Showing titles in LGBTQ+ Studies

Savor gorgeous writing and the pleasure of romance with Best Lesbian Romance 2014. The lesbian literati in this volume comprising the very best of the year raise the bar with tales that grab listener's attention, and their libidos, and have them coming back for more. Romance is many things: Thrilling, inspiring, passionate, and life-altering. But most of all, love - whether new or lifelong - is filled with endless possibility.

Vivek Shraya has reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she's endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive childhood, she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult, she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak. Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate.

In Men at War, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. He goes inside the machines of war and strips away uniform cloth to discover the true depth and complexity of men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. From writers, filmmakers, artists and ordinary men - including those in his own family - Turner assembles a broad cast of characters to bring the war to life.

The razor-sharp but damaged Valerie Solanas; a doomed lesbian biker gang; recovering alcoholics; and teenagers barely surviving at an ice creamery: these are some of the larger-than-life, yet all-too-human figures populating America’s fringes. Rife with never-ending fights and failures, theirs are the stories we too often try to forget. But in the process of excavating and documenting these queer lives, Michelle Tea also reveals herself in unexpected and heartbreaking ways.

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of US citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity.

What even is "sexy," and how do you do it? A tough question for trans and nonbinary queers struggling to find their sexual selves in a landscape rife with misogynistic, transphobic and homophobic ideals and expectations. In How Do I Sexy?, Mx. Nillin Lore provides affirming and helpful direction based on over a decade of their own personal and professional experience as an educator, advocate, support worker and award-winning sex blogger. You're invited to do some deep introspection, find a look that feels right and gain insight on sexiness from fellow trans and nonbinary queers.

When Brianna Pastor released her self-published poetry collection, Good Grief, she was blown away by the outpouring of support from people who reached out and said, “Yes. Me too.” For anyone who has struggled with questions of identity or coped with serious emotional issues, including grief, trauma, anxiety, and depression, this collection will help you find hope on the other side.

In Scarborough, a low-income urban neighborhood, three kids struggle to rise above poverty, abuse, and a system that consistently fails them. The adults in their lives either rise to the occasion or fall by the wayside; together, they make up a troubled yet inspired community that refuses to be undone.

From the singular voices behind Tom and Lorenzo comes the ultimate guide to all-things RuPaul's Drag Race and its influence on modern LGBTQ culture. Legendary Children centers itself around the idea that not only is RuPaul's Drag Race the queerest show in the history of television, but that RuPaul and company devised a show that serves as an actual museum of queer cultural and social history, drawing on queer traditions and the work of legendary figures going back nearly a century.

Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.

Best Gay Erotica 2015 is filled to the pause-resisting brim with fantastic tales of fire dancers and TV repairmen, of hunky painters and electricians and magicians, solo sex, duo sex, and sweat-soaked triple onslaughts. Heck, throw in an alien and a priest, and you'll soon see why this anthology is head and shoulders - not to mention certain other body parts - above the rest, and always with the highest literary quality that listeners have come to expect from this esteemed and steamy collection.

A tour de force of groundbreaking reportage by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jo Becker, Forcing the Spring follows the historic legal challenge mounted against California’s ban on same-sex marriage, a remarkable lawsuit that forced the issue of marriage equality before the highest court in the land. For nearly five years Becker embedded with the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, was given free rein within the legal and political war rooms where strategy was plotted, and attended every day of the trial and every appellate argument.

Happiness has become a serious business. Where 20th-century psychology focused on depression and illness, in the new millennium scientists have begun focusing on "positive psychology" - the study of happiness. Ariel Gore first became intrigued by this subject when she discovered that a class on positive psychology was the most popular course on the Harvard campus.

Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. As soon as she solves her “penis problem”, she begins receiving anonymous letters, seemingly sent by a cult of sinister clowns, and sets out on a magical mystery tour to find the source of these surreal missives. Misadventures abound.

Emerson Whitney writes, "Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess." What follows is that mess—electrifying, gorgeous, defiant. At Heaven's center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose—all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton—to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood.

The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf fills a necessary gap in our understanding of how racism, transphobia, and antiblackness operate in liberal spaces. Black feminist and queer theorist Kaila Adia Story blends analysis, pop culture, and her lived experiences to explore the silencing practices of mainstream queer culture.

Based on Baron's own empirical research, What's Your Pronoun? chronicles the story of the role pronouns have played-and continue to play-in establishing both our rights and our identities. It is an essential work in understanding how 21st-century culture has evolved.

Mab Segrest explores her singular experience as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent Far Right movement in North Carolina in this best-selling political memoir.

Detective Kurt O'Donnell is used to digging up other people's secrets, but when he discovers his slain partner was married to another man, it shakes him. Determined to do the right thing, Kurt offers the mourning Davy his assistance. Helping Davy through his grief helps Kurt deal with the guilt that his partner didn't trust him enough to tell him the truth, and somewhere along the way Davy stops being an obligation and becomes a friend, the closest friend Kurt has ever had. His growing attraction to Davy complicates matters, leaving Kurt struggling to reevaluate his sexuality.

All I Could Bare is the story of a mild-mannered graduate student who "took the road less clothed". Seymour embarked on his journey in the 1990s, when Washington, D.C.'s gay club scene was notoriously no-holds-barred, all the while trying to keep his newfound vocation a secret from his parents and maintain a relationship with his boyfriend, Seth. Along the way he met some unforgettable characters....