Queer Literature Across Genres

Showing all 13 results

  • And the Dragons Do Come

    And the Dragons Do Come

    Raising a Transgender Kid in Rural America
    Sim Butler
    $24.99

    A gripping account of one family’s battle to protect their daughter against transphobia and hate in contemporary America

    Our country stands at a critical cultural crossroads, with a wave of anti-trans legislation emerging at unprecedented levels targeting trans children, in particular, who face increasing stigmatization and erasure. Sim Butler’s And the Dragons Do Come is a poignant account of one family’s experience of parenting and supporting a trans child against this nightmarish backdrop.

     

    In recent years, the Butler family faced an impossible reality in their home state of Alabama, where trans rights are increasingly under attack. Butler recounts their family’s struggles and sacrifices to protect their trans child against the barrage of state-sanctioned intolerance in the legal, educational, and health arenas.

     

    Around the time she turned twelve, his daughter’s personal struggles became political fodder. Along with other trans kids, she was outlawed from playing sports and forbidden to use the girls’ bathroom. Another law made Butler and his wife felons for seeking trans-affirming health care for her. When her charter school was featured in several gubernatorial campaign ads, local community members began driving through the parking lot to yell at the trans kids.

     

    Serving both as a compassionate story of one family’s struggle for acceptance and as a window onto a fraught issue that parents, grandparents, other family members, and friends are confronting across the nation, And the Dragons Do Come provides a firsthand perspective on the human cost of anti-trans sentiment.

     

  • Mouths of Rain  cover

    Mouths of Rain

    An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
    Briona Simone Jones
    $22.99

    Winner, Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Anthology
    Winner, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Publishing Triangle Awards
    A Ms. magazine, Refinery29, and Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Read of 2021

    A groundbreaking collection tracing the history of intellectual thought by Black Lesbian writers, in the tradition of The New Press’s perennial seller Words of Fire

    African American lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing. Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century.

    Using “Black Lesbian” as a capacious signifier, Mouths of Rain includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who have self-identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black Lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word lesbian as a political descriptor that disrupts and critiques capitalism, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, Mouths of Rain addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-blackness while also attending to love, romance, “coming out,” and the erotic.

    Contributors include:
    Barbara Smith
    Beverly Smith
    Bettina Love
    Dionne Brand
    Cheryl Clarke
    Cathy J. Cohen
    Angelina Weld Grimke
    Alexis Pauline Gumbs
    Audre Lorde
    Dawn Lundy Martin
    Pauli Murray
    Michelle Parkerson
    Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
    Alice Walker
    Jewelle Gomez

  • Edges of the Rainbow  cover

    Edges of the Rainbow

    LGBTQ Japan
    Michel Delsol
    $21.95

    PAPERBACK ORIGINAL An intimate photographic glimpse into the queer world behind the closed doors of modern Japanese society



    The LGBTQ community in Japan has faced its challenges. Even as some religious and warrior orders have a long and recognized tradition of same-sex love, to be considered different, to be “the nail that sticks out,” makes coming out difficult.


    Despite the conservative strain within Japanese society that encourages the LGBTQ community to remain unseen, a welcome change is happening on the ground. A number of queer cultural figures are opening up new horizons, and a growing majority of Japanese people believe that homosexuality should be an integral and open part of society.


    The latest in a series of beautiful, affordable photobooks that look at LGBTQ communities around the world, Edges of the Rainbow is a photographic celebration of the queer community in Japan. In a set of more than 150 color and black-and-white photographs, acclaimed photographer Michel Delsol and journalist Haruku Shinozaki have brought together a fascinating group of individuals to create an unforgettable and uplifting look at a proud and resilient community on the margins of Japanese society.


    Edges of the Rainbow was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

  • LGBTQ Stats  cover

    LGBTQ Stats

    Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer People by the Numbers
    Bennett Singer
    $14.99$17.95
    Winner of the 2018 American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book Award

    An essential handbook of myth-busting facts and figures about the real lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people



    Twenty years ago it was impossible to imagine the president of the United States embracing same-sex marriage or Bruce Jenner transitioning to Caitlyn Jenner, an open transgender woman.

    LGBTQ Stats chronicles the ongoing LGBTQ revolution, providing the critical statistics, and draws upon and synthesizes newly collected data. Deschamps and Singer—whose previous books and films on LGBTQ topics have won numerous awards and found audiences around the globe—provide chapters on family and marriage, workplace discrimination, education, youth, criminal justice, and immigration, as well as evolving policies and laws affecting LGBTQ communities. A chapter on LGBTQ life around the globe contrasts the dramatic progress for LGBTQ people in the United States with violent backlash in countries such as Russia, Iran, and Nigeria, which have discriminatory laws that make same-sex activity punishable by prison or death.

