Book picks similar to
Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court by Joyce Murdoch
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nonfiction
history
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A Private Life
Michael Kirby - 2011
Speaking in his own voice, he opens up as never before in a beautifully written, reflective and generous memoir - one that Michael Kirby's many admirers have been waiting for.Michael Kirby is one of Australia's most admired public figures. In times of spin and obfuscation, he speaks out passionately and straightforwardly on the issues that are important to him. Even those who disagree with him have been moved by the courage required of him to come out as a high-profile gay man, which at times has caused him to be subjected to outrageous assaults on his character.This is a collection of reminiscences in which we discover the private Michael Kirby speaking in his own voice. He opens up as never before about his early life, about being gay, about his forty-two year relationship with Johan van Vloten, about his religious beliefs and even about his youthful infatuation with James Dean, which sent him on a sentimental journey to Dean's home town in the year 2000, an adventure he here wryly recalls.Beautifully written, reflective and generous, in that warm and gently self-deprecating voice that is so characteristic of him, this is a memoir that Michael Kirby's many admirers have been waiting for.
Gay Rights and the Mormon Church: Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences
Gregory A. Prince - 2019
Since then, the church has been a significant player in the ongoing saga of LGBT rights within the United States and at times has carried decisive political clout. Gregory Prince draws from over 50,000 pages of public records, private documents, and interview transcripts to capture the past half-century of the Mormon Church’s attitudes on homosexuality. Initially that principally involved only its own members, but with its entry into the Hawaiian political arena, the church signaled an intent to shape the outcome of the marriage equality battle. That involvement reached a peak in 2008 during California’s fight over Proposition 8, which many came to call the “Mormon Proposition.” In 2015, when the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land, the Mormon Church turned its attention inward, declaring same-sex couples “apostates” and denying their children access to key Mormon rites of passage, including the blessing (christening) of infants and the baptism of children.Prince's interview with KUER: https://radiowest.kuer.org/post/gay-r...Prince's Q-Talk with Equality Utah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcnVa...Prince's interview with the Press: https://conta.cc/2HHmeTmPrinces's event with Benchmark Books: https://youtu.be/Daz-TFldZDA
You Can Say You Knew Me When
K.M. Soehnlein - 2005
And then Jamie gets the call he's always dreaded: Teddy, the father who never accepted him, has died. It's time for the prodigal son to come home to the subdivisions and strip malls of suburban New Jersey to face the emotionally barren family he left behind years ago.Caught between the guilt he wants to shake and the grief he can't express, Jamie takes solace in a box of memorabilia he finds in the attic, marked "1960," the year his father spent in San Francisco but kept secret. Jamie is especially drawn to a moody, enigmatic photo of the stunning Dean Foster, his dad's closest friend, who headed west then mysteriously disappeared.Determined to unlock the mystery of his father, Jamie seeks out the artists and poets, the free spirits and wild men mentioned in Teddy's letters to Dean. It's a journey that takes him deep into the subcultures of San Francisco, from the bohemian heyday of the Beat Generation through the Internet mania of his contemporary world, even as it unleashes something primal, hungry, and slightly dangerous in Jamie. As his search for the elusive Dean Foster turns ever more obsessive, undermining his friendships, his income, and his fidelity to his partner, Jamie is forced to decide what he is willing to risk in the pursuit of the truth.
The Family Heart: A Memoir Of When Our Son Came Out
Robb Forman Dew - 1994
American Book Award winner Robb Forman Dew, known for her breathtaking ability to depict family love in all its ambiguity and pain, reaches deep into her own heart to write the story of finding out her son is gay.
I Can Give You Anything But Love
Gary Indiana - 2015
Described by the London Review of Books as one of “the most brilliant critics writing in America today,” Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post–summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book yet—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.
A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story
Anthony Godby Johnson - 1993
Johnson's story of AIDS, abuse, and hope received extensive media coverage. Foreword by Paul Monette; Afterword by Fred Rogers, with a new Afterword by the author.
The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture
Walter L. Williams - 1986
I believe that people should be able to call themselves whatever they wish, and scholars should respect and acknowledge their change of terminology. I went on record early on in convincing other anthropologists to shift away from use of the word berdache and in favor of using Two-Spirit. Nevertheless, because this book continues to be sold with the use of berdache, many people have assumed that I am resisting the newer term. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unless continued sales of this book will justify the publication of a third revised edition in the future, it is not possible to rewrite what is already printed, Therefore, I urge readers of this book, as well as activists who are working to gain more respect for gender variance, mentally to substitute the term "Two-Spirit" in the place of "berdache" when reading this text. -- Walter L. Williams, Los Angeles, 2006
Nature's Domain: Anne Lister and the Landscape of Desire
Jill Liddington - 2003
Betrayed once again by another woman’s marriage plans, she knew her romantic youth was over. So many of her female friends had married and settled. Anne cast around forlornly for the life-companion she had so long sought. She held melancholy spirits at bay by reading new geology and new gardening books in Shibden’s well-stocked library.
Then a chance re-acquaintance with neighbouring heiress Ann Walker changed all that. Anne Lister is best known to us as a lesbian diarist. Nature’s Domain tracks her intense courtship of Ann Walker, vividly and candidly recorded in Anne’s daily journals - and partly written in her own secret code. This influential Anne Lister book also documents how she began redesigning the Shibden landscape and playing a powerful new role in the local political tumult after the passing of the great Reform Bill. This dramatic story, hitherto unknown and never before unpublished, unfolds to New Year’s Eve 1832. It records how Anne Lister’s indomitable will enabled her to mould nature to her own powerful desires. “Nature’s Domain gives a compelling overview of a key time in Anne Lister’s remarkable life. Jill Liddington guides us knowledgeably through the diaries of 1832, offering crucial insight into Anne’s private and candour observations about love, sex, money and politics.” Laura Johansen, Cultural Destinations Manager, Halifax. Jill Liddington is co-author of One Hand Tied Behind Us (1978) which became a suffrage classic. She is author of Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax 1791-1840 (1994) and of Female Fortune: the Anne Lister diaries 1833-36 (1998). She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, and lives in Mytholmroyd near Halifax. Sally Wainwright’s BBC1 drama series, Gentleman Jack was inspired by Female Fortune and Nature’s Domain
Humanity: How Jimmy Carter Lost an Election and Transformed the Post-Presidency (Kindle Single)
Jordan Michael Smith - 2016
Carter's unpopularity helped Republicans win seats in the House and gain control over the Senate for the first time in over 20 years. The Reagan Era had begun, ushering in a generation of conservative power. Democrats blamed Carter for this catastrophe and spent the next decade pretending he had never existed. Republicans cheered his demise and trotted out his name to scare voters for years to come. Carter and his wife Rosalynn returned to their farm in the small town of Plains, Georgia. They were humiliated, widely unpopular, and even in financial debt. 35 years later, Carter has become the most celebrated post-president in American history. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize, written bestselling books, and become lauded across the world for his efforts on behalf of peace and social justice. Ex-presidents now adopt the Carter model of leveraging their eminent status to benefit humanity. By pursuing diplomatic missions, leading missions to end poverty and working to eradicate disease around the world, Carter has transformed the idea of what a president can accomplish after leaving the White House.This is the story of how Jimmy Carter lost the biggest political prize on earth--but managed to win back something much greater. Jordan Michael Smith is a contributing writer at Salon and the Christian Science Monitor. His writing has appeared in print or online for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, BBC, and many other publications. Born in Toronto, he holds a Master's of Arts in Political Science from Carleton University. He lives in New York City. www.jordanmichaelsmith.typepad.com.Cover design by Adil Dara.
Spontaneous Combustion
David B. Feinberg - 1991
. . both urgent and convincing."--The New York Times Book Review In this sequel to David Feinberg's national bestseller Eighty-Sixed, B.J. Rosenthal navigates life with an HIV-positive diagnosis amidst the "constant tide of deaths" in New York City during the AIDS crisis.
Pride: Celebrating Diversity & Community
Robin Stevenson - 2016
Pride Day is a spectacular and colorful event. But there is a whole lot more to Pride than rainbow flags and amazing outfits. So what exactly are we celebrating on Pride Day? How did this event come to be? And what does Pride mean to the people who celebrate it?
Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall
James Polchin - 2019
He traces how the press depicted the murder of men by other men from the end of World War I to the Stonewall era, when gay men came to be seen as a class both historically victimized and increasingly visible.Indecent Advances tells the story of how homosexuals were criminalized in the popular imagination—from the sex panics of the 1930s, to Kinsey study of male homosexuality of the 1940s, and the Cold War panic of Communists and homosexuals in government. Polchin illustrates the vital role crime stories played in circulating ideas of normalcy and deviancy, and how those stories were used as tools to discriminate and harm the gay men who were observers and victims of crime. More importantly, Polchin shows how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall Riots of 1968.A cast of noted public figures—Leopold & Loeb, J Edgar Hoover, Alfred Kinsey, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal—is threaded through this complex subject. Politicians, law enforcement officials, and psychologists weigh in to explain the dangerous relationship between homosexuality and violence.
Beyond the Pale
Elana Dykewomon - 1997
The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich’s odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York. Interwoven with her tale is that Chava Meyer, who was attended by Gurvich at her birth and grew up to survive the pogrom that took the lives of her parents. Throughout the book, historical background plays a large part: Jewish faith and traditions, the practice of midwifery, the horrific conditions in prerevolutionary Russia and New York sweatshops, and the determined work of labor unionists and suffragists.
Loving Eleanor
Susan Wittig Albert - 2016
Their relationship begins with mutual romantic passion, matures through stormy periods of enforced separation and competing interests, and warms into an enduring, encompassing friendship documented by 3300 letters. Set during the chaotic years of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Second World War, Loving Eleanor reveals Eleanor Roosevelt as a complex, contradictory, and entirely human woman who is pulled in many directions by her obligations to her husband and family and her role as the nation's First Lady. Hick is revealed as an accomplished journalist, who, at the pinnacle of her career, gives it all up for the woman she loves. Then, as Eleanor is transformed into Eleanor Everywhere, First Lady of the World, Hick must create her own independent, productive life. Loving Eleanor is a profoundly moving novel that illuminates a relationship we are seldom privileged to see, celebrating the depth and durability of women's love.
The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps
Heinz Heger - 1972
Since that time, books such as Richard Plant's The Pink Triangle (and Martin Sherman's play Bent) have illuminated this nearly lost history. Heinz Heger's first-person account, The Men with the Pink Triangle, was one of the first books on the topic and remains one of the most important. In 1939, Heger, a Viennese university student, was arrested and sentenced to prison for being a "degenerate." Within weeks he was transported to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in East Germany, and forced to wear a pink triangle to show that his crime was homosexuality. He remained there, under horrific conditions, until the end of the war in 1945. The power of The Men with the Pink Triangle comes from Heger's sparse prose and his ability to recall--and communicate--the smallest resonant details. The pain and squalor of everyday camp life--the constant filth, the continuous presence of death, and the unimaginable cruelty of those in command--are all here. But Heger's story would be unbearable were it not for the simple courage he and others used to survive and, having survived, that he bore witness. This book is harrowing but necessary reading for everyone concerned about gay history, human rights, or social justice. --Michael Bronski