From the Internet is a wholly original, brilliant and engrossing book. I couldn't put it down." --Kate Durbin, author of E! Entertainment "This is no ordinary memoir. It's a moving, funny and rigorous attending to technology, desire and community as experienced by a whole generation. . . A tour de force of post-internet life writing." --Janet Sarbanes, author of The Protester Has Been ReleasedStephen van Dyck's PEOPLE I'VE MET FROM THE INTERNET is a queer reimagining of the coming-of-age narrative set at the dawn of the internet era. In 1997, AOL is first entering suburban homes just as thirteen-year-old Stephen is coming into his sexuality, constructing selves and cruising in the fantasyscape of the internet. Through strange, intimate, and sometimes perilous physical encounters with the hundreds of men he finds there, Stephen explores the pleasures and pains of growing up, contends with his mother's homophobia and early death, and ultimately searches for a way of being in the world. Spanning twelve years, the book takes the form of a very long annotated list, tracking Stephen's journey and the men he meets from adolescence in New Mexico to post-recession adulthood in Los Angeles, creating a multi-dimensional panorama of gay men's lives as he searches for glimpses of utopia in the available world.

    Features a new chapter and afterward on recent biological breakthroughs.

    Nina Ansary takes readers on a 4,000-year historical journey to expose the roots and manifestations of systemic gender discrimination. The book’s biographical profiles of fifty forgotten female innovators—brought to life by international illustrator Petra Dufkova—shatter deeply rooted gender myths to tell remarkable stories about groundbreaking contributions to the global community.In 1929, British novelist Virginia Woolf ran her fingers along the spines of the books in her library wondering why no woman in Shakespeare’s era had written “a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.” She concluded, “Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”Nearly a century after Woolf penned those incisive words—frequently modified as “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman”—the phenomenon of female anonymity persists as women worldwide continue to be restricted by society’s formal and unspoken barriers.Why does Virginia Woolf’s statement still echo in the twenty-first century?Why have women been consistently denied opportunities that are automatically given to men?And why has the historical record failed to adequately recognize notable women?Anonymous Is a Woman. . .exposes the roots and manifestations of institutionalized gender and racial discrimination; dismantles centuries of historical bias through biographical profiles of fifty remarkable, yet forgotten women innovators; and challenges ingrained stereotypical assumptions to advance an unconventional argument for equality and inclusivity.100% of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated. The primary recipients will be The Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based 501(c)(3) registered nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights in Iran, and The London School of Economics Centre for Women, Peace, and Security, an academic space for scholars, practitioners, activists, policymakers, and students to develop strategies that promote justice, human rights, and participation of women in conflict-affected situations around the world.

    Here is a dramatic story of these people, revealing the history of the anti-gay policy pursued by the U.S. military authorities in World War II. Two 8-page photo inserts.