    A lively, accessible, and eye-opening snapshot, LGBTQ Stats offers an invaluable resource for activists, journalists, lawmakers, and general readers who want the facts and figures on LGBTQ lives in the twenty-first century.

  • Love Unites Us  cover

    Love Unites Us

    Winning the Freedom to Marry in America
    Kevin Cathcart
    $27.95$27.99

    Firsthand accounts from the attorneys and advocates who brought the historic cases and fought to secure the freedom to marry for same-sex couples.

    The June 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was a sweeping victory for the freedom to marry, but it was one step in a long process. Love Unites Us is the history of activists’ passion and persistence in the struggle for marriage rights for same-sex couples in the United States, told in the words of those who waged the battle.

    Launching the fight for the freedom to marry had neither an obvious nor an uncontested strategy. To many activists, achieving marriage equality seemed far-fetched, but the skeptics were proved wrong in the end. Proactive arguments in favor of love, family, and commitment were more effective than arguments that focused on rights and the goal of equality at work. Telling the stories of people who loved and cared for one another, in sickness and in health, cut through the antigay noise and moved people—not without backlash and not overnight, but faster than most activists and observers had ever imagined. With compelling stories from leading attorneys and activists including Evan Wolfson, Mary L. Bonauto, Jon W. Davidson, and Paul M. Smith, Love Unites Us explains how gay and lesbian couples achieved the right to marry.

    “An exceptional piece of work by courageous and innovative leaders.” —Eric H. Holder Jr., 82nd US attorney general

    “Captures the amazing story of the fight for marriage equality—in California and around the country. A remarkable journey recounted with truth and eloquence.” —Gavin Newsom, governor of California

  • Queer America  cover

    Queer America

    A People's GLBT History of the United States
    Vicki L. Eaklor
    $21.99
    Placing GLBT people at the center of the history of the twentieth century,
    Vicki L. Eaklor’s Queer America: A People’s GLBT History of the United States is a major new effort to popularize a long-overlooked chapter in the American experience.


    Written in the tradition of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Queer America, provides a decade-by-decade overview of major issues and events in GLBT history including the Harlem Renaissance, changes in military policy, the Stonewall riots, organizations and alliances, AIDS, same-sex marriage, representation in the media, and legal battles. Eaklor brings the steady hand and perspective of an historian to the task of writing a sweeping work of narrative nonfiction that is both meaningful and relevant to all Americans.


    Queer America includes a rich array of visual materials, including sidebars highlighting major debates and vignettes focusing on key individuals. A timeline and further reading sections conclude each chapter; a full bibliography and black-and-white images enhance the text. Queer America is destined to become an indispensable resource for students, teachers, and general readers alike.

  • Ties That Bind  cover

    Ties That Bind

    Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences
    Sarah Schulman
    $17.99$23.95
    Hailed as “a cri de coeur woven into a utopian vision” by Susan Brownmiller (author of Against Our Will), Ties That Bind is the highly praised work of prizewinning writer and professor Sarah Schulman on “familial homophobia,” a phenomenon that, until now, has not had a name but is nevertheless an integral part of most people’s experience. Ties That Bind invites us to understand familial homophobia as a cultural crisis, rather than a personal or an individual problem.


    Ambitious, original, and deeply important, Schulman’s book draws on her own lived experience, her research, and her engagement with active social change to articulate a practical, attainable vision of transformation that can begin today. This highly acclaimed and groundbreaking exploration is now available in paperback for countless more to experience a fundamental text that alters our understanding of homophobia and adds a critical dimension to the political landscape of all Americans.
  • Dangerous Liaisons  cover

    Dangerous Liaisons

    Blacks, Gays, and the Struggle for Equality
    Eric Brandt
    $22.95

    A groundbreaking study of the intersections of race and sexuality, by an all-star group of writers. From Selma and Stonewall to California’s Proposition 209 and the Defense of Marriage Act, blacks and gays continue to face resistance. Conservatives often lump these two groups together by arguing that both are demanding not equal rights, but “special” rights. In fact, gay rights activists have drawn parallels between their own struggles and the civil rights movement. Yet others have balked at any comparison, and conflict between the minorities has recently arisen. In an unprecedented undertaking, Dangerous Liaisons provides a platform for the leading minds of both communities, including those who straddle both worlds, to debate the volatile subject of the relationship between African Americans and homosexuals. In eleven newly commissioned pieces together with five classic essays, Dangerous Liaisons addresses such timely issues as attitudes toward gay marriage versus attitudes toward interracial marriage; the growth of gay and lesbian rights organizations and homophobia in the black church; and conflict among minorities in the arts. Dangerous Liaisons presents well-known historians, political analysts, activists, artists, writers, and philosophers on minority relations in the struggle for legal, social, and cultural equality.

