Showing titles in LGBTQ+ Studies

In this audiobook inspired by her popular TED Talk, the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code urges women to embrace imperfection and live a bolder, more authentic life. By choosing bravery over perfection, we can find the power to claim our voice, to leave behind what makes us unhappy, and to go for the things we genuinely, passionately want. In Brave, Not Perfect, Saujani shares powerful insights and practices to help us let go of our need for perfection and make bravery a lifelong habit.

In None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary, Travis Alabanza considers seven phrases people have directed at them throughout their life. These phrases—some deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or violent, some celebratory—have fundamentally shaped Alabanza, both for better and for worse.

They number in the millions and they are incredibly important to families and to our society, yet they are underappreciated, little respected, and even controversial. Who are they? They are the stay-at-home moms. In Praise of Stay-at-Home Moms is a special book, a profound and unique understanding of how important it is for mothers to raise their own children.

Hugh Ryan's When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. In intimate, evocative, moving prose, Ryan brings this never-before-told story of Brooklyn's vibrant and forgotten queer history to life.

The world is full of mixed messages for girls: Stand up for yourself but do it softly. Be independent but not single. Love your body, just make sure it’s waxed, bleached, and thin. And then there are the more overt hostilities: being talked over, paid less, touched without permission, and having politicians debate their right to bodily autonomy. Many parents find it simpler to affirm girls’ strength than to address these distressing experiences directly. But with girls’ skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide, parenting them in this culture presents an urgent challenge.

From the moment he began writing his syndicated sex-advice column, "Savage Love", Dan Savage has never been shy about expressing his opinion on controversial topics - political or otherwise. In the height of his activism, he addresses issues ranging from parenting and the gay agenda to the Catholic Church and health care. Speaking to a broad range of subjects with brutal honesty and irreverent humor, American Savage is a pivotal piece that cements Dan Savage’s place as a provocative and insightful voice in American culture.

In 1930, William Haines was Hollywood's #1 box-office draw - a talented, handsome, and wisecracking romantic lead. Off screen, however, protected by a careful collaboration between studio and press, he was openly gay with reporters and studio chiefs alike. Here is Haines's virtually unknown story - rich with detail, revelations, and scandal - about silent movies and talkies; his lover Jimmie Shields, and their fifty-year relationship.

Lesbian bars have always been treasured safe spaces for their customers, providing not only a good time but a shelter from societal alienation and outright persecution. In 1987, there were 206 of them in America. Today, only a couple dozen remain. How and why did this happen? What has been lost—or possibly gained—by such a decline? What transpires when marginalized communities become more accepted and mainstream? In Moby Dyke, Krista Burton attempts to answer these questions firsthand, venturing on an epic cross-country pilgrimage to the last few remaining dyke bars.

It goes without saying that even today, it's not easy to be gay in America. While young gay men often come out more readily, even those from the most progressive of backgrounds still struggle with the legacy of early-life stigma and a deficit of self-acceptance, which can fuel doubt, regret, and, at worst, self-loathing. Through moving stories - of friends and patients, and his own - Odets considers how experiences early in life launch men on trajectories aimed at futures that are not authentically theirs.

June 28, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots.

Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of 31 men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue-collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community.

At least two generations of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people have emerged since Becoming a Visible Man was first published in 2004, but the book remains a beloved resource for trans people and their allies. Since the first edition's publication, author Jamison Green's writings and advocacy among business and governmental organizations around the world have led to major changes in the fields of law, medicine, and social policy, and his (mostly invisible) work has had significant effects on trans people globally.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the lesbian feminist movement and the no-fault divorce revolution transformed the lives of wives who desired women. Women could now choose to divorce their husbands in order to lead openly lesbian or bisexual lives; increasingly, however, these women were confronted by hostile state discrimination, typically in legal battles over child custody. Well into the 1980s, many women remained ambivalent about divorce and resistant to labeling themselves as lesbian, therefore complicating a simple interpretation of their lives and relationship choices.

Thanks to her blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex. For this book, she spoke to more than 30 African women across the globe while chronicling her own journey toward sexual freedom.

In the era of Grindr and same-sex marriage, gay bars are closing down at an alarming rate. What, then, was the gay bar? Set between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London, Gay Bar takes us on a time-traveling, transatlantic bar hop through pulsing nightclubs, after-work dives, hardcore leather bars, gay cafes, and saunas, asking what these places meant to their original clientele, what they meant to the author as a younger man, and what they mean now.

Hey, I'm Jamie, a 29-year-old trans guy from the UK. I've been transitioning for 12 years now after realising I was trans (by accident!) at sixteen years old. I knew I was a boy since the age of four, but realised whilst growing up that I was different. It was only in my teens that I found the words to express who I was and what I needed to do. Since then, I've been on testosterone for more than a decade - I know, I can't believe it either - I've also had top and bottom surgery and legally changed my sex, so I know a few things about the transitioning process and being trans!

Michael Andor Brodeur is a Gen-X gay writer with a passion for bodybuilding and an insatiable curiosity about masculinity—a concept in which many men are currently struggling to find their place. In our current moment, where “manfluencers” on TikTok tease their audiences with their latest videos, where right-wing men espouse the importance of being “alpha,” as toxic masculinity and the patriarchy are being rightfully criticized, the nature of masculinity has become murkier than ever.

Anne Lister was extraordinary. Fearless, charismatic, and determined to explore her lesbian sexuality, she forged her own path in a society that had no language to define her. She was a landowner, an industrialist, and a prolific diarist whose output has secured her legacy as one of the most fascinating figures of the 19th century. Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister follows Anne from her crumbling ancestral home in Yorkshire to the glittering courts of Denmark as she resolves to put past heartbreak behind her and find herself a wife.

Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Heyam looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.

On the eve the 20th century, in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, one of the earliest attempts at a sound film depicted two men dancing together as a third plays the violin. It’s only a few minutes long, but this cornerstone of early cinema captures a queer moment on film. It would not be the last. Hollywood Pride is a tale spanning from “pansy craze” of the 1930s to the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, all the way up to today.