Celebrating Pride Month

Summary:

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book -- Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns -- and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan's tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? A book about storytelling -- its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change -- and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres's Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made -- a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light--Publisher's description.

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From Hida Viloria, writer and intersex activist, a candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of life, love, and gender identity as an intact intersex person, as well as a call to action for justice for intersex people. Hida Viloria was raised as a girl but discovered early on that he/r body was different. Unlike most people who are born intersex in the first world--meaning they have genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, and/or chromosomal patterns that do not fit standard definitions of male or female--Hida had the freedom to explore the person s/he was born to be because he/r parents did not agree to have he/r sex characteristics surgically altered at birth. It wasn't until s/he was 26 and encountered the term intersex in a San Francisco newspaper that s/he finally had a name for he/r difference. That's when s/he began to explore what it means to live in the space between genders--to be both and neither. As s/he began to reach out to others like he/r, however, Hida discovered that most intersex people had been scarred, both physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to correct their bodies. Eager to help end this practice, Hida came out as intersex at a national and then international level. By answering the question Are you a boy or a girl? with I'm both, Hida's helped blaze a trail for people--particularly intersex and genderqueer/non-binary people--to celebrate the middle space where male and female are not separate and opposite but entwined. Born Both is an intimate and powerful account of Hida's search for authentic identity and love in a world that insists on categorizing people into either/or--

Summary:

A striking literary memoir of genderfluidity, class, masculinity, and the American Southwest that captures the author's experience coming of age in a Tucson, Arizona, trailer park.--Amazon.com.

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Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her--and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science. In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes--and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate love darts at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed the eel question. Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized--and they have lessons for us all. Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.--Publisher's website.

Summary:

..a heartwarming story following four gay Asians navigating love, identity, and friendship--a celebration of queer chosen family.​ When AJ moves to Seattle in the early aughts, he's ready to reinvent himself as a gay Asian man--but his dreams hit reality fast with no friends, no job, and an apartment so far out, not even lesbians live there. Then a spilled drink at a bar introduces him to K, a glamorous drag queen; John, a shy gamer; and Steven, a reckless flirt. AJ's Boy Luck Club helps him find love, pride, and belonging--until a brutal attack tests everything they know about friendship and family. Meticulously observed and gorgeously illustrated, Gaysians is a fierce, funny, and tender story of queer resilience and self-discovery.--Publisher.

Summary:

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and the self. Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in the Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year's Eve in Mexico City, Lawson's travels bring unexpected wisdom about life in and out of love. They learn the strength of friendships and the dangers of beauty during a narrow escape in Egypt. They examine Blackness in post-dictatorship Zimbabwe, then take us on a secretive tour of Black freedom movements in Portugal. Through a deeply insightful journey, Lawson leads readers from a castle in France to a hula hoop competition in Jamaica to a traditional theater in Tokyo to a Prince concert in Minnesota and, finally, to finding liberation on a beach in Bermuda, exploring each location--and their deepest emotions--to the fullest. In the end, they discover how the trials of marriage, grief, and missed connections can lead to self-transformation and unimagined new freedoms--

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Twenty-five narrative essays by contemporary LGBTQ writers reflecting on queerness in horror film, from Hitchcock to Halloween to Hereditary--

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As a founder and editor of the wildly influential magazine Christopher Street and then as the first openly gay editor at a mainstream publishing house, Michael Denneny critically shaped publishing around gay subjects and themes in the 1970s and 1980s. Authors whom he helped bring into the spotlight include Paul Monette, Randy Shilts, Ethan Mordden, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, and John Preston. Here he presents not a conventional memoir, but an assemblage of writings from the 1970s and 1980s (many previously unpublished) that illuminate the twists and turns of a period of great cultural and political ferment. Denneny's time machine of a book both preserves and brings back to life a vibrant period in American cultural history--

Summary:

Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul's Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the 'queerly departed' along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard. Join any Pride march and you are likely to see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads trailing sequins, drag queens wearing mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. But these are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots. To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past and Queer as Folklore is a celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before--

Summary:

From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an empire of critique from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia. With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.

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Spring Break, 2009: Five days, three friends, and one big city. Roaming marks a triumphant return to the graphic novel and deft foray into new adult fiction for Caldecott Medal-winning authors Jillian Tamaki (Boundless) and Mariko Tamaki (Cold). Over the course of a much-anticipated trip to New York, an unexpected fling blossoms between casual acquaintances and throws a long-term friendship off-balance. Emotional tensions vibrate wildly against the resplendently illustrated backdrop of the city, capturing a spontaneous queer romance in all of its fledgling glory. Slick attention to the details of a bustling, intimidating metropolis are softened with a palette of muted pastels, as though seen through the eyes of first-time travelers. The awe, wonder, and occasional stumble along the way all come to life with stunning accuracy in this sumptuous softcover with gorgeous jacket. Roaming is the third collaboration from the critically acclaimed team behind Skim and Governor General's Literary Award winner This One Summer. Moody, atmospheric, and teeming with life, the magic of this comics duo leaks through the pages with lush and exquisite pen work. The Tamakis' singular, elegant vision of an urban paradise slowly revealing its imperfections to the tune of its visitors' rhythms is a masterpiece - a future classic for generations to come--

Summary:

Vern--seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised--flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past and, more troublingly, the future--outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering not only the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history of America that produced it. Rivers Solomon's Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren't just individuals but entire nations. This is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction--

Summary:

In this collection of one novel and three stories, Torrey Peters's keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing. In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition. Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In The Chaser, a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, The Masker, a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood-- Provided by publisher.

Summary:

In The Lavender Scare, historian David K. Johnson relates the frightening story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a Lavender Scare more vehement and long-lasting than McCarthy's Red Scare. Relying on newly declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson's 2004 book recreated the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in New Deal-era Washington and took us inside the security interrogation rooms where thousands of Americans were questioned about their sex lives. The homosexual purges ended promising careers, ruined lives, and pushed many to suicide. But, as Johnson also showed, the purges brought victims together to protest their treatment, helping launch a new civil rights struggle. Much has changed regarding LGBT rights and our understanding of LGBT history since the original publication, and this enlarged edition features a new epilogue by the author that brings the story into the twenty-first century--

Summary:

Le Guin's Hainish series begins with the assumption that centuries ago humanoids from the planet Hain ventured through the solar system establishing colonies on various planets including Earth. For mysterious reasons these colonies lose all contact and knowledge of each other until the 21st century when an attempt is made to establish a galactic league. Individual stories in this loosely organized series explore the inherent communication difficulties in the mingling and clash of cultures that, over the centuries of separation, have developed widely disparate social and political structures as well as a range of biological differences.

Summary:

A compelling exploration of trans history through art, activism, and unique objects of resistance. Surveying over four centuries, this volume brings together a wide-ranging selection of artworks and artefacts that highlight under-recognised histories of trans and gender-nonconforming communities. Through the contributions of artists, writers, poets, activists, and scholars, this title reflects on historical erasure to imagine trans futures.