    Contributors: Michael Bronski, George Chauncey, Cheryl Clark, Cathy Cohen, Gary Comstock, Samuel Delany, Martin Duberman, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jewelle Gomez, Pillip Brian Harper, Audre Lorde, Robert Reid-Pharr, Darieck Scott, Barbara Smith, Alisa Solomon, Cornel West

  • The World Out There cover

    The World Out There

    Becoming Part of the Lesbian and Gay Community
    Michael Thomas Ford
    $14.95

    A much-needed introduction to life beyond the closet door, Mike Ford’s The World Out There: Becoming Part of the Lesbian and Gay Community is the first book for a new generation of young men and women who want to know more about what being part of the gay and lesbian community means.

    In a book that many older gay men and lesbians will wish had been available to them, The World Out There addresses everything from dating and the gay bar scene, to career and education choices, community centers, and online services.

    The book includes lists of songs, artists, books, films, and resources of special interest to lesbians and gay men; schools with gay studies programs; and portraits of a half-dozen gay communities in cities across the country. Brief profiles offer examples of men and women who have successfully incorporated their gay identities into their personal and professional lives.

    Ideal for the thousands of young men and women who migrate to urban gay communities every year, The World Out There is also for the thousands of others isolated in less receptive settings for whom this book will open up a whole wonderful and reassuring universe of possibilities.


  • Try This at Home!  cover

    Try This at Home!

    A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Winning Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Policy
    Matthew A. Coles
    $14.95

    Try This at Home! is a practical, no-nonsense guide for individuals and grassroots groups on how to pass laws and policies that protect lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals from discrimination. Written by the director of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project of the ACLU, the book suggests strategies to use at the state and local government levels, and at private institutions—including universities, corporations, banks, and social service organizations. The book includes information on:

    • Building support in the lesbian and gay community
    • Designing your campaign organization
    • Developing an endorsement strategy
    • Building relationships with the media
    • Writing and negotiating policy
    • Lobbying
    • Domestic partnership policies

    Written in response to the hundreds of requests for assistance Coles has received, Try This at Home! also contains anecdotes from those who have helped enact pro-gay policies, sidebars on what works and what doesn’t, and appendixes with the actual wording Coles recommends for gay-friendly amendments to all manner of policies and legislation.

  • Art on My Mind  cover

    Art on My Mind

    Visual Politics
    bell hooks
    $17.99$18.99

    The canonical work of cultural criticism by the “profoundly influential critic” (Artnet), in a beautiful thirtieth-anniversary edition, featuring a new foreword by esteemed visual artist Mickalene Thomas

    “Sharp and persuasive.” —The New York Times Book Review on the original publication of Art on My Mind

    Art on My Mind, “one of the country’s most influential feminist thinkers“ (Artforum) offers a tender yet potent suite of writings for a world increasingly concerned with art and identity politics. This collection of bell hooks’s essays, each with art at its center, explores both the obvious and obscure: from ruminations on the fraught representation of Black bodies, to reflections on the creative processes of women artists, to analysis of the use of blood in visual art.

    bell hooks has been “instrumental in cracking open the white, western canon for Black artists” (Artnet), with searing essays complemented by conversations with Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, Margo Humphrey, and LaVerne Wells-Bowie. Featuring full-color artwork from giants such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, and Alison Saar, Art on My Mind “examines the way race, sex and class shape who makes art, how it sells and who values it” (The New York Times), while questioning how art can be instrumental for Black liberation. In doing so, hooks urges us to unravel the forces of oppression that colonize our imaginations.

    With a new foreword from acclaimed contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas, this thirtieth-anniversary edition passes the torch to a new generation of artists, capturing hooks’s simple yet evergreen affirmation: art matters—it is a life force in the struggle for freedom. Art on My Mind is essential reading for anyone looking to find lessons on liberation and creativity in the world of color—the free world of art.

  • A Queer Reader cover

    A Queer Reader

    Patrick Higgins
    $25.00
    A Queer Reader is a rich and provocative collection of writings about male homosexuality—a gay version of Bartlett’s Quotations, with authors ranging from Plato to Andy Warhol. Arranging entries chronologically and drawing on sources from the Satyricon to Gay News, from Michelangelo&squo;s sonnets to a speech in the House of Lords, from sexually explicit graffiti found in Pompeii to a Playboy interview with David Bowie, Patrick Higgins uses novels, biographies, autobiographies, histories, and ephemera to present gay history as never before.
  • Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian  cover

    Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian

    A Literary Anthology
    Bennett L. Singer
    $14.95

    Growing up Gay, Growing up Lesbian is the first literary anthology geared specifically to gay and lesbian youth. It includes more than fifty coming-of-age stories by established writers and teenagers and has been hailed by writers, educators, activists, booksellers, and the press as an essential resource for young people—and not-so-young people—seeking to understand the gay and lesbian experience. The anthology includes selections by James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, David Leavitt, Jeanette Winterson, Audre Lorde, and others.

    A free teaching guide is available.


Showing all 13 results