It tells the story of very private lives caught up in the heartrendering ordeal of suffering and doom - an ordeal that was largely ignored for reasons of politics and majority morality.Filled with power, anger, and intelligence, Larry Kramer's riveting play dramatizes what actualy happened from the time of the disease's discovery to the present, and points a moral j'accuse in many directions. His passionate indictment of government, the media, and the public for refusing to deal with a national plague is electrifying theater - a play that finally breaks through the conspiracy of silence with a shout of stunning impact. As Douglas Watt summed it up in his review for the New York Daily News,THE NORMAL HEART is "an angry, unremitting and gripping piece of political theater. You are bound to come away moved."

    Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

    Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.Often O'Hara, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.

    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.

    She was a tough-talking, wise-cracking vaudeville performer who made her way onto the Broadway stage and then into the hearts of the American public with a highly visible Hollywood film career. Rarely, however, do people think of Mae West as a writer even though she wrote eight scripts for the stage and her own dialogue for many of her films. In "Three Plays By Mae West, " Lillian Schlissel brings this underexplored part of West's career to the fore by offering for the first time in book form, three of the plays West wrote in the 1920s--"Sex" (1926), "The Drag" (1927) and "Pleasure Man" (1928). Schlissel's introduction offers insight to the life and early career of this legendary stage and screen actress. In her first starring role on Broadway, West played Margy LaMont in "Sex, " which had 375 continuous performances but was closed by the police after more than a year, when she was tried and convicted of corrupting the morals of youth. Set in a Montreal brothel, the play confronts the issue of women separated by class and attitudes of sexuality. West's character learns the painful lesson that women are not bound in sisterhood simply because they have both shared the betrayal of men. In "The Drag, " which opened in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but not in New York, West argued that, like sexuality in a woman, homosexuality had no class identification. In this play West used the theatricality of the drag "queens" who had become her friends and "sisters." "Pleasure Man" is once again set in the world of theatre, and is both a forerunner to "La Cage aux Folles" and a revenge fantasy in which a man is castrated after seducing and impregnating an innocent girl. "Pleasure Man" had two and a half performances in the city before it was closed by the police. While West won the legal right to have her play performed, its controversial nature marked the end of her box office success.

    Five main characters are linked loosely and intermittently and at the center of the play is an ever-changing love triangle of petty criminals. It is a gritty, grimy urban society, a depressing  microcosm of drugs, shoplifting, prostitution, and sexual adventure. The characters have shunned morality and conduct hedonistic and destructive lives in this shocking, humorous, nihilistic play that examines a completely corrupted society.

    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.

    Sullivan goes on to provide a detailed overview of the complex ways in which queer theory has been employed, covering a diversity of key topics including: race, sadomasochism, straight sex, fetishism, community, popular culture, transgender, and performativity. Each chapter focuses on a distinct issue or topic, provides a critical analysis of the specific ways in which it has been responded to by critics (including Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adrienne Rich and Laura Mulvey), introduces key terms, and uses contemporary cinematic texts as examples.

    Sweeping all major theater awards, including the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama, as well as four 1996 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score for a Musical, Rent captures the heart and spirit of a generation, refleting it onstage through the emotion of its stirring words and music, and the energy of its young cast. Now, for the first time, Rent comes to life on the page -- through vivid color photographs, the full libretto, and an utterly compelling behind-the-scenes oral history of the show's creation. Here is the exclusive and absolutely complete companion to Rent, told in the voices of the extraordinary talent behind its success: the actors, the director, the producers, and the librettist and composer himself, Jonathan Larson, whose sudden death, on the eve of the first performance, has made Rent's life-affirming message all the more poignant.

    One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth."The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself." —From the new Preface

    Martin Sherman's worldwide hit play Bent took London by storm in 1979 when it was first performed by the Royal Court Theatre, with Ian McKellen as Max (a character written with the actor in mind). The play itself caused an uproar. "It educated the world," Sherman explains. "People knew about how the Third Reich treated Jews and, to some extent, gypsies and political prisoners. But very little had come out about their treatment of homosexuals." Gays were arrested and interned at work camps prior to the genocide of Jews, gypsies, and handicapped, and continued to be imprisoned even after the fall of the Third Reich and liberation of the camps. The play Bent highlights the reason why - a largely ignored German law, Paragraph 175, making homosexuality a criminal offense, which Hitler reactivated and strengthened during his rise to power.

    These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams.I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascialike pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones.The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stickagainst the lion's cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow!With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lionpulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars.The lion didn't want to do it—He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowdthis: I only wanted some goddamn sleep . . . Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Surprise, Arizona, and is working to preserve the Mojave language.

    Of interest to readers in gender studies and cultural studies, the psychology and sociology of emotions, and phenomenology and psychoanalysis, The Cultural Politics of the Emotions offers new ways of thinking about our inner and our outer lives.

    In the victories of Tamburlaine, Faustus's encounters with the demonic, the irreverence of Barabas in THE JEW OF MALTA, and the humiliation of Edward II in his fall from power and influence, Marlowe explores the shifting balance between power and helplessness, the sacred and its desecration.

    Thrown objects. Dodged burgers.After someone threw a burger at them and shouted a transphobic slur, performance artist Travis Alabanza became obsessed with burgers. How they are made, how they feel, and smell. How they travel through the air. How the mayonnaise feels on your skin.Burgerz is the climax of their obsession – exploring how trans and gender non-conforming bodies exist and how, by them reclaiming an act of violence, we can address our own complicity.