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An unvarnished accounting of one man's struggle toward sexual and emotional maturity In this unconventional memoir, Jonathan Alexander addresses wry…
and affecting missives to a conflicted younger self. Focusing on three years—1989, 1993, and 1996—Dear Queer Self follows the author through the homophobic heights of the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Bill Clinton, and the steady advancements in gay rights that followed. With humor and wit afforded by hindsight, Alexander relives his closeted college years, his experiments with his sexuality in graduate school, his first marriage to a woman, and his budding career as a college professor. As he moves from tortured self-denial to hard-won self-acceptance, the author confronts the deeply uncomfortable ways he is implicated in his own story. More than just a coming-out narrative, Dear Queer Self is both an intimate psychological exploration and a cultural examination—a meshing of inner and outer realities and a personal reckoning with how we sometimes torture the truth to make a life. It is also a love letter, an homage to a decade of rapid change, and a playlist of the sounds, sights, and feelings of a difficult, but ultimately transformative, time
Jessi Hempel was raised in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family. But the truth was far from perfect. Her father…
was constantly away from home, traveling for work, while her stay-at-home mother became increasingly lonely and erratic. Growing up, Jessi and her two siblings struggled to make sense of their family, their world, their changing bodies, and the emotional turmoil each was experiencing. And each, in their own way, was hiding their true self from the world. By the time Jessi reached adulthood, everyone in her family had come out: Jessi as gay, her sister as bisexual, her father as gay, her brother as transgender, and her mother as a survivor of a traumatic experience with an alleged serial killer. Yet coming out was just the beginning, starting a chain reaction of other personal revelations and reckonings that caused each of them to question their place in the world in new and ultimately liberating ways.
An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American…
visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals. “I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.” In The Black Period, Hafizah creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase. At nineteen, she lost her mother to a sudden stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. By her thirties, she was constantly in pain, pinballing between physical therapy appointments, her grief, and the grind that is the American Dream. Hafizah realized she'd spent years internalizing the narratives that white supremacy had fed her about herself. Suddenly, she says, I was standing at the cliff of my own life, remembering. Recalling her parents&’ lessons on the art of Black revision, and mixing history, political analysis, and cultural criticism, alongside stunning original artwork created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter, Hafizah maps out her own narrative, weaving between a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives; her days in a small Catholic school; a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother; and the feelings of joy and community that the Black Lives Matter protests engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, she forms a new personal and collective history, addressing the systems of inequity that make life difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color while capturing a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love. A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, in The Black Period, Hafizah manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself. *Includes a downloadable PDF of visual art from the book.
From the moment Ron Goldberg stumbled into his first ACT UP meeting in June 1987, the AIDS activist organization became…
his life. For the next eight years, he chaired committees, planned protests, led teach-ins, and facilitated their Monday night meetings. He cruised and celebrated at ACT UP parties, attended far too many AIDS memorials, and participated in over a hundred zaps and demonstrations, becoming the group's unofficial "Chant Queen," writing and leading chants for many of their major actions. Boy with the Bullhorn is both a memoir and an immersive history of the original New York chapter of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, from 1987 to 1995, told with great humor, heart, and insight. Diligently sourced and researched, Boy with the Bullhorn provides both an intimate look into how activist strategies are developed and deployed, as well as a snapshot of life in New York City during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. He relies on his extensive archive of original ACT UP documents, news articles, and other published material, as well as activist videos and oral histories, to help flesh out actions, events, and the background stories of key activists. Writing with great candor, Goldberg examines the group's triumphs and failures, as well as the pressures and bad behaviors that eventually tore ACT UP apart