Service Alert
CD service concludes July 31, 2025
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
Showing 1 - 6 of 6 items
By Kit Heyam. 2022
A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity. Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit…
neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives. 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. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.By Samuel R. Delany, Sarah Schulman, Judy Grahn, John Preston, Essex Hemphill, Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus, Jewelle Gomez, Edmund White, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Griffin, Cheryl Clarke, Linda Villarosa, Tony Kushner, Craig Lucas, Pat Califia, Melvin Dixon, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mariana Romo-Carmona, Chrystos, Peggy Shaw, Luis Alfaro, Janice Gould, Kate Rushin, Nancy K. Bereano. 2022
Running from 1990 to 1999, the annual OutWrite conference played a pivotal role in shaping LGBTQ literary culture in the…
United States and its emerging canon. OutWrite provided a space where literary lions who had made their reputations before the gay liberation movement—like Edward Albee, John Rechy, and Samuel R. Delany—could mingle, network, and flirt with a new generation of emerging queer writers like Tony Kushner, Alison Bechdel, and Sarah Schulman. This collection gives readers a taste of this fabulous moment in LGBTQ literary history with twenty-seven of the most memorable speeches from the OutWrite conference, including both keynote addresses and panel presentations. These talks are drawn from a diverse array of contributors, including Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Essex Hemphill, Patrick Califia, Dorothy Allison, Allan Gurganus, Chrystos, John Preston, Linda Villarosa, Edmund White, and many more. OutWrite offers readers a front-row seat to the passionate debates, nascent identity politics, and provocative ideas that helped animate queer intellectual and literary culture in the 1990s. Covering everything from racial representation to sexual politics, the still-relevant topics in these talks are sure to strike a chord with today’s readers.By Rachel Krantz. 2021
*****When Rachel Krantz met and fell for Adam, he told her that he was looking for a committed partnership -…
just one that did not include exclusivity.Excited but a little trepidatious, Rachel set out to see whether love and a serious relationship can coexist beyond the familiar borders of monogamy. This is her open and honest true story.Now, in her debut memoir, she chronicles her dive into non-monogamy. With fly-on-the-wall detail and extraordinary perceptiveness, OPEN takes us inside Brooklyn parties and into the wider swinger and polyamory community. Armed with her journalistic instincts, detailed journal entries and interviews with experts and therapists, Krantz also breaks new ground in confronting the unique ways tacit abuse and gaslighting can manifest when things get so complex.Unflinching and brazen, OPEN asks what liberation really looks like, and whether the pleasure really is worth the pain.(p) Octopus Publishing Group 2022By Jeremiah Moss. 2022
What happens when an entire social class abandons a metropolis? This genre-bending journey through lockdown New York offers an exhilarating,…
intimate look at a city returned to its rebellious spirit. The pandemic lockdown of 2020 launched an unprecedented urban experiment. Traffic disappeared from the streets. Times Square fell silent. And half a million residents fled the most crowded city in America. In this innovative and thrilling book, author and social critic Jeremiah Moss, hailed as “New York City’s career elegist” (New York Times), explores a city emptied of the dominant class—and their controlling influence. “Plagues have a disinhibiting effect,” Moss writes. “As the normal order is suspended, the repressive force of civilization lifts and our rules fall away, shifting the boundaries of society and psyche.” In public spaces made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss experienced an uncanny time warp. Biking through deserted Manhattan, he encountered the hustlers, eccentrics, and renegades who had been pressed into silence and invisibility by an oppressive, normative gentrification, now reemerging to reclaim the city. For one wild year the streets belonged to wandering nudists and wheelie bikers, mystical vagabonds and performance artists working to disrupt the status quo, passionate activists protesting for Black lives—along with the everyday New Yorkers who had been pushed to the margins for too long. Participating in a historic explosion of activism, resistance, and spontaneity, from queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, Moss discovered an intoxicating freedom. Without “hyper-normal” people to constrain it, New York became more creative, connected, humane, and joyful than it had been in years. Moss braids this captivating narrative with an account of his renewed sense of place as a transgender man, weaving together insights from psychoanalysis, literature, and queer theory. A kaleidoscopic vision of a city transformed, Feral City offers valuable insight into the way public space and the spaces inside us are controlled and can be set free.By Maria San Filippo. 2022
Premiering at Sundance in 2014, Desiree Akhavan’s acclaimed debut feature, Appropriate Behavior, introduced the indie film world to the deadpan,…
irreverent wit that had already won over fans of her trailblazing LGBTQ web series The Slope. The first volume in the Queer Film Classics series to spotlight a work by and about a bisexual woman of colour, this book explores Appropriate Behavior as an instant classic of US indie filmmaking in the 2010s, as a radical reappropriation of straight and gay film genres, as an artist’s coming-of-age story, and as a model for feminist-queer creative collaboration. Less than a decade old, Appropriate Behavior captures an urban queer community imperilled by gentrification and homonormativity and serves as exemplar of an innovative wave of independent cinema not yet subsumed by the streaming economy. Maria San Filippo explores how filmmaker and film render a singular voice and story that queers not only its celebrated romcom predecessors but also the gay coming-out film and the lesbian romance alike. The book concludes with an interview with Akhavan.San Filippo pays special tribute to Akhavan’s audacious sensibility and the “inbetweener” moxie that makes Appropriate Behavior an unparalleled portrayal of bisexuality.By Dr Kit Heyam. 2022
A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity Today&’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly…
into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people&’s lives. 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. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.