Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme


Ivan E. CoyoteAnne Fleming - 2011
    The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.

Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son


Lori Duron - 2013
    Whereas her older son, Chase, is a Lego-loving, sports-playing boy's boy, her younger son, C.J., would much rather twirl around in a pink sparkly tutu, with a Disney Princess in each hand while singing Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi."   C.J. is gender variant or gender nonconforming, whichever you prefer. Whatever the term, Lori has a boy who likes girl stuff—really likes girl stuff. He floats on the gender-variation spectrum from super-macho-masculine on the left all the way to super-girly-feminine on the right. He's not all pink and not all blue. He's a muddled mess or a rainbow creation. Lori and her family choose to see the rainbow.   Written in Lori's uniquely witty and warm voice and launched by her incredibly popular blog of the same name, Raising My Rainbow is the unforgettable story of her wonderful family as they navigate the often challenging but never dull privilege of raising a slightly effeminate, possibly gay, totally fabulous son.Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content

Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union


Roger Keeran - 2004
    For the authors of this work, however, it instead represented the disappearance of a counterweight to colonialism and imperialism. They ask whether the Soviet demise was indeed inevitable, as the triumphalist right has claimed, suggesting that without the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s the answer is "no." They examine the policies of Gorbachev as the product of ideological debates that had been continuing in the Communist Party since Lenin's time and as a response to the development of a second private economy within the overall socialist framework. Gorbachev's reforms of 1987, seen as comparable to policies pushed by Kruschev during 1954-1963 and advocated by Bukharin in the 1920s, discarded central tenets of Marxism-Leninism and prompted the collapse of the Soviet order. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle


Elaine Showalter - 1990
    This book ranges over the trial of Oscar Wilde, the public furore over prostitution and syphilis, moral outrage over the breakdown of the family, abortion rights and AIDS. High and low culture, from male quest romances to contemporary male bonding movies, Freud to Fatal Attraction, are all included in his study.

The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities


Ching-In ChenBran Fenner - 2011
    We wanted to hear about folks’ experiences confronting abusers, both with cops and courts and with methods outside the criminal justice system."—The Revolution Starts at Home collectiveLong demanded and urgently needed, The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities finally breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the “secret” of intimate violence within social justice circles. This watershed collection of stories and strategies tackles the multiple forms of violence encountered right where we live, love, and work for social change—and delves into the nitty-gritty on how we might create safety from abuse without relying on the state. Drawing on over a decade of community accountability work, along with its many hard lessons and unanswered questions, The Revolution Starts at Home offers potentially life-saving alternatives for creating survivor safety while building a movement where no one is left behind. Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic. Kundiman Fellow Jai Dulani is an interdisciplinary storyteller and activist/educator. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author of Consensual Genocide. Andrea Smith is the author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.

Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era


Jason Baumann - 2019
    A face in a crowd holding a sign that says, “Hi Mom, Guess What!” at an LGBT rights rally. Two lovers kissing under a tree. These indelible images are among the hundreds housed in the New York Public Library’s archive of photographs of LGBT history from photojournalists Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies.This powerful collection—which captures the energy, humor, and humanity of the groundbreaking protests that surrounded the Stonewall Riots—celebrates the diversity of the LGBT rights movement, both in the subjects of the photos and by presenting Lahusen and Davies’ distinctive work and perspectives in conversation with each other. A preface, captions, and part introductions from curator Jason Baumann provide illuminating historical context. And an introduction from best-selling author Roxane Gay speaks to the continued importance of these iconic photos of resistance.

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia


Masha Gessen - 2017
    Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen’s understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own–as